'To Be So Prodigal of Pity'

It’s an antiquarian taste, stalking rare words, those erased by neglect from the language. One can always hope for their resurrection under the assumption that if a word once existed and was used by even a lone writer, it corresponded to something in our world and filled some human need. Take marcescibility. I salvaged it from “A Club in Ruins,” an essay collected in Max Beerbohm’s Yet Again: “Sighing over the marcescibility of human happiness, I peered between the pillars into the excavated and chaotic hall.” From the context, what might it mean? Vanity? Impossibility? The adjective form is marcescible, which the OED defines as “liable to wither or fade.” The noun form has two citations, one from 1727, the other from Beerbohm. It’s rooted, not surprisingly, in a post-classical Latin word meaning “perishable, subject to fading or withering.” I think of the Japanese wabi-sabi, a notion at once metaphysical and aesthetic.

Beerbohm’s ruin is not ancient or alien but a product of his own time and place, making it peculiarly pertinent to people like ourselves who inhabit a world forever consuming itself. I recently learned that a drug store in a small Ohio city where I worked as a newspaper reporter has been demolished. I remember when it was built in 1981. The pharmacist was a member of the city council that I covered. Beerbohm writes:

“The ruins made, not by Time, but by the ruthless skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old enough to be sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands of a gasping and plethoric community–these are the ruins that move me to tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers lunch in them. In no guide-book or leading-article will you find them mentioned. Their pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to the street, but nor gods nor men hold out a hand to save them. The patterns of bedroom wall-papers, (chosen with what care, after how long discussion! only a few short years or months ago) stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for mercy.”

When we are young, everything appears unchanging and eternal. A building, even the house we live in, is immortal, but only until it is unimaginably consumed by fire or the wrecking ball. Lately, on my nightly drive home from work, I’ve passed two houses that workmen have been preparing to move. It’s a prolonged and delicate procedure, and last week, after a month of preparation, one was hauled away. What surprised me was that neither home was particularly large, attractive or noteworthy for its design. Were the owners unable to part with the settings for their lives? Did memory outweigh architectural interest, cost be damned? Beerbohm neatly distanced himself from the London club and its unhappy fate:      

“You, readers, are free-born Englishmen. These clubs ‘come natural’ to you. You love them. To them you slip eagerly from your homes. As for me, poor alien, had I been a member of the club whose demolition has been my theme, I should have grieved for it not one whit the more bitterly. Indeed, my tears would have been a trifle less salt. It was my detachment that enabled me to be so prodigal of pity.”