Diogenes
syndrome takes the philosopher’s mode of living, subtracts its philosophical
content and turns it into self-destruction. Its sufferers are hoarders and
usually elderly. They live in squalor and neglect their health and hygiene. They
withdraw from the world. Twice as a cop reporter I accompanied police officers
into dwellings filled to the ceilings with newspapers, sacks of garbage and
other refuse. We walked through narrow canyons flanked by trash. In one case,
the man had killed himself by drinking a can of red lead-based paint and other
substances. We found him sitting upright on the floor, propped against the wall.
He was covered with paint. This was almost forty years ago. The syndrome had
already been identified and named but the cops and I didn’t know that.
In 1961,
Marianne Moore’s contribution to a special issue of the journal Sequoia dedicated
to Yvor Winters was a poem titled “Yvor Winters--,” in which the title was the
start of the poem’s first line:
“something
of a badger-Diogenes—
we are
indebted technically; and
attached personally,
those of us who know him;
are proud of
his hostility to falsity;
of his verse
reduced to essence;
of a
tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.
He does not
hesitate to call others foolish,
and we do
not shrink from imputations
of folly—of annoying
a man to whom
compliments
may be uncongenial;
--wise to be
foolish when a sense of indebtedness
is too
strong to suppress.”
Winters’ high
literary standards, brusqueness and indifference to being a conventionally jolly
fellow are legendary. He and Moore had known each other for forty years. Never
close, they were mutually admiring and respectful, most of the time.
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