'A Kind of Punctiliousness'

When eccentric entered the language in the sixteenth century its uses were scientific. Consider the etymology: out from + center. It was the opposite of concentric; thus, two circles not sharing a common central point. It showed up in geometry, astronomy and mechanics. Shakespeare never used it. Another two centuries would pass before the modern, figurative sense emerged. In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson’s first definition is “deviating from the center.” In a word-association test today, likely responses to the noun form would be oddball or weirdo. 

An eccentric is not an iconoclast, rebel or anti-bourgeois hipster. We can think of their behavior as affected eccentricity, put on like a costume. Eccentrics are eccentric not because they revel in that designation but because that’s the way they are. Thoreau, for example, was not an eccentric. He was a Harvard graduate, a pampered snob contemptuous of people who merely worked for a living. American writers are not a notably eccentric bunch. I can see someone arguing that Henry James was a legitimate eccentric, a priest of prose who never married, had no children and lived almost exclusively to write.

 

The Promised Land of eccentricity was England, particularly in the nineteenth century. It nurtured oddballs. Among writers, consider Sydney Smith, Blake, Lamb, Ruskin and Beerbohm. As the inclusion of some of the names on that list makes clear, the membrane separating eccentricity from pathology can be highly permeable. Eccentricity is a genus not a species. Try Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics (1933) for an eccentric treatment of the subject.

 

One way to gauge the desirability of a society, its health, is to observe how it treats eccentrics. We’re hard on them today. Often, genuine eccentricity in thinking and behavior is barely tolerated. The private realm is shrinking. In England: An Elegy (2001), Sir Roger Scruton writes:

 

“Privacy engenders eccentricity, and the English were famous eccentrics. In every city of the world people dress and behave crazily; they show off, play the fool, disguise themselves with masks and affectations. English eccentricity, however, was the opposite of showing off, and quite without theatrical intentions. It was in fact a kind of punctiliousness.”