'Yes! Among Books That Charm'

Like most humans I flatter myself that I’m in control of every thought and action. I’m the boss. Increasingly, age teaches otherwise. What goes on in consciousness is more like a third-rate vaudeville show than an earnestly delivered TED talk. I seldom know what’s coming next, juggler or baggy-pants comedian. Emotionally, I’m a fairly disciplined guy who resists self-indulgence, until I’m reminded otherwise: 

“There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a workhouse. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.”

 

How nice to be judged a success. The other night my youngest son showed me a Richard Prior clip and I laughed till I cried. Same reaction when not long ago I watched The Bank Dick for the twenty-seventh time and reread Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis. There’s a species of laughter akin to blissful inebriation and certain advanced spiritual states. The self is briefly forgotten. In fact, it disappears. Such moments are dependent to some degree on unexpectedness. Comedy is rooted in surprise. Preachiness kills it.

 

Max Beerbohm is author of the passage cited above, from his essay “Laughter” (And Even Yet, 1920). Ours is a world in which stridency and volume are mistaken for honesty. Beerbohm’s voice is hushed. Irony lies coiled, ready to spring from his soft-spoken manner. He is among those who, Joseph Epstein suggests in his appropriately titled Charm: The Elusive Enchantment (2018), “find life delightful and through their own charm bring delight to  others!”   

 

In “Diminuendo” (The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896), Beerbohm writes:

 

“Yes! among books that charm, and give wings to the mind, will my days be spent. I shall be ever absorbing the things great men have written; with such experience I will charge my mind to the full.”

 

Beerbohm died on this date, May 20, in 1956, at age eighty-three.