'So a Fool Returneth to His Folly'

Grownups seldom credit children with insight into human psychology, thus treating them as smaller, more annoying versions of themselves. My father had an acquaintance even he knew was a fool. By admitting such knowledge, he was violating adult solidarity. His friend's customary epithet was “That Goofball Herb,” whose reaction to any stimulus, positive or negative, was a juicy, open-mouthed giggle. And yet, somehow, he had even reproduced. 

At a picnic, we watched as Herb spent half an hour trying to start a fire in a fire pit. Apparently, he was unfamiliar with kindling. Instead, he was throwing matches at logs and had attracted an appreciative audience. We watched as he opened the trunk of his car, removed a gasoline can, emptied the contents on the logs and threw a match. The ensuing “Whoomp!” knocked him “ass over tea kettle,” the American variation on the more colorful British “arse over tit.” He had singed away the hair on his forearms, his eyebrows and eyelashes, and left his face the color of a pomegranate. When people were certain Herb wasn't dead, everyone laughed, which suggests the enduring appeal of slapstick comedy. Best of all the fire promptly fizzled out, but he was back to work within minutes, bringing to mind Proverbs 26:11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”

 

Herb was a fool. Most of us recognize at least two species of fool – those like Shakespeare’s who are gifted with wisdom and the homelier sort like Herb who are merely foolish. In his lecture on As You Like It, W.H. Auden writes: “The fool is fearless and untroubled by convention [and good sense]—like a child, he isn’t even aware of convention. He’s not all there, but he is prophetic, because through his craziness he either sees more or dares to say more.” Auden blurs the distinction between the two sorts of fool. Herb, as I recall, never manifested wisdom.

  

It's April Fools’ Day, a favorite holiday when we were kids. It gave us permission to tell lies and to feel very un-foolish about it. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary defines an April Fool as “the March fool with another month added to his folly.” In other words, there’s a continuity to foolishness. It doesn’t recede. The condition is chronic and we learn about it as children. Bierce’s definition of fool, one of the longest in his Dictionary, sounds like H.L. Mencken:

 

“A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent,” and so on. I prefer Rosiland’s exhortation to Jacques in As You Like It: “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.”

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]