There are people of refined sensibilities in the world. I don’t know how to put it so it doesn’t sound unbearably stuffy, so I will tell a story to illustrate the concept.
I have a friend who was born in a dirt-poor Mexican family. The father abandoned them, and my friend had to quit school at 16 and go work at an oil rig to support his functionally illiterate mom and two younger brothers.
For reasons that are impossible to comprehend, my friend turned out to be a person of refined sensibilities, an auto-didact who taught himself several languages, and became obsessed with books and obscure European movies.
The life at an oil rig was very distasteful to him. Contrary to the stereotype of a bookish guy as being slender and easy to bully, my friend is a huge, burly guy with the physique of an armoire, so nobody hassled him. But there was no life of the mind at the oil rig, and that, to a person like him, is almost as bad as death. Everything is smelly, dirty, and ugly. Other guys talked about stuff that to him, a deeply religious guy of extraordinary moral probity, was repellent. The only thing that kept him afloat was a copy of Dante’s Inferno he was reading in the original. That book was his biggest treasure because it took him from the debasement of the oil rig to the world of beauty and light.
Once he came back to his bunk and discovered that the treasured book had disappeared. Finally he found it in the toilet, which was of the kind that has holes in the ground, with the attendant nastiness and stench. Somebody had torn out the pages and used them as toilet paper. “It wasn’t out of malice,” my friend told me. “He simply didn’t see a difference between a page with words on it and a page without.”
For people of refined sensibilities who are reading this and who are shaken by this story like I was, I can reassure you by telling you that the friend ended up becoming a college professor and a writer. It all ended well. But the story is a perfect metaphor of life. Some people experience the sublime and others shit on it. Sometimes they do it unthinkingly and sometimes out of frustration because they really don’t get it and it annoys them. If you ever felt shat upon for being too sensitive, too bookish, or too repelled by coarseness, then you’ll know how precious it is to meet people like yourself. People who get it. People who acquire a dazed look when they can talk about their favorite books, indie bands or comics. People who were always laughed at and told they are weird.
All this has a point which will be revealed in the next post. For now, please stay with the story and think about the concept of refined sensibilities.
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