On the Wing (10 page)

“I would hope so,” he said. “A fellow gets some time to think when he's spending the night in a jail cell, and I hope that you used that time to come to realize what a little egotist you were when you drove that weird motorcycle into town.”

“Piloted.”

“Don't interrupt me, son.”

“It's just that I was piloting, not driving. And it's an aerocycle, not a motorcycle. It's got wings, and—”

“Perhaps you're interrupting me to demonstrate that you're still the wretched little egotist you were when you rode into town?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. I think.”

“You know that I'm right, don't you?”

“Well,” I said, hanging my head, “the truth is that when I saw that bright banner strung across Main Street, I thought that it might be a message of welcome for me.”

“You don't say.”

“I do say—but of course I was wrong.”

“And during that night of introspection in my jail, did you discover anything about yourself and your mistake?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely. I did.”

“What?”

“I—well—”

“I would hope you discovered that a readiness to perceive the state of things as pertaining specifically to ourselves is one of the ways in which our senses are often deceived. I would hope you discovered that when we have insufficient data to know what is actually the case, we interpret the data that we have in a way that suits our predilections: optimists see good news; pessimists see bad news; the timid see danger; and a nostalgic booster such as yourself is apt to see in a crowd of strangers the eager ears of friends-to-be who want to listen to him describe each and every little detail about his humble home town and its queer customs. I would hope you discovered that, although we are all egotists to one degree or another, you have been an egotist to too great a degree. And I would hope that you discovered the desire and the will to control the tendency.”

“That was pretty much it,” I said.

Chapter 8

Egoists and Egotists

EGOTIST,
n.
A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil's Dictionary

LITTLE BY LITTLE, as we motored along, avoiding the highway like good little shunpikers, enjoying the day and the air, I began to get an impression of chocolate. It began with a pleasant but elusive scent of chocolate, then thickened to a conviction that there was chocolate around somewhere, then thickened further until I thought that the air was filling with chocolate, then further still until I began to expect that a river of chocolate might come flowing down the road toward us like the river of porridge that had inundated an unfortunate village in “The Porridge Pot,” one of the tales in
The Little Folks' Big Book,
the favorite book of my childhood.

“Call me crazy,” I said, “but I think there's chocolate around here somewhere, lots of it.”

“If you had been navigating as you are supposed to be, checking a map now and then, you would know that the next stop on our tour is Hershey, Pennsylvania.”

“Watch out for chocolate, then,” I said.

“Recent studies indicate that chocolate lowers one's blood pressure,” Albertine asserted. “We are allowed to welcome it into our lives again. Chocolate is our friend.”

“Not if it comes sweeping down upon you in a rushing river.”

“Like porridge?”

“Yes! Did you read that story when you were a girl?”

“I think so. Or you told me about it.”

“Hmm. Could be either. Our lives have come to overlap in so many ways, so thoroughly and completely, that we sometimes think we share even those parts of our past that we know we do not.”

“But you cheat. You keep increasing that overlap artificially, pretending that you knew me before you actually did.”

“Are you talking about those sweet and innocent days when we used to play together in the snows of Dayton, Ohio?”

“Yes, I am.”

“When you were just a girl?”

“Yes.”

“And I used to invent games that involved wrestling?”

“That's right.”

“So that I could get you horizontal, wrap my little self around your little self, and bring us both to a state of bliss that our adult supervisors assumed we knew nothing about?”

“Exactly. Do you think there's a place around here where we could stop and make love?”

There was. There always is, Reader, if you look hard enough and are willing to make do.

*   *   *

OVER COCKTAILS THAT EVENING, in the hotel bar, Albertine paid me the compliment of saying, “I thought you displayed a really admirable degree of self-control back there in Mallowdale, not only at the marshmallow feast, but during the good talking-to that the sheriff gave you.”

“Did you? Thanks.”

“Unless you were hoping that the dark-haired girl had slipped out of her house in the morning to watch the birdboy take off and was lurking somewhere nearby, listening, and it was all a performance for her.”

“It may have been,” I admitted, “or it may have been a performance for the dark-haired girl at the wheel of the Electro-Flyer.”

“I should hope it was.”

A couple was sitting next to us at the bar, twitching with eagerness to add their two cents to our conversation, looking for some opening in which to insert themselves. (If you are part of a couple in love, Reader, you know what was happening. You have probably found it happening to you. It's a consequence of being in love. Couples who are not as much in love, or no longer as much in love, hope to inhale a bit of your happy state by insinuating themselves into your conversation. They expect to conceal the inhalation in the intervals between chatter, when they might seem merely to be pausing, catching their breath before the next utterance—but you know what they're up to, don't you?)

“Speaking of chocolate—” I said.

“That seems so long ago,” said Albertine.

“Do you remember a function at the Boston Athenæum that featured a huge wheel or block of chocolate, or maybe it was several huge wheels or blocks of various types of chocolate, chaperoned by a charming Belgian who was offering very generous samples while enumerating its virtues and explaining its provenance?”

“Yes, I do. As I recall, it was an all-you-care-to-eat situation.”

“I think you're right.”

“So do I. Mmm.”

“Do you also remember the way everyone who sampled it claimed an international history of experiences with chocolate, each of those experiences superior to the one we were having at the moment?”

“I do! I do! In fact, I recall that some people disdained to sample the chocolate at all, on the grounds that it couldn't possibly be up to their standards.”

“Which they could tell merely by looking at it.”

“Right!”

“It was a splendid display of egotism, the best I've ever seen.”

“Egotism or egoism?” she asked.

“Mm?”

“You said it was a splendid display of egotism.”

“Yes.”

“But was it egotism or egoism?”

“I wonder, now that you ask.”

“I know that in general use they both vaguely mean the same thing, but I'd like to know—”

Seeing his opening at last, the man in the couple beside us said, “I couldn't help overhearing. I think I can enlighten you a bit on the subject of egoism and egotism, if you will permit me.” Without permission, he proceeded. “The older of the two terms is
egoism,
the sin of the egoist. It's a borrowing from the French
égoïsme,
from which
égoïste
is derived. The usual translation for that original term
égoïste
is ‘one who thinks,' but I personally think that a more accurate expression of the idea behind the term as it was originally intended would be ‘one who knows that he thinks,' that is, a conscious being.”

“Ah!” I said. “You must be a relative of Angus MacPherson, my French teacher back at Babbington High quite a few years ago.”

“No, I don't think so. I—”

“He's just kidding,” said Albertine. “He's a card-carrying member of the Heartsick American Humorists' Association.”

“Oh,” the man said, with a slackness in his tone that said, simply but unmistakably, that however highly the rest of the world might esteem such status, he was unimpressed. “Well, the term
egotist
seems to have been coined by Joseph Addison, the essayist, to identify what he considered to be an annoying rhetorical style characterized by the too-frequent use of the first-person singular pronoun.”

“Aye-yi-yi,” I said.

“I always tell myself to use the
t
to remind myself of the difference between
egoist
and
egotist,
” the woman informed us. “Someone told me to do that long ago—but for the life of me I can't remember who it was.”

“It was I, my dear,” said the man.

“Was it? I don't think it was.”

“I assure you that it was.”

“Regardless of who it was who told me to do so—and I doubt very much that it was you—I remind myself that the
t
stands for
talking.
”

“I think you're getting ahead of yourself, dear,” said her companion, with the appearance of good humor. “I think we've got to begin with a couple of definitions.”

“Do you,” she said icily.

“Yes, I do,” he snapped. Then, to us, or perhaps to the room at large, he announced, “An egoist is a person who is guided by the principle of ‘me first.'”

“I find that it applies in every circumstance, at every turn, whenever a choice must be made,” the woman added.

“That was implied in my definition,” her companion asserted.

“I had no way of knowing that,” she asserted right back at him. To us she said, “I feel that I must point out that the principle of ‘me first' is not quite the same as ‘me only.'”

“Of course not,” the man said with a sneer. “‘Me only' is the solipsist's principle. For the solipsist, the notion of ‘me first' is utterly superfluous.”

“When you talk, all I hear is blah, blah, blah,” she said.

“I wonder where the fault lies,” he growled.

“What's your other definition?” asked Albertine with the subtlety of a diplomatist. “The definition of
egotist?
”

“An egotist is someone who is always talking about himself,” said the woman.

“Or herself,” the man suggested.

“I always remember the
t,
” the woman said, almost wistfully, as if she were recalling a particularly poignant moment when she had used the
t
to remind herself of the difference between the words, sometime in the past, in other circumstances, in other company.

“I think a person can be an egoist and not realize it, don't you?” asked Albertine, intending a kindness, I think, drawing the woman back into our foursome. “There's a kind of egoism that is unthinking or passive.”

“Yes,” I said, doing my bit. “There's a kind of egoist who doesn't even consider other people and their needs, feelings, and desires.”

“In fact,” said Albertine, “I think that that kind of neglectful egoism is the most widespread, and the people who practice it are the egoists who are least likely to recognize their egoism.”

“Could be,” admitted the man. “Or else they're dissembling; they aren't quite assertive enough to put themselves first, but they are egoistical enough to be blind to the needs and rights of others—or deliberately to blind themselves to those needs and rights.”

I began to wish that they would go away. I'd had enough of them. I wanted to be alone with Albertine. We two. Just we two. We two against the world, the whole yammering, battering, self-centered world.

“But if one's neglectful egoism, as you put it, is genuine,” he went on, “it may be the worst kind of egoism. It's the kind that considers other people beneath contempt. What they think, what they do, what they feel, what becomes of them is simply of no interest whatsoever.”

“My grandmother warned me against that,” said the woman, with, again, that note of wistfulness.

“What?” he demanded of her.

“What you said,” she said, from a distance.

“I said quite a number of things—”

“Must an egotist be an egoist first?” Albertine asked quickly, touching the arm of the distant woman. “Or can a person be an egotist without being an egoist?”

The woman didn't answer. Instead, with that odd distance still in her voice, she said, “I try to remind myself that talking must also be interpreted figuratively. It stands for many other ways of drawing attention to oneself or putting oneself forward.” Then, suddenly bridging the distance, she squealed, “Oh! Don't get me started on the way my sister used to hog the camera when Uncle Jerry took those nudes of us in his ‘studio' !”

Just to show that I was still in the game, I responded to Albertine's question with one of my own. “Must an egoist be an egotist or necessarily become one?” I asked. “Can one be an egoist without advertising it through egotism?”

“Oh, yes,” said Albertine. “We saw it there at the Athenæum. The egotists were continually talking about their experiences with chocolate, demonstrating their superiority and the superiority of their experiences, while the egoists were quietly consuming all the chocolate they could get.”

The distance had returned to the woman's voice when she said, “I think the saddest type of egotist is the one who is always telling you, or anyone she can find to listen, what she intends to do, because she doesn't have anything that she actually
has
done to brag about.”