Choosing Beerbohm

I note this week the Virginia Department of Transportation is reducing the speed limit along a four-mile stretch of road from 45 to 35 mph after seven fatalities in five years.

This is the route we take on the way to the mountain retreat. When we start out, the anticipation of a peaceful weekend in the country is delectable. At the half-way point, we stop for an always surprisingly grand gourmet lunch in the same non-descript village. Well fed, we drive the steep winding roads, bordered by farms, woods and streams, up, over and down the pass, leading to our final destination. The only thing which can dispel the relaxing mood is an idiot on my bumper with a serious need for speed.

VDOT, I applaud you.

Have you ever logged the time it takes upon exiting the driveway to when you're first annoyed? I depart on workdays at 3:50 a.m. Even at this godforsaken hour, you'd be surprised, or not, how many drivers tailgate with their brights on, and leave their lights on, shining in your car, as they sleep in the parking lot awaiting the commuter train. Or those who stand on the platform smoking in front of the no smoking sign, and whom, upon claiming a seat, crank the volume to a level on their headphones so you can hear the tinny buzz while they simultaneously talk on a cell (though who the hell else would so chatty at 5:15 a.m. when they might still be abed?).

Friend Jill says the underlying frustration is lack of control, that is, how all the intricate planning, mapquest research, packing, etc., as meticulous as D-Day logistics, is easily ruined by the actions of morons unaccounted for in prior considerations.

As you age, it's worse. Like a dog who circles for a half hour to tramp down what would have been a forest floor but is now a pile of blankets on the living room carpet, the nesting dna activates, striving for supremacy in the failure of memory cells, which no longer recall, say, where you laid the sunglasses five minutes ago after you intentionally, conveniently, staged them on the buffet, so you could remember to pick them up on the way out.

All this climbs to a plateau where universals are lost in lieu of reclaiming control in small ways. The Sun reports on a parochial school, inner-city Baltimore, where drug dealers who formerly respected the territory are now dealing on sidewalks in front, even stashing dope in the grotto next to the statue of the Virgin Mary. A Sister responds, "We want our buffer zone back. In no way do we want to confront drug dealers. We just want to say this is our space. Find another space. Go someplace else."

Like the good Sister, I long to restore the sanctuary of an isolated privacy within a greater public space. To calmly drive through a mountain pass. To drink a cup of coffee in the garden behind the new Griffin bookshop minus the static of a neighbor's IPOD. To down a quiet pint of Guinness in an Irish pub without breathing the second-hand smoke of the blathering tootsie on the next barstool.

Or merely to read peacefully on the train in the morning. It could be summertime, or it might be age, when history tomes are laid aside, replaced by what Dorothy Parker calls 'little entertainments.' There still come rainy days to read Nuremberg interviews, but mostly, lately, its reading for pleasure.

When Max Beerbohm, in 1895, writes of Thackeray, "He blew on his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like children, like pretty little children, who are perfectly drilled for the dance," the essence of lesser ambition is so elegantly captured.

When you realize you won't change the world, kindness emerges sufficient. Beerbohm, again, sweetly defends an assumed feckless George IV: "When all the town was agog for the fete to be given by the Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card of invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this time to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of all the steetsters. The poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton House, proud as a peacock, and he was greeted with a tremendous cheer from the by-standing mob, but when he came to the lackeys he was told that his card was a hoax and sent about his business. The tears were rolling down his cheeks as he shambled back into the street. The Regent heard later in the evening of this sorry joke, and next day dispatched a kindly-worded message, in which he prayed that Mr. Coates would not refuse to come and view the decorations nevertheless."

Over the past few months, in prepping to teach Book of Acts Bible study, I've noticed the questions I'm devising are devolving to human scale as opposed to a presumption that anyone may know God's intentions. When Paul defends himself in court, for example, I ask the class not about the merits of his cosmic theological defense, but how, they, as an ordinary juror, might react to a talkative defendant, like Paul, in contrast to an accused, like Jesus, who says, little, or nothing, in response to questioning.

What might one find in little entertainments that's missing from the historical magnum opus? Tolstoy says, "Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of exernal signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

With every road taken, there are external and inner warning signs which convey allowances and constaints. Those who fail to heed, acting as if no one else exists, deny, through small irritations, the happy conduct of all good common lives.

That's what I find most annoying.