This is Illyria, lady.

[substitute]

Gertrude Stein said about Ezra Pound that "He is a village explainer. Which is fine, if you're a village."

I, too, am a Village Explainer. I got it from my father. I rediscovered this last night when I found myself giving the 15 minute history of 19th Century American Religious Movements to someone and thought "Why am I doing this? How do I know this?"

My uncle Richard told me once that it's a miracle that I escaped the academic world. He should know; he spent a career in a love/hate relationship with being an art professor.

But it's true. If I could spend an entire life learning things in detail and then explaining them to other people, I'd be happy. I just hated academia because it was too much learning about things I didn't care about and then explaining them to people who had no interest, which is a lifeless task. If my spiritual life wasn't such a minefield, I might have become a pastor. If it paid at all, I might have become a computer trainer.

So by default I've found my true calling. I'm a dilettante, amateur, flâneur, habitué de café, freelance village explainer. Maybe this is a decent way to grow old.

Comments

[altamont.livejournal.com]

Guilty as described above. It's an occupational hazard among record and bookshop folks, I guess, which tends to get mixed up with an odd sense of mission, especially when I'm dealing with younger customers, who either listen intently or hang out for the freakshow. Either way, I get to drop spores, and that's alright.

I'm still in my first year as a fulltime bookgeek after many years as fulltime recordgeek. Someone asked me a while ago what aspect of my new job I enjoyed the most. I told them that I couldn't think of many places outside of academia where you could have three different and non-overlapping discussions about Charles Lamb (and his crazy sister) in the course of the same workweek. So shoot me.