The Long View-The Barbers’ Tale
It’s the time of year for staying inside while the weather does its own, expectable thing. And a time for reading a classic story or two. You know, the comfortable, familiar ones. As it happens, I have one at hand —the old original condensed and updated to fit in with today’s world[1].
It’s the one about the man whose one defining feature was that he was unhappy with his time in life. No, not with the fact that he was growing old. Not that. It was that he wished he lived in more adventurous times — preferably back in the heady days of his forefathers when, as the saying more-or-less goes, “knights were bold . . .” etcetera and so forth. And since he actually was descended from knights (which, basic psychoanalysis would suggest, was the reason for his fixation in the first place), he had a lot of inherited knight stuff hanging around the house. Probably, you know, breast plates, deeds to allodial properties — that kind of thing.
Let’s call this guy “Don,” though we won’t go any farther than that, for Don was apparently quite the hothead, very litigious, so, who knows, he might still have lawyers working on retainer who’ll raise a legal fuss if they think we’ve gone too far.
I’m sure you remember how the story goes, though. One day, while Don, who by all accounts was already a marble or two short of a game, wasn’t paying close enough attention and most of his remaining marbles slipped out of the sack and just rolled away. Now virtually marbleless, a state he never seemed to notice (though he must’ve heard the term used, since he came to employ it frequently about himself, albeit slightly mispronounced), Don finally determined to stop just thinking about it and go on out and do knightly things upon the land.
Long story short, he dressed himself up in pieces of the ancestral armor. I put it that way because there were just scattered pieces left, not a complete outfit, the most important piece, the helmet, being among the missing. (We won’t even get into what psychoanalysis might say about that.) Don then set out on horseback to discover what adventures awaited him. Sometimes he travelled solo and sometimes with one or more companions, usually people who knew him from back home. If truth be told, some went along just for fun and perhaps to protect Don if things started going seriously awry; others, more foresightful, went to protect the countryside from Don. And no few just thought they might be able to make a buck off the deal.
Now there were several more-or-less constants to Don’s several “expeditions.” One was that he saw the many experiences he underwent as all bound together in one grand “adventure,” in which he was always “winning.” In real life, however, they were isolated happenings largely of his own instigation — and, also in real life, he almost always lost. (He soon had accumulated a collection of scars and holes between lone-standing teeth to prove it.)
Not only that, several “adventures” elicited complaints: from ranchers whose livestock Don had attacked, from tavern owners who discovered that Don hadn’t the money to pay the bills he ran up, and from numerous other, similarly-aggrieved quarters. In short, such was the trail of woe left in his wake that before long Don was looked upon as, in effect, a ne’er-do-well cavorting about, literally at considerable public expense.
Amid his many comings and goings, Don had one off-again-on-again set-to with a barber — the old-fashioned sort who’d come to your house with his instruments, do a shave, even minor surgery. This barber brought with him a deluxe portable basin, gaudily gold-painted on the underside. Don was very taken with the shiny gold (if truth be told, he had always been thus taken) and decided that the basin was his missing helmet being providentially returned to him. So, to his mind, he “pursued and won” his helmet “in knightly combat.” The problem was that the barber interpreted events differently, calling what had happened “open theft.”
Now it took a while for the barber to catch up with Don, but when he did there ensued a painstaking inquiry facilitated by one of Don’s most prominent followers. For his part Don insisted that the object of the dispute was a helmet fated to be his — and even, typically for him, threatened to “bring down a world of hurt” upon anyone who said otherwise. All the barber could do was point and say “that’s a basin.”
Finally, the facilitator decided that the only way to resolve the matter was to call for a vote of all those present, thereby initiating the earliest example of universal suffrage in the modern world (though admittedly the particular “universe” was quite small, omitting, as it did, women and all non-local elements of the population). Anyhow, all present, either as a lark or — with the “world of hurt” remark still ringing in their ears — in fear of what Don might do if he lost, voted it a helmet. Thus was the matter settled.
As marbleless, basin-helmeted Don rode on at the head of his group of companions, apparently heedless of the great harm he had just done not only to the concept of democracy but to that of epistemology as well, all the barber could do was mutter to himself “but, but, it really is just a basin.”
Dear fellow barbers,
May you find relief and enjoyment in the new year . . .
Washington, DC
December 2020
[1] With thanks — and apologies — to Miguel de Cervantes.
