From Essays After Montaigne
The manner wherewith our Lawes assay to moderate the foolish and vaine expences of table-cheare and apparell seemeth contrarie to its end. The best course were to beget in men a contempt of gold and silkwearinge as of vaine and non-profitable things, whereas we encrease their credit and price: a most indirect course to withdraw men from them. As, for example, to let none but Princes eat dainties, or weare velvets and clothes of Tissew, and interdict the people to doe it, what is it but to give reputation unto those things, and to encrease their longing to use them? Let Kings boldly quit those badges of honour; they have many other besides: Such excesse is more excusable in other men than in Princes. We may, by the examples of divers Nations, learne sundrie better fashions to distinguish our selves and our degrees (which truly I esteeme requisit in an estate) without nourishing to that purpose this so manifest corruption and apparant inconvenience. It is strange how custome in these indifferent things doth easily encroach and suddenly establish the footing of her authoritie.
Just before my senior year of college, during which I would be trying to leverage the degree that I expected to earn the following June into a lucrative career, my father took me to buy suits that I could wear to job interviews. I held up a plain navy blue three-piece suit and asked him if I should get it. He said, "No. A blue three-piece suit with a crisp white shirt can look really sharp, but they look cheap now that every assistant manager at Kmart wears one." My father was painfully aware of the barriers imposed by socioeconomic status and how they were signalled. He, like his father before him (and my father's brother and my mother's father and brother too, for that matter), was a lifelong underachiever. My grandfather's brother worked for DuPont, where he worked on the invention of Lycra and Teflon, but he always said that my grandfather, who (to the best of my knowledge) never advanced professionally beyond working as a proofreader at a local publisher in Bristol, Connecticut, was the brightest one in the family. My father and my uncle, though they were both very bright, grew up to be an office equipment salesman and a machinist, respectively. I suspect that all three of them became deeply cynical, believing that the disparity between their abilities and their professional standings clearly demonstrated the lack of a meritocracy in our land of opportunity. They were certainly angry--anyone around them could sense that.
From my perspective, they seem to have been thwarted not by snobbery, but by their lack of Christopher Alexander's "quality without a name." His description of a person with that quality is the opposite of the men in my family:
...it happens when our inner forces are resolved.
And when a person's forces are resolved, it makes us feel at home, because we know, by some sixth sense, that there are no other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company.
Though I somehow managed not to inherit my father's thwartedness, I did inherit his sense of both the importance and the absurdity of the strictures imposed by class. Any idiot can dress well, so it would be ridiculous to be unsuccessful by failing to do so--almost as ridiculous as having your success hinge upon dressing well. I'm not a sentimental person, but sometimes when I hear Bruce Springsteen's "Independence Day" (which admittedly isn't all that often), I shed a tear for what my father did to himself, and what he believed "they" did to him. And I feel a little triumphant because I've escaped that fate--because I have a lucrative job in New York and a co-op on West End Avenue, yet I wear a suit maybe once or twice a year.
7:50:32 AM 
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