British Happily Swim Against Current of Conformity

My Cambridge, England, correspondent, Jim Moore, has sent me a clipping from the Daily Telegraph reporting findings of a Royal Edinburgh Hospital psychiatrist that England has more and better eccentrics than America, or, for that matter, any other country.

I would take that as typical British snobbism except for the fact that the psychiatrist, a Dr. David Weeks, is an American. He has been studying eccentrics for five years.

I would say that anyone who has spent five years studying eccentrics certainly must be one himself. Oddly, Weeks doesn’t say exactly what an eccentric is, so I must assume that he means a person who is slightly cuckoo but harmless. The inventor in “Back to the Future” was certainly an eccentric.

Webster’s defines an eccentric as “deviating from the norm, as in conduct; out of the ordinary, odd, unconventional; an odd or unconventional person.” A more pertinent definition from the same source, which evidently is not meant to refer to human beings, is “not having the axis exactly in the center.”

Weeks says that eccentrics are happier, healthier, more creative and more difficult to live or work with than persons whose axes are not off center.

He finds that women can be just as eccentric as men but that they tend to hold their eccentricity until later in life, when their children have been raised. Then watch out. Then they leave their husbands and enjoy extraordinary bursts of creativity.

He describes one aristocratic woman who appeared for interviews with a pet red plastic lobster which she wheeled around with her and which she stroked lovingly. She said it was better behaved than a pet and didn’t need feeding.

Among the men he interviewed, one refused to eat anything but potatoes and another wore a pair of shoes that looked like elephant’s feet. Weeks allows that these were unusual. Most eccentrics exhibit no external sign of their eccentricity.

Weeks said that eccentrics are of great potential use because of their creativity but that they are often ignored or dismissed as wacko. “They often feel that they are ahead of their time but the rest of the world is out of step with them.”

Weeks says eccentrics are unfailingly happy because “they are very curious about everything and usually have an obsessive preoccupation with five or six different things at once. This gives them a goal in life. It adds up to a recipe for happiness.”

This happiness, he said, also explains their good health because it enhances immune response systems so they are less prone to infections.

At certain times in my life I have fancied myself an eccentric. But in fact, I discovered, I was rather ordinary and conventional. I don’t know how far off center a person has to be to be an eccentric, but in my profession I have run into a few who I believe qualify.

Once a young man called the paper to say that even on our clearest day we have smog and that he could prove it. I was assigned to get his story. On what we called a clear day he drove me around the downtown area. I was wearing a gas mask and so could not smell anything. Finally he asked me to take off the mask and, as he predicted, I smelled smog, though none was visible.

No doubt he was right, but because we considered him eccentric, we ignored him. Besides, if we had smog on clear days, what could we do about it?

I was also asked to listen to a man who claimed to be able to produce perpetual motion. He was obviously a nut, so I gave him short shrift.

There is a man out in Lancaster who heads the international Flat Earth Society. I have corresponded with him and am an honorary member of the society. Now this chap is obviously an eccentric. No one can seriously believe that the Earth is flat. All you have to do is watch the sun set over the horizon.

Of course, we have eccentrics who are mere impostors, capitalizing on their eccentricity. Tiny Tim, for example, made himself famous merely on his eccentricity. He was odd. Writer Ambrose Bierce once defined eccentricity as “a method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.”

John Stuart Mill took it rather more seriously: “The amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained.”

After all, it was American eccentrics who invented the radio, the telephone and the airplane, so perhaps we ought to take them more seriously.

Some eccentric may even come up someday with a perpetual motion machine, although theoretically it is impossible.

But nobody will ever prove the Earth is flat.