It Wasn’t the Theft of Fire but the Promethean Boast: Hubris

“In 1910, many in this country would have lynched heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson for not ‘knowing his place.’ When ‘the Big Smoke’ was stopped for speeding in rural Georgia, he told the officer who presented him with a $50. fine, ‘Here’s a hundred—keep the change ‘cause I’m comin’ back the same way.’” —Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“King Henry the Eighth,/ who left six wives sour,/has the largest codpiece/in the Tower.” —The Wordspinner

“The name is Sterling,/but I prefer Skip/to hide the silver/in the hold of my ship.” —The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/6/2015—Whether condemned as “arrogance” or promoted as “self-esteem,” the West has long been conflicted by pride. While Dominican friars were smashing and burning mirrors in Florence to lift the plague of narcissism, the Catholic tutors of Louis XIV were urging their young king to act like God during the day and reflect on what his divinely inspired powers had accomplished at night.

One of the young secretaries in the English department was so impressed I could spell twelve without a dictionary that whenever someone called with a word question, she referred it to me. One morning, a call came in before I arrived, so the secretary said to ring back during my office hours later that morning. When I walked into the office to check my mail, the young woman handed me the following: “Expect a call about 10 a.m. from a lady in Seneca who wants to know the other word in English besides hungry and angry that ends in -gry.” Standing at her desk, I ran through the alphabet (angry, bangry, cangry . . .) with no success and then went to my office where I located Paul Dickson’s Word Treasury. I had a vague recollection that Dickson had something to say about this question, being one that for some reason the editors at Merriam-Webster often field.

Fortunately, I found anhungry (an archaic synonym for hungry) without too much difficulty, but the pointlessness of the caller’s question needled me to do more than just answer it. The pride of “exclusive” knowledge does that sometimes. Minutes after I located the word and did some hasty research, the phone rang, and my mysterious inquisitor shyly asked if I knew “that other word in English that ends in -gry.” 

“Indeed I do, Madam,” I said in my best imitation of Professor Charles Kingsfield. “It’s anhungry. Shakespeare used it once, and it may be found on page 85 of Webster’s Third International Dictionary.”

For a moment, there was a strained silence before she said, “Thank you,” and hung up. She left before I could recite the other words equally obscure ending in –gry or confess that I knew her question before she’d called. But for days, I imagined this woman telling her friends of the English professor who not only knew the word anhungry but had recorded its frequency and memorized the pagination of an unabridged dictionary.

My efforts aren’t always so warmly appreciated. On a recent trip to Germany, a pompous young man was showing off his “Pink-Floyd-Edition” VW Rabbit. When he began telling me how much better German cars are than the Japanese car I drive, I asked him if he knew what “pink Floyd” meant in American slang.

“It’s a British rock group,” he said, “who took their name from two American blues musicians.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, “but what body part does ‘pink Floyd’ refer to?”

“I give up. What?”

“A white man’s reproductive organ,” I said and marveled at how fast his crest fell.

But it was my own crest that fell on April 28, 1995, when some 35 people stood up to prove me wrong. It seems that for years one of my closest friends and colleagues, Dr. John Idol, from Deep Gap, North Carolina, and a word-haunted man himself, had been calling a ski or knit cap a “toboggan.” I’d told him on several occasions with the confidence of Adam that a toboggan was a sled, not a cap, though you might wear one riding a toboggan. Unfortunately, I never bothered to look up the word, violating my first rule of maintaining vocabulary one-upmanship.

On the occasion of John’s retirement, after I had roasted and toasted my friend, John rose, pulled a ludicrous orange-tasseled knit cap from his briefcase, tugged it down to his ears, and explained our running feud over toboggan. He then asked anyone in the audience to stand if they’d ever heard toboggan used for “this thing that I have on my head.” I did a neck-popping double-take when I turned around and saw a mountain of his Tar Heeled relatives standing behind me in a fine show of familial solidarity. I was had, for these people, who had risen as one, had been forewarned.

I laughed with the rest because it wasn’t that I felt “the high disdain from sense of injured merit,” but I was stung. Before I’d repressed my humiliation, I stumbled on these lines from e. e. cummings:

all ignorance toboggans into know

and trudges up to ignorance again . . . .

Now when I picture ignorant proud folk, I imagine myself oscillating between dumb and smart, riding a toboggan and wearing one, too.

As it was for the Italian and French churchmen mentioned at the start of this essay, pride has long been a puzzle to me: when I boarded the train for college, my father said, “Make us proud, son.” Yet, in Sunday school, pride had been presented, not just as a peccadillo, but the most brazenly red of the seven cardinals. Indeed, it was the sin, according to John Milton, that led God to hurl the angel Satan into hell.

But at what point does “making your parents proud” become sinful? I suggest that it’s when satisfaction with oneself leaves the confines of the skull. Successful surgeons are surely bathed in the warmth of their success but, when that high opinion of themselves escapes, the ether is defiled. I’m thinking of that Vanderbilt surgeon who carved his initials on his patient’s uterus.

In other words, there’s bad pride and good, and each of these varies by degree. First among the sinners is the confident student who wrote: “The first time I read Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’ I realized it was a step in a positive direction for the literary world.” Now, I appreciate students who recognize any writer’s worth, but no reader has ever unerringly been able to say which way the wind will blow.

More difficult to reform is the wife of a small-town Georgia mayor who treats the town library as her personal property. One day, my friend Ray Barfield witnessed this woman tearing several cards from the catalogue, which she presented to the librarian and demanded that he deliver. Though the stacks were closed, the mayor’s wife was out of line and possibly beyond redemption.

As remote as the mayor’s wife is from the societal norm, she lies closer to it than the following head of state. In 1988, after hearing of severe food shortages in Romania, some Germans collected tons of food and offered to send it to Bucharest. President Nicolae Ceaușescu gallantly declined the offer, saying, “Our people would rather starve than accept German charity.” It should be noted, however, that the leader and his family were all well fed.

As I said, there’s bad pride and good. Though some might object, I find nothing wrong with this 19-year-old animal science major who wrote, “I can castrate a bull calf, milk a dairy cow, collect a stallion, and inseminate a mare.” Perhaps, some of her youthful edges needed sanding, but this is a woman I’d hire to run my ranch.

In 1910, many in this country would have lynched heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson for not “knowing his place.” When “The Big Smoke” was stopped for speeding in rural Georgia, he told the officer who presented him with a $50. fine, “Here’s a hundred—keep the change ‘cause I’m comin’ back the same way.”

Finally, there’s my father, of whom I am immensely proud. After two of his men were hanged in late 1944 for raping a pregnant British woman, Dad climbed on the hood of “Skipper,” his jeep, and addressed his battalion of combat engineers. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there’s a good chance we’re going to win this war, but we will not gloat, nor will we rape and pillage our way across Germany. We will save our pride of accomplishment for the parades back home. Meanwhile, I suggest we work on our poker faces.”

After the Creation, the best justification for God’s continued existence is His brake on man’s pride. If the brake fails, we might study Voyager’s photograph of Earth taken from the fringes of the solar system. If that pale-blue dot suspended in a black void doesn’t humble us, all is lost to pride.

Note: The abstract watercolor above, depicting Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, was rendered by Jose A. Fadul and derives from http://www.sito.org/cgi-bin/egads/showart?show=jaf.0006.