Be Different! (Like Everyone Else!)
By LUC SANTE
(note to students: This is in Seeing and
Writing (409).
Are you a unique individual? What a stupid
question! How could you not be? You are
the only person ever to have been born at
12:08:32 A.M. on June 17, 1973, in the
maternity ward of Enos T. Throop
Memorial Hospital in Picpus, N.Y. You are
easily distinguishable from the infants born
in the same location on the same day at
12:07 and 12:09, respectively -- their
parents were different from yours, for one
thing, unless, of course, you are one of a set
of twins or triplets. Even then, your
fingerprints will be unique, and the graph
of your voiceprint equally singular,
identifiably yours alone, even when you
talk in a growl or a falsetto. Anyway, the
important thing is that you know that you
are you, an inimitable human being, with a
collection of tastes, tendencies, tropisms,
penchants and small perversities that have
never been gathered together in exactly the
same way in the history of the world.
So how do you express this uniqueness of
yours? Maybe you always and unfailingly
wear red socks. Or you wear your watch on
the pulse side of your wrist. Or you have a
hummingbird tattooed just above your
ankle. Or you carry special imported tea bags with you everywhere and will drink nothing else. Or you are
never seen without your tiny, trembling dog. Or you have a cabochon emerald implanted in one of your
front teeth. Or you drive a converted army ambulance. Or you write with a fountain pen the size of a celery
stalk. Or you wear shorts even in winter. Or you wear a baseball cap even to church. Or you wear the same
outfit every day. Or you rig your car with vanity plates that encode your nickname. Or you have everything
monogrammed, down to your unmentionables.
These are hard times for individuality. If you practice any of the above small eccentricities, you've got to
know that at least a zillion people do the same (and that includes the implanted stone in your tooth, which
will forever appear to the casual eye like a forgotten piece of spinach). Even if you engage in some kind of
radical piercing, like encasing both eyebrows in tight rows of small rings, and by this means emphatically
announce to the world that you are not employed in middle management at a Fortune 500 company, you are
hardly doing something unprecedented. The fact that you have carried out such a thing virtually insures that
you've taken notice of all other humans in your town or on your travels who have done the same. Perhaps,
then, you are not proclaiming your individuality so much as establishing your kinship with others of the
same micropersuasion.
The compulsion to express one's individuality by means of eccentric style was for centuries restricted to
members of the aristocracy, the only people who had the means or the time to pay attention to style, much
less to feel constrained by prevalent fashions. Things changed in the 19th century, with the rise of the
bourgeoisie, which imposed a set of instant standards and latter-day traditions upon the general population.
The first people to set themselves apart from these dictates were the earliest bohemians, specifically the
Jeune France crowd in Paris circa 1830, which included Gerard de Nerval, today much better known to
English speakers for having walked a lobster on a leash through the gardens of the Palais Royal than for his
visionary poems. His friends drank wine from human skulls, assumed bizarre names, dyed or perfumed or
Martin Schoeller
Variations on a theme, No. 1: Redheads, female.
