Togetherness

Falstaff McClosky just didn't fit. All his friends knew he didn't fit and perhaps he had known it first of all. Here he was twenty years old, a Harvard junior, and completely left out. It was irony pure and simple. Everyone else seemed at least partially unfulfilled, partially frustrated, somewhat disturbed. But not Falstaff. His life was a model of emotional serenity. Indeed, it was often doubted that he possessed any emotions in the first place. He had failed completely to achieve frustration.

Possibly he hadn't tried hard enough. The others entertained ambitions--intellectual ambitions, athletic ambitions, social and political ambitions--and those who entertain ambitions undershoot the mark a good sixty-two percent of the time. This is the real key to dejection, but a key Falstaff never held. He simply didn't desire. He didn't care to. He really didn't care.

Rather, he passed day after day of unimpaired bliss, blithely assured that even if all was not well he at least walked in the sunlight. He didn't complain when his bus was late, when it poured on his way to Longfellow, or when he was trapped in Filene's revolving door. And the time his date's heel caught and broke in a streetcar track he cheerfully carried her home. He enjoyed House food, loved breakfasts at 8:15, and even liked the Lowell House bells. He read Thurber, collected Charles Addams, and was content to sit alone at night listening to Dylan Thomas recordings and drinking black coffee from his electric percolator. Or would have been had he been able. But he was not.

The fellows in the entry, his friends in Adams and Dunster, and even his friends in Eliot, were certain to drop in and ask him for a walk "just to cheer old Falstaff up." How little Falstaff needed this super-added cheer they could hardly imagine. On the contrary, they distrusted his seeming calm. They thought his satisfied air a cloak veiling deep festering pools of insidious despair. They feared a crack-up were his troubles perpetually suppressed. And possibly they perceived in his calm something more than merely "taking things in stride"--saw the serious threat he posed to the whole community. In any event, they sought his confidence, and encouraged their friend to unveil by confessing with their own qualms. And this was the beginning of the end for old Falstaff.

After months of bull sessions over tea and fruit salad at the Waldorf he became sincerely troubled. Unwittingly, society had struck a telling blow. It was Job and Oedipus brought up to date and it made sense. "Happiness is illusion. Only togetherness has meaning. Togetherness assumes similarity. Similarity means frustration. Frustration demands purpose."

Thus went the talk, the distilled ideas danced circles in the air, and there Falstaff stood, an outsider, one of the happy few. He just had to cultivate a frustration, if only a mild one; and this was no mean commission. Falstaff gathered his vague resolution and tried to desire.

But can anyone really tack telos onto a life already so self-containing, so much a closed system, as Falstaff's? And if so, how? Falstaff was stymied. He tried a game of solitaire, but it came out; worked a cross-word puzzle, but it was a snap; cheered one Saturday for a Harvard upset victory, but only the experts found frustration (Falstaff was gloriously intoxicated and had a wonderful time). And still his hope gushed, so he found no frustration even in his many failures to achieve illusive melancholy. It was really bad news.

And finally, Falstaff left. He had dug deep-seeking dry-rot in his soul's garden and found nothing, so he changed scenes, joined the two percent, went abroad. And there he is today, still delightfully happy, ever hunting misfortune, bearing always the curse of the modern Cain--a horrible isolation in his happiness.

Occasionally he drops a card to his enlighteners in Cambridge. (The stamps change color, but the message remains the same.) Harvard life is otherwise very much as before. His old roommates use the percolator now, his friends have divided the records, and if interested you can find the Charles Addams on Lamont's fifth floor, forever Falstaff's favorite on campus spot.