The Week

Time, too, to acknowledge that some fixed concept of normality is desirable not just socially, but psychologically. Abnormality—at least abnormality of the elevated sort—is very fine food for fantasy; but by definition, most of us must rest our hopes for a fulfilled and happy life in the well-worn ruts of human experience. The elevated-abnormal person is probably essential to the progress of civilization, but his prospects for contentment are not high. The distress and persecution suffered by the abnormal, the étranger, has been a staple of literature since the Romantic Age, and in our own time is seen at its most highly colored in the imaginative excesses of science fiction. In Damon Knight’s short story “The Country of the Kind,” to take one impressive example, the world has become a utopia of normality, built around universal benevolence and harmony. To prevent it all from sinking into a suffocating hell of boredom and conformity, the authorities have licensed one man to go around breaking into people’s houses and trashing them, just to introduce some uncertainty into life. To make sure this lone eccentric does not lapse into normality, the authorities, when operating on his brain, have also given him an intolerable smell so that no one wants to get close to him. He is, of course, wretchedly unhappy.

The ancient equivalent of science fiction was mythology, in which the abnormal attribute most desired was immortality. Tennyson retold one of these myths in his wonderful poem “Tithonus,” which is spoken in the first person by Tithonus himself, a beautiful youth who caught the eye of Eos, the Greeks’ goddess of the dawn. Eos abducted the youth, along with Ganymede, and took them off to her palace in the east, from which she rides out every morning to herald the sun. When Zeus robbed her of Ganymede, Eos begged him to grant Tithonus immortality, and Zeus agreed. Unfortunately Eos forgot to request perpetual youth for her lover, so Tithonus became older, grayer, and more shrunken, and his voice more high-pitched, until Eos tired of nursing him and locked him in her bedroom, where he eventually turned into a cicada. Tennyson’s poem is the lament of Tithonus, partly for the lost affections of Eos, but much more for his lost normality. The opening lines are a veritable hymn to normality, to the ordinary cycles of the world:

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Time, too, to acknowledge that some fixed concept of normality is desirable not just socially, but psychologically. Abnormality—at least abnormality of the elevated sort—is very fine food for fantasy; but by definition, most of us must rest our hopes for a fulfilled and happy life in the well-worn ruts of human experience. The elevated-abnormal person is probably essential to the progress of civilization, but his prospects for contentment are not high. The distress and persecution suffered by the abnormal, the étranger, has been a staple of literature since the Romantic Age, and in our own time is seen at its most highly colored in the imaginative excesses of science fiction. In Damon Knight’s short story “The Country of the Kind,” to take one impressive example, the world has become a utopia of normality, built around universal benevolence and harmony. To prevent it all from sinking into a suffocating hell of boredom and conformity, the authorities have licensed one man to go around breaking into people’s houses and trashing them, just to introduce some uncertainty into life. To make sure this lone eccentric does not lapse into normality, the authorities, when operating on his brain, have also given him an intolerable smell so that no one wants to get close to him. He is, of course, wretchedly unhappy.

The ancient equivalent of science fiction was mythology, in which the abnormal attribute most desired was immortality. Tennyson retold one of these myths in his wonderful poem “Tithonus,” which is spoken in the first person by Tithonus himself, a beautiful youth who caught the eye of Eos, the Greeks’ goddess of the dawn. Eos abducted the youth, along with Ganymede, and took them off to her palace in the east, from which she rides out every morning to herald the sun. When Zeus robbed her of Ganymede, Eos begged him to grant Tithonus immortality, and Zeus agreed. Unfortunately Eos forgot to request perpetual youth for her lover, so Tithonus became older, grayer, and more shrunken, and his voice more high-pitched, until Eos tired of nursing him and locked him in her bedroom, where he eventually turned into a cicada. Tennyson’s poem is the lament of Tithonus, partly for the lost affections of Eos, but much more for his lost normality. The opening lines are a veritable hymn to normality, to the ordinary cycles of the world: