2.
TO A MEDIOCRE MIND . .
.
by
Brent C.
Dickerson
Copyright © 1997 Brent C. Dickerson
To a mediocre mind, everything is a mediocrity. A man who places himself on a flat plain, and keeps his eyes level with his surroundings his whole life, will have no sight of the eminences, except at a distance and without clarity, and the profundities and depths will be not only beyond his sight, but beyond his understanding as well.
Should anyone of wider vision speak to him with all due excitement of golden inspirations or black dejections, the man who has lived in a mist of gray all his life will generally nod congeniallyand change the subject. Unable to grasp the urgency or import of the matter, and flummoxed by his friend's intensity about it, he will, rather than to look upon this as a precious opportunity to gain some rare insight into a subject or indeed feeling which he has been too languid or complacent to approach himself, scamper away from marvels to rejoice in commonplaces, meanwhile making a mental note to avoid his excitable friend in the future.
Yes, "to avoid his
friend." Because there is that in human nature which promotes
security by, obviously first, timidly avoiding insecurity, and then by
consciously or otherwise attempting to weaken and destroy the causes of
insecurity. Human nature!self-preservationan instinct
understandable enough when applied to true threats, but pernicious and
retrograde to the progress of self and society when set indiscriminately
against everything whcih is merely unfamiliar. Especially in these
unheroic times, when simply helping someone in obvious need is looked on
as a miracle of virtue rather than as the duty it is, who will challenge
himself, let alone challenge the thoughtless commonplaces of
society or their nervous, insecure protectors? No, the great over-riding
imperative, the wonderful prime desideratum, which rules the day is to
embrace the vague but warm complacency of commonalty and the shallow life
that goes with it. This is an insidious impulse, innocent-seeming in its
warm vagueness, but all the more sinister for that. The playwright Eugene
Ionesco saw it well: "The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it
persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join
in the madness of others, the one who tries to resist. We will never
understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have
the strength to be uncommon."
But we have, within us, another
instinct as well, one which has served to bring our curious species to
higher levels of thought and accomplishment in those bracing times when
complacency blinks for a moment, or when individuals are born who, by
their very nature, are able to resist declining into this quicksand of
lazy mediocrity which always lies just outside our doors. What this
instinct is, and how it manifests itself in various ways and in various
people, we will investigate in a future essay. Shakespeare (from Sonnet
59).
"If there be nothing new, but
that which is
Hath been
before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention,
bear amiss
The second burden
of a former child!"
or