“Eccentricities of genius”. A line from Charles Dickens who we remember fondly at this time in the year. There is a fine line between eccentricity and genius in some cases, but not all…
Do you remember the TV series called The Millionaire? An extremely wealthy benefactor made it his passion in life to give away large sums of his money. It was up to his assistant to seek out the beneficiaries of his generosity. In some ways the millionaire in the series was unconventional. The millionaire was also male, but I recently read that it is affluent women who are the most giving. Thomas Stanley in his sequel The Millionaire Women Next Door, said that on average, they donate 7% of their annual incomes to charity. At the time of this writing, that was three times the rate donated by the average American family. I wouldn’t consider that eccentric; I’d call it just plain generous…
In the first hour of tonight’s program, I mention the life of a true eccentric, William Blake. He wrote poems that had a mystical quality to them. He was also haunted by gods and angels, and he had a strange passion for Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost‘ that I explain in detail. I also mention the fact that Paradise Lost seems destined to make it to the Big Screen sometime in the future.
His torments got me to thinking about some of the world’s unambiguous eccentrics. The Globe and Mail’s Social Studies column published on November 8th featured some information from an article that was written by Nigel Farndale in The Sunday Telegraph. He mentioned the aristocrat Jack Mytton (1796-1834) who had a fondness for his 2,000 dogs. He fed them steak and champagne.
Another eccentric mentioned in that same Globe and Mail column back in July liked to do monkey impressions. He once convinced some Spaniards that he was, in fact, the Duke of York. He then proceeded to dive head first into a rather large punch bowl that was filled.
But the one that really caught my eye was a Hindu Ascetic mentioned in the Los Angeles Times and that same column by Michael Kesterton in 2004, this man had spent 19 years, and had covered thousands of miles, ‘rolling like a log along India’s roads’. He had done this to promote world peace…You could just imagine what he must have endured on the hot asphalt in the blistering heat of midday…He was called ‘the rolling saint’.
As I said at the beginning, there is a fine line between genius and eccentricity…Some, it seems, have regularly crossed that line many times throughout history. Maybe William Blake wasn’t that strange after all…
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Don Jackson
