Lice . . . er . . . Slice of the 19th Century

I bought a 200 year old hat today, though I would wager that upon hearing this news my French acquaintances would congratulate me on the purchase of a “NEW” hat. What remains utterly astonishing to me is how common place this sort of thing is. Even more astonishing is that I have come to expect it. For nothing more than the change that I can shake from beneath my sofa cushions I can purchase many an artifact that predates my country of origin. It sort of staggers the mind doesn’t it? And this, perhaps more than anything we have come to know and love about France, is what I am going to miss the most. She is an old gal, France . . . with the age and wisdom to know the value of history. Every line on her wrinkled brow tells a story. A story that dates as far back as pre-history, and for this she is proud. The past is to be revered, appreciated, cherished and preserved. Items don’t go out of fashion here like a pair of skinny jeans or a tattered flannel shirt. History is timeless. It has always been and will always be. I sit and I stare at this “NEW” hat of mine and I wonder where it’s been and the lives that have been carried out beneath the shade of its brim, the thoughts that have filled the head that it sheltered, or the way that it looked in the shop keeper’s window. For this reason and this reason alone, it is perhaps one of the greatest things I have ever purchased.

It is not because it has great historical significance or that it will garner a fetching price at an antiquities auction. On the contrary, it is really the most commonplace of items, yet somehow its ability to conger dreams of the past makes it priceless to someone like me. So, really, all that’s left is to try it on. Upon doing so, I realized that it must have belonged to a leprechaun. Feeling certain that I am as cranially challenged (pinheaded) as any adult male can be, I began looking for suitable hosts. Amazingly, it fit both of my children like a glove. Huh? Could a “haute de forme” (tophat) really have been the rage with the toddler set of the 1800s? I remember a lot of black and white photos from my University level world history courses, however I don’t recall seeing mobs of tophated children running wild in the streets. Of course, I didn’t purchase this item as a jaunty addition to my daily wardrobe and some of you may feel a bit queasy at the idea of me placing this item on my head to begin with. We Americans are a squeamish bunch when it comes to history. It seems to be something we were all taught on that first grade school field trip to the art museum. “Look . . . DON’T Touch”. To this day I keep my hands firmly in my pockets whenever I encounter anything that might be of even remote historical significance and whisper terse warnings to my children to do the same if they know what is good for them. So, as you can imagine, I was quite taken aback as we began discovering the historical beauty of France only to find the native patrons quite willing to place their grimy hands all over damned near ANYTHING.

The French touch their history and it touches them. I have seen folks run their hands all over the surface of paintings at the Louvre, pick up a variety of antiquated items found in historical museums just to give them a ponder, and I am fairly certain I witnessed a child give a stalagmite a passing lick in a pre-historic cave a month or so back (I admit, it did kind of look like a bomb-pop). So why are we so sensitive and the French so free to explore? It certainly can’t have anything to do with the relative age of these artifacts. Or maybe that is exactly the point. From the French perspective, my hat IS new. That which we find ancient and therefore sacred beyond touch in America is so common, so mundane and so very plentiful here in France, why not touch it? The very walls that surround me as we speak date back as far as the 1600’s. The Castle next door, the grounds of which I live upon, goes back as far as the 1400’s. You don’t need all of your fingers and toes to come to terms with the fact that this predates my hat by 4 centuries.

So, how has it all survived? That is really the important question here isn’t it? How with so many people man handling this stuff has it not all fallen into ruin to be lost in a grainy history book photo or preserved behind a plate glass window in some museum. How have all these examples of glorious history been so preserved over the years that a sap like me can buy a 200 year old . . . er . . . new hat at a local yard sale? The American equivalent of this item would certainly find its way into a museum curator’s hand for safe keeping rather than in my kitchen for me to molest with my dirty little digits. From a purely architectural standpoint, that is exactly it . . . preservation. The French care for their buildings, lovingly coaxing them through the years, the decades, the centuries and the millennia to come. Americans are an “out with the old and in with the new” brand of folks. If a structure starts showing some age, why not bulldoze that fucker to the ground and throw up something new with a shelf life of about 10 years. When those 10 years have passed we will bulldoze again and so on. This is our choice though, isn’t it. We prefer the new to the old and prefer to look toward the future than gaze upon the past. That is simply a difference in philosophies. The more interesting examination is that which relates to the items like my hat.

There was a time when Americans were craftsmen and artisans. I would argue that at our peak, no one has ever done it better. Yet, somehow, this method of manufacturing fell out of favor. Our impatient need to advance is careless. Employing the use of machines where practiced hands once stood means that we are not continuing to make items that will last for centuries. For this reason, our historical artifacts are finite and housed safely and securely out of our wandering touch. The French on the other “hand” have been “manufacturing” their history since the dawn of time and continue to do so to this day. This very day, if I so chose, I could make my way into town to find a hat maker that could produce the very same hat as the oldish-newish hat I just purchased and it would last just as long as the one already in my possession. In the US, we are obsessed with disposables. We LIKE to throw shit away, so we don’t mind that a machine threw it together and that on occasion things get out of alignment and seams aren’t quite as strong as they should be. If the sleeve of a shirt begins to separate we will simply throw it into one of our vast and varying landfills and be on our merry way to the Mall to purchase a replacement. This sort of quality is inevitable where machines are concerned. Factory bots are not intuitive, they don’t improvise. They do the same thing over and over with surgical precision which means if there is even a single variable out of whack, the product is trash. A machine doesn’t feel fabric between its aging fingers, examine it with knowing eyes or regard an imperfection as something that can be fixed or overcome through improvisation. The craftsman’s seam will never split or fray. He has taken the time to ensure his stitch is perfect and not in the cold mechanical way a machine would do so, but in a way that ensures the item won’t land in a trash heap at the end of the day. 

The French don’t have room in their trash heaps nor room in their hearts for the un-artful musings of a cold dead machine. They quite prefer their people to their machines and their past to their future. And though this all may sound like a hearty endorsement of the “French Way”, nothing could be further from the truth. I am simply advocating, as an American, that there is something to gain in preserving our past and many of its ways while moving toward our future. The truth of the matter is that both the French and the Americans can’t see the forest for the leaves on the trees. The American’s are wrapped up in the future and pay no regard for the past, while the French remain so tied to their past that they lack a certain vision for their future. I truly believe we could each learn a great deal from each other if we were just willing to wear the other’s hat. Until that day comes, I am going to sit back, relax, and prop my ill-fitting hat upon my weary head and feel fairly content in the knowledge that in another 200 years when this hat re-appears in someone else’s hands and they dream as I have, they will never have guessed it was worn by a guy like me. R.