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Caricature
of James Whistler (1834-1903), artist and notorious dandy, by Aubrey
Beardsley, fellow dandy. |
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What
Now?
Dandies and dilettantes are relics of another age and deeply at odds with
the forces that produced them. For us sensitive souls—we modern
day dandies, dilettantes, or the dilettante-curious, destined perpetually
to be mildly out of step with out times—our forebearers can be inspirational;
for they indicate an alternative to the two major strategies of coping
with the world: the postmodern ironic embrace, and the purely reactive,
perpetually adolescent, bohemian rejection.
In one of the great novelistic considerations of
coping with the absurdities of life, Candide (written right between
the birth of the dilettante and the dandy), Voltaire concludes that, in
the face of the almost deliberately malicious vicissitudes life can throw
one’s way, sometimes the best course is a sovereign disdain indistinguishable
from foolishness: we must tend our gardens.
Dandies and dilettantes ride their hobbyhorses, sometimes with, sometimes
against the tide, a diffuse community of gardeners
THE END
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