I view everyone I meet – in person or print – as a prospective mate. Are they my sort? Do we share interests? Do they care about me – or I for them? Do we have room on our dance-cards for each other? According to the social brain hypothesis, a human life can accommodate three to five intimates, fifteen close friends, and 150 friendly acquaintances, beyond which there isn’t room in our mind or schedule for more. (I didn’t encage “social brain hypothesis” in quotation marks to mislead you about my erudition. I’d never heard the term before working up this theme. Turns out, it was invented – or discovered – by one Paul Dunbar, who’s only a few years my senior and still kicking. While I’ve no notion how his hypothesis works, its conclusion feels about right. Profligacy in intimacy comes to resemble indifference: love many, love none.)

With a hundred and fifty slots and eight billion living applicants for one’s regard (and lord knows how many dead), one must choose with care. Why squander precious hours on dullards or jerks? I confine my literate acquaintance to you guys – we’re copasetic, no? If somebody wants to know me but doesn’t want to read me, WTF?

With authors the contest for my attention is murderous. I might relish multitudes but who will most reward? Better deeply than widely read. (Love many, love none.)

William Hazlitt (1778-1839) has hovered on the periphery of my respect for half a century. Friend – then antagonist – of some of the leading lights of his age (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lamb, Priestly, Stendhal), essayist on all sorts of topics, lover of liberty, sufferer for his art, prickly wild man in his relations, applauded by aficionados of English prose – you get why I might want to hang with the guy. I pick up a sampling from time to time – he’s only available in samplings – which I read with mingled engagement and irritation – until, finally, I flee with exaggerated disgust. Quit preening, Billy – flaunting your erudition, gutsiness, way with words – inveighing, as if you were God Almighty, congratulating yourself for your contumely – relax, I urge him from afar; you’re too prickly to embrace, too prone to attack. I’d pal with you if I could, but I just can’t, sorry. I bid goodbye with regret. We could be close if he were less ornery – and for sure, he needs a friend.

Then, the other day, I happened on his essay “On Fashion.” My marginalia escalate from pleasure to rapture – carats, underscores, double underscores, asterisks, exclamation points!!! This is really good stuff, especially the first half, which I append below – reluctantly – for I dread the competition. Smart, funny, eloquent, substantive, honed – why can’t I make such trenchant, memorable sentences! I love this guy – on a good day – and his good days are worth both wait and wince.

Which sets me to musing on the accident of fervent attachment. Love may feel ordained in hindsight – mine for Thoreau, say, which commenced when I was nineteen – or mine for Jane – but the circumstances must be right – and the moment – and mood: one must be seeking, ready for a relation of this sort. It’s a miracle, really, when two souls click.

Hazlitt will never be my bestie – coinage care of my grandkids – but with this essay he barged into my permanent regard. He’ll never be to me a Shakespeare – or Montaigne – or Thoreau – or any of my pantheon of perfect makers – he’s too flawed, frustrating, fickle – but for sure I’ll be stopping by for visits, for another jolt of his juice.

Here’s what struck me. Maybe it will you.

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Fashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies. It exists only by its being participated among a certain number of persons, and its essence is destroyed by being communicated to a greater number. It is a continual struggle between ‘ the great vulgar and the small’ to get the start of or keep up with each other in the race of appearances, by an adoption on the part of the one of such external and fantastic symbols as strike the attention and excite the envy or admiration of the beholder, and which are no sooner made known and exposed to public view for this purpose, than they are successfully copied by the multitude, the slavish herd of imitators who do not wish to be behind-hand with their betters in outward show and pretensions, and which then sink, without any farther notice, into disrepute and contempt. Thus fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy innovation and restless vanity. To be old-fashioned is the greatest crime a coat or a hat can be guilty of. To look like nobody else is a sufficiently mortifying reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken for one of the rabble is worse. Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of all things. It cannot be lasting, for it depends on the constant change and shifting of its own harlequin disguises; it cannot be sterling, for, if it were, it could not depend on the breath of caprice; it must be superficial, to produce its immediate effect on the gaping crowd; and frivolous, to admit of its being assumed at pleasure by the numbers of those who affect, by being in the fashion, to be distinguished from the rest of the world. It is not any thing in itself, nor the sign of any thing but the folly and vanity of those who rely upon it as their greatest pride and ornament. It takes the firmest hold of the most flimsy and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and those like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the less so for standing alone. That which is good for any thing, is the better for being more widely diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism : it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath—tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute. ‘The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.’ It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance, idleness, and selfishness. It thinks of nothing but not being contaminated by vulgar use, and winds and doubles like a hare, and betakes itself to the most paltry shifts to avoid being overtaken by the common hunt that are always in full chase after it. It contrives to keep up its fastidious pretensions, not by the difficulty of the attainment, but by the rapidity and evanescent nature of the changes. It is a sort of conventional badge, or understood passport into select circles, which must still be varying (like the water-mark in banknotes) not to be counterfeited by those without the pale of fashionable society; for to make the test of admission to all the privileges of that refined and volatile atmosphere depend on any real merit or extraordinary accomplishment, would exclude too many of the pert, the dull, the ignorant, too many shallow, upstart, and self-admiring pretenders, to enable the few that passed muster to keep one another in any tolerable countenance. If it were the fashion, for instance, to be distinguished for virtue, it would be difficult to set or follow the example; but then this would confine the pretension to a small number, (not the most fashionable part of the community), and would carry a very singular air with it. Or if excellence in any art or science were made the standard of fashion, this would also effectually prevent vulgar imitation, but then it would equally prevent fashionable impertinence. There would be an obscure circle of virtù as well as virtue, drawn within the established circle of fashion, a little province of a mighty empire;—the example of honesty would spread slowly, and learning would still have to boast of a respectable minority. But of what use would such uncourtly and out-of-the-way accomplishments be to the great and noble, the rich and the fair, without any of the eclat, the noise and nonsense which belong to that which is followed and admired by all the world alike? The real and solid will never do for the current coin, the common wear and tear of foppery, and fashion. It must be the meretricious, the showy, the outwardly fine, and intrinsically worthless—that which lies within the reach of the most indolent affectation, that which can be put on or off at the suggestion of the most wilful caprice, and for which, through all its fluctuations, no mortal reason can be given, but that it is the newest absurdity in vogue! The shape of a head-dress, whether flat or piled (curl on curl) several stories high by the help of pins and pomatum, the size of a pair of paste buckles, the quantity of gold-lace on an embroidered waistcoat, the mode of taking a pinch of snuff, or of pulling out a pocket handkerchief, the lisping and affected pronunciation of certain words, the saying Me’m for Madam, Lord Foppington’s Tam and ’Paun honour, with a regular set of visiting phrases and insipid sentiments ready sorted for the day, were what formerly distinguished the mob of fine gentlemen and ladies from the mob of their inferiors. These marks and appendages of gentility had their day, and were then discarded for others equally peremptory and unequivocal. But in all this chopping and changing, it is generally one folly that drives out another; one trifle that by its specific levity acquires a momentary and surprising ascendency over the last. There is no striking deformity of appearance or behaviour that has not been made ‘the sign of an inward and invisible grace.’ Accidental imperfections are laid hold of to hide real defects. Paint, patches, and powder, were at one time synonymous with health, cleanliness, and beauty. Obscenity, irreligion, small oaths, tippling, gaming, effeminacy in the one sex and Amazon airs in the other, any thing is the fashion while it lasts. In the reign of Charles II, the profession and practice of every species of extravagance and debauchery were looked upon as the indispensable marks of an accomplished cavalier. Since that period the court has reformed, and has had rather a rustic air. Our belles formerly overloaded themselves with dress: of late years, they have affected to go almost naked,—‘and are, when unadorned, adorned the most.’ The women having left off stays, the men have taken to wear them, if we are to believe the authentic Memoirs of the Fudge Family. The Niobe head is at present buried in the poke bonnet, and the French milliners and marchands des modes have proved themselves an overmatch for the Greek sculptors, in matters of taste and costume…