Another Thought on Hype

I recently asked the question "is hype good?". I meant "hype" in the most fundamental sense. Not just commercial publicity, but every effort to excite anybody about anything.

This has been on my mind a lot recently, especially regarding one memory in particular.

My birthday is in October. (In four days, actually.) One year, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, my father gave me a birthday present of A Christmas Carol on audiotape. Books on tape were quite a big thing back then and I was keen on them.

I can remember him saying as he gave it to me: "This recording has been done by some of the best actors in the business". Or something like that.

The fact that my father had gushed over the actors gave the recording a sort of glamour in my mind. It made it seem like a big deal to me. And I wasn't all that naive. I fully understood that my father was just trying to excite me about the gift. But the fact that he cared enough to try to excite me mattered.

The really interesting thing about enthusiasm (to me) is that there's no fixed quantity. It's not like everybody has, say, ten thousand units of enthusiasm (perhaps a unit could be called a "gush") and everybody assigns these units however they see fit: this much to sport, this much to work, this much to family, etc. etc.

Each person's measure of enthusiasm clearly differs. Some people are full of it and some people (or so it has always seemed to me) have very little of it. People with negligible enthusiasm used to greatly unsettle me in my childhood and teens. I called them "death worshippers" because I really believed they were indifferent as to whether they were alive or dead, or perhaps they even preferred the latter state.

Before I was a teenager myself, I really believed all teenagers were death worshippers, from the stories I heard from those who had gone before me. One teenager told me that all his schoolmates threw their weight against the side of the schoolbus when it passed the river, in order to push it in. Rubbish, no doubt, but I believed it. Teenage nihilism seemed to me the epitome of death worship. Mersault in Camus's The Outsider isn't a teenager, but I thought every teenager was like Mersault.

Of course, you can't judge somebody's enthusiasm from outside, and I was just as judgmental back then as I am now. Still, I don't think I was always completely wrong.

The other interesting thing about enthusiasm is that there's no upper limit. Beyond a certain threshold, we start using words like "wonder", "awe", "the numinous", "transcendence", "the sacred", "rapture", etc.

I think one of the purposes of poetry is to raise the roof (literally) of this capacity. I think there is, sadly, a great insight in this stanza from Coventry Patmore:

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child’s unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

Personally, I always want to be on the side of the hypers, of the people pushing hype. There is of course hype for bad things. It's right to be cynical about the bad hype. But to be cynical about all hype--- all romance, all idealism, all poetry, all glamour-- is about the worst thing I imagine.