The Importance of Being Earnest
What does it mean to be earnest? Seriousness, honesty, attention to detail, seeing the wood for the trees, genuine commitment, lack of filter - that all might be part of it. Working with your hands, taking the scenic route, taking pride in your work, preserving the old ways - that's earnest too.
At the start of a 1966 book called Early Netherlandish Painting, the German art critic Erwin Panofsky set out why he found the Dutch Renaissance, and Jan van Eyck in particular, so special.
The Italian Renaissance had invented perspective, the ability to represent 3D space on a 2D canvas. Van Eyck's technique was innovative too; but Panofsky was particularly excited about what he did with it. Discussing the Arnolfini Portrait, van Eyck's 1434 masterpiece, Panofsky says that:
"In thus describing the direct juxtaposition of the minutiae of an interior with a vast, almost cosmic panorama, of the microscopic with the telescopic, so to speak, Fazio comes very close to the great secret of Eyckian painting: the simultaneous realization, and, in a sense, reconciliation, of the "two infinites," the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. It is this secret that intrigued the Italians, and that always eluded them...
The nuptial chamber of the Arnolfinis is, in spite of its cozy narrowness, a slice of infinity. Its walls, floor and ceiling are artfully cut on all sides so as to transcend not only the frame but also the picture plane so that the beholder feels included in the very room; yet the half-open window, disclosing the thin brick wall of the house and the tiniest strip of garden and sky, creates a kind of osmosis between indoors and outdoors, secluded cell and universal space.”
Van Eyck's genius was to combine the infinitely small and the infinitely large: weather and climate; strategy and tactics.
The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie once wrote that “All historians are either truffle hunters, their noses buried in the details, or parachutists, hanging high in the air and looking for general patterns in the countryside far below them.” Panofsky thought that van Eyck's painting surpassed and sublimated this distinction; truffle hunting and parachuting at the same time.
Drawing on Panofsky, I think earnestness is about combining some Big Idea with the prosaic. The general and particular. Retaining a sense of numinous awe as you encounter the most quotidian objects.
Here's John Collison on that subject:
Here's a TikTok of a dad looking at the details of a cruise ship: "Do you know how much concrete they must have put here to make this little dock?
It's the infinitely big and the infinitesimally small.
Here's an awesome clip from the 1993 film Rudy. Rudy's about a kid called Daniel Ruettiger, who grows up in an Illinois steel town, but dreams of Notre Dame football. Rudy's dad, a foreman in the steel mill, watches Notre Dame football religiously, but knows his place. But after a fatal accident in the mill, Rudy realises that it's now or never: he can stay at the steel mill for the rest of his life, or hunt down his dream. And so Rudy, a dyslexic defensive end who measured at 5'6" and 165lb, enrolled at a juco in South Bend, determined to make the team. He works on the grounds staff at the Notre Dame stadium. He makes it through his classes at juco; and, at his fourth attempt, he finally gets the grades to enroll at Notre Dame.
As part of the grounds team, Rudy had to fix up the Notre Dame locker room. That locker room is Gethsemane and Calvary, Golgotha and Bethlehem, the most holy and private site in the lore of the Fighting Irish. It's a dingy place - but it represents everything Rudy's ever wanted and believed in. Glory isn't some wishy-washy abstract concept, it's a place on earth - and Rudy is getting to stand there for the first time.
Rudy is earnest. When he makes the practice squad as a walk-on, lining up opposite Midwestern farm boys with 200 pounds on him, he gives it everything he’s got - his effort makes the rest of the team look bad. But Rudy gives up on his dream, gives up on ever dressing to play a game for the Irish. It’s at that point that Fortune, the head groundsman, gives him a talking-to:
You're 5 foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you have barely a speck of athletic ability. And you hung in there with the best college football players in the land for 2 years. And you're gonna walk outta here with a degree from the University of Notre Dame. In this life, you don't have to prove nothin' to nobody but yourself. And after what you've gone through, if you haven't done that by now, it ain't gonna never happen. Now go on back.
I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it made me cry.
My culture has something like that. I was - am - a Colleger at Eton, part of a unbroken tradition stretching back almost six hundred years. To be part of that tradition is an incredibly precious gift, one that very few people receive. In the course of those centuries, a few names stand out. One of them is Logie Leggatt, or LCL: born in 1894, Leggatt was a talented sportsman, and in the First World War was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards.
In 1915, in a French dugout, he gathered together a few Colleger friends to commemorate St Andrew's Day, the November holiday that sometimes falls on my birthday. On St. Andrew’s Day, we play Wall Game.
He wrote a letter home, describing that moment in the dugout:
This time three years ago I was the keenest man alive. We were, admittedly, the finest Wall XI that had been seen for forty years. Eton teaches you most things, but the College traditions and ideals are even higher than those of the school in general. In every respect I am simply what College at Eton made me. What am I fighting for now? Not at all England with its follies and conceits, simply for about a hundred friends, and a few acres of elms and turf, by a river, for red-brick buildings and a grey chapel, and above all for the most tremendous tradition I shall ever know.
He was 21.
England's far, and honour's a name, so LCL tied his committment to the war effort back to a very particular thing: the formative experience in his life, his sentimental Wesenwille, his experience playing Wall Game. All the high-minded ideals were sublimated into that specific, "tremendous" tradition. LCL was earnest. He was killed in 1917, aged 22, on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele. At our best, we carry his torch.
