Gossip

by Joseph Epstein

  Yet I continue to feel that snobbish sense of false superiority when, say, I stay in an expensive hotel, as I did recendy in a suite at the Plaza in New York (at someone else's expense, let me quickly add), though a small superior hotel will set my snob glands flowing even more profusely. Wearing good clothes can also elevate my spirits. I've not any food snobbery, I believe, and I have also managed to evade wine snobbery altogether, and think that spending more than thirty dollars for a bottle of wine an almost immoral act. But I am a sucker for the small fine things that a not really wealthy person can acquire: fine stationery, a splendid fountain pen, an elegant raincoat. I don't own an expensive watch, chiefly because I'm not much for jewelry, and spending a thousand dollars or more for a wristwatch is not my notion of a good time, but I am not opposed to buying a knockoff of a Carrier tank watch or of a Bvlgari watch on the streets of New York or Washington, D.C., for fifteen or twenty-five dollars. ("An André Knokov-sky," I say, if anyone asks what kind of watch I'm wearing.) Snobbery, I know, still courses through my bloodstream.

  It's time it be flushed out. My eldest son not long ago reminded me that, when he was applying for admission to college, I gave him the following advice: "I want you to go to one of the country's best schools, at any rate as the world reckons these things. What you will discover when you get there is that it's not all that good, which is fair enough. But having gone there, you will at least not have to spend any further portion of your life in a condition of yearning, thinking to yourself, Ah, if only I had gone to one of the better schools, how much grander my fate would have been." My son, a good student, went to Stanford, and he says that things have worked out just as I had prophesied.

  But, pathetic truth to confess, I am also a little pleased that my son went to Stanford, for nothing better, I fear, than snobbish reasons. I am too often a little pleased with myself on other snobbish fronts. Allow me to present a few candid snapshots. Here I am giving a lecture at an English university—how nice! Here I am being praised in print by a writer I have long admired in a magazine of high status—splendido! Here I am being paid obeisance by the wealthy—and, lo, the world seems a just and good place!

  Time to grow out of such thoughts. Time to extrude all such snobbish feelings. Time to'sèe the world, as the philosophers put it, as in itself it really is, which snobbery, even in small doses, makes it all but impossible to do.

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