Charles Lamb loved eccentrics. He had some remarkable friends.
One quality he marveled at was the capacity to be absent, to be so caught up in a line of thought that you are without a sense of self. It seems to me that this sense of absence has been largely lost as our notions of psychology have developed, but we still think of the absent-minded professor.
Lamb’s life was scarred by family tragedy. When he was at his lowest, he was helped by his friendship with George Dyer, a classics scholar at Cambridge. Lamb would sometimes see him in London, walking down a busy street, a Latin text in hand, oblivious to the crowds.
Here is a sketch of Dyer from Eric. G. Wilson’s biography of Lamb, quoting their contemporaries:
Dyer was once “seen in Fleet Street without his stockings, and he took off his inexpressibles to give them to a poor man who was wretchedly clad.” At a party he “took up a coal-scuttle instead of his hat, and its contents fell into his neck and down his back.” At “his own table (he) put his fingers into the mustard-pot, mistaking it for the sugar basin.” Dyer was halfway home from a dinner at Leigh Hunt’s when he realized he was only wearing one shoe. He returned to the Hunts’ after midnight to retrieve the other. He found it under the dinner table and went on his way.
I read and take heart.
So what was Dyer thinking about when he should have been thinking of socks, shoes, hats and sugar basins? He edited a 143-volume collection of Latin classics. He wrote a biography of the religious dissenter Robert Robinson and a history of Cambridge University. He had other things on his mind.
As Lamb himself put it: “For with G.D. — to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) is to be present with the Lord.”
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