High Society
Scott Nelson
9 May 2019
I can’t express enough my disdain for the sorts of people who attend these high society events. I wonder if they can smell anything other than their own excrement with their heads shoved so far up their backsides. And the venue is a swanky fashion venue to boot – could anything be less intellectual and more conducive to the ephemeral and superficial than this? The useless and gigantic cultural attaché of an unrecognizable country is here and I’m glad she doesn’t remember me. I wonder what other pieces of detritus will come in off the street.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. A man nearly bowled over a slender older lady, half his size, without the semblance of acknowledgement as she offered a meek and very Canadian apology for an offence she did not own. The aforementioned attaché had a spat with the host over some ill-placed glasses (they happened to be perched precariously close to a hideous pair of shoes that no self-respecting woman would be caught in). They both pointed to and grabbed the shoe – the one to assert it was not a big deal, the other to retort that it was the only deal – as if they were beggars at odds over a loaf of bread.
Superiors of every sort ordered around the wait staff in a dirty amalgam of German, Italian, and English that was tolerable only if you were a luddite in all three. Some guests affected the French tongue with the sort of proficiency possessed by those who wield the language as a party favour, immune to the language’s measured cadences and balanced sonority, its penchant for discovering reason in antinomy and uncovering paradox in reason.
Well-dressed socialites swarmed around the morsels of food like gnats on a rotten peach. It was like watching peasants who had miraculously come into wealth and knew of no other way to flaunt their undeserved status. They possessed the virtues that only money can buy. A young pianist played some wonderful pieces, commanding a rare moment of silence when the audience could have reflected on the beauty of the music instead of impatiently gazing into the next room spying their next meal. The pianist’s parents were mannered as nouveaux riches, with excess emphasis on the adjective and insufficient stress on the noun. They owned nothing of nobility, for must it really be repeated that true nobility and aristocracy are rewards to be earned through constancy and character and not the taudry baubles given away at a ball?
O homines ad servitutem paratos! I hate this vulgar mob. An ambassador spoke briefly at the event before spending the remainder of the evening entertaining the petulant flatterers as he hungrily eyed the buffet. He moved skillfully about with a ninja-like furtiveness. But the toadies were upon him, and they were crafty in their encircling manoeuvres. Conversations were in heated competition with each other to see which could scrape the bottom of the barrel in content and irrelevance. I was hardly surprised to hear that nothing has changed since I first started courting this scum so many years ago. Could I really think random fashionistas and diplomats from unimportant countries of any consequence when I have already shaken hands with ambassadors and diplomats from the most important countries in the world?
…but what am I saying? Would I use their own tawdry weapons against them in some claim to superiority? The aforementioned ambassador moved swiftly and silently, but he was not the only one. There was another. Several will have missed him at this engagement, but you will know the type all too well. He observed everyone and everything; he ate from the same dish as they did; he shook the hands of and smiled at the refuse; he too took his place in line to have his moment with an ambassador whose insight was nil, whose memory would immediately thereafter be wiped of the encounter, and whose popularity at this engagement owed everything to masses of people whose simple gathering symbolized that his presence must have been important…
Your humble narrator was a flatterer amongst courtiers, a slave amongst servants, and a fly on the wall of a harem.
And he is now at home with Horace.
