A Good Hat

A good hat will shelter you from the idea of a falling sky. It comforts those of us who don't trust things above our heads.  It protects us from too-frequent reminders of looming infinity -- that celestial vacuum that would suck us into the void if it could.  The brim of a good hat reduces our horizons to a manageable scale, directing our attention, like a sail properly set, down and forward, into the elements, instead of up and away into god knows what.

We know, of course, that a bit of felt will not stop the piano which has broken its block and tackle and is now falling toward us at precisely 9.8 meters per second squared, but it may reduce our knowledge of it, which is in most cases more satisfying.

Every lover of hats must know the line between the distinguished and the ridiculous.  An otherwise respected English professor wears an Australian outback contraption while walking his bulldog in Ann Arbor -- and loses all dignity.  We know it is a cheap hat made of coarse wool felt, no lining, bought for twenty something bucks at the local mall's Nature Store, but that's not what ruins it. What ruins it is its sad need to be seen.  Plus, we wonder why a taciturn scholar needs to pretend he is a crocodile hunter hiking along a desert gully, and we are forced to conclude he is sexually impotent.

When a surgeon arrives in the doctor's lounge with a Stetson on his head, the anesthesiologists will snigger behind his back. This is a law of nature.  Surgeons, and the rest of us, would be wise to reduce the pile of reasons why we are despised.  This means we must wear hats that are as modest as they are fine.  An owly Classics professor wears an Basque beret with good cheer, and we love him.

Good fashion for men requires a certain encouragement of Old World values.  I would like to be counted among a nearly lost breed of men who dare to exercise their innate impulse to chivalry -- an unappreciated virtue among a people disinclined to feel the need for our services. Contrary to people, however, objects do not resent our efforts.  We restore old boats, or fix broken hand-mowers, not only out of love for the things themselves, but out of respect for the act of salvation. A '56 Chevy, returned to gleaming health, is not merely a thing of beauty: she is a maiden restored to honor, and we, of course, are the knight.  This is not merely a harmless fantasy; it is indeed a useful social fiction that should be encouraged.  Without it, we would be unlikely to find, say, hundreds of firefighters willing to save us from burning skyscrapers.

As for me, I follow a less heroic calling: to restore the Irish Country Hat.  This is a hat with a proud lineage, brought to the U.S. in the early 1970s via Norm Thompson's New Yorker ads, only to become the victim of its own success among frumpy academics with no sense of style, and then cheaply imitated by mass producers such as Totes, so that it became a wrinkled flop of wool upon balding and addled heads, the sartorial equivalent of an upside-down bowl of oatmeal.

Nonetheless the true Irish Country Hat, properly styled and worn, was a modest hat of exceptional quality.  It was hand-woven in Connemara, no doubt by ancient women in thatch-roofed cottages on the edge of enchanted forests.  The mountain sheep who relinquished their wool for this use were protected from the squalls off the Irish Sea by a natural lanolin, which conferred an impressive level of water resistance to the hat, and helped preseve its perfect tweedy smell, reminiscent of heather and bramble and a peet-burning hearth.  With a steam kettle and some clothes pins, one could shape it to suit one's style, and it would then hold that shape forever.  It kept the misty Irish rain off your face, of course, and warmed your blood, and stayed put in a gale.  Over time it increased in character, which is perhaps the simplist way to distinguish good things from their shoddy imitators, be they wives, or shoes, or hats.

Norm Thompson's catalogues from the 1970s read like newsletters from an old-money sailing club, and featured Peter Lawford among its models.  He seemed to inhabit its pages not because modelling for a clothing cataglogue was the last pathetic stop on his descent into obvlivion, but because he was Norm's good friend and didn't mind being photographed on his boat wearing his favorite Irish Fisherman's Sweater.  To a skinny and philosophical teenager, who despaired of meaning in the company of stoners and hockey jocks, the Norm Thompson catalogue promised a more humane world to which I could aspire, where a gentle, wise, and wealthy intelligentsia waxed poetical aboard sloops of mahagony and brass.

In 1978, Norm Thompson's Irish Country Hat could be purchased for a mere $17.50; a very small entry fee into such a club.  But unable to compete against the cheaply-made imitators, they stopped importing the hat in 1987, perhaps the nadir for anything suggestive of Liberalism, academia, and frumpy tweeds.  Their spokesperson reports that "this product has simply not created enough demand to justify its inclusion in catalogues since then."

Nonetheless, like the monks in the Dark Ages, I dream of a world restored to a more ancient dignity.  Sheltered by my Irish Country Hat from the paralyzing intrusions of existential dread and the demeaning winds of low culture, I tend the flame of another era. I dare to dream of a lost day's restoration, when once again hats of dignity will suggest, without shame, easy lives of gentle wisdom and noble purpose.



The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology