The Tissue Issue

Medieval philosophers and moralists in the Platonic tradition used a strange Latin phrase to describe what they took to be the disorienting deceptiveness of the empirical world.  They spoke of the regio dissimilitudinis, often translated into English as the “land of unlikeness”.  In the land of unlikeness moral reality is strangely deformed.  Our wounded human nature often seduces us into desiring what is actually bad for us and generally behaving in self-destructive ways.  A passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans—“For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do”—was frequently cited in this regard.

            This appears to me to be related not merely to Plato’s myth of the cave but to the “mind/body problem” of modern secular philosophy; and quite apart from any theological super-structure, “land of unlikeness” seems a most evocative term to describe the strange world that we have suddenly been thrust into by a frightening pandemic.  I read this in the Times: “An Arizona man and his wife ingested a fish tank cleaning additive made with the same active ingredient as chloroquine phosphate, which President Trump has referred to as a ‘game changer’.”  The result was a definitive change in the man’s game.  He died.

            Less lethal though scarcely more comprehensible has been the run on toilet paper.  One of my first illuminations of the opacity of the regio dissimilitudinis into which the coronavirus was leading us was a journalist’s photograph of the bare shelves, only recently laden with cubic yards of toilet paper and paper towels, of a stripped Walmart.  According to the article it accompanied, two women had engaged in an unseemly battle over the last megapack of Charmin.  Nature red in tooth and claw!  My own unseemly response to the unseemliness was to rush immediately to Amazon.com.  Items temporarily unavailable!  My ancestors got along perfectly well with corncobs and the pages of old Sears catalogues for this sort of thing, but, but….I then recalled an anecdote that suggested there was something particularly American at work here.  It will take a couple of paragraphs of needed context.

And when she went there, the cupboard was bare

When I was a student at Oxford sixty years ago, I enjoyed the benefits provided by an extraordinary service organization called the Dominions Fellowship Trust.  I believe that it no longer exists, and I have not been able to come up with much information about it using the techniques of quickie research.  But it had been active during World War II in a “hands-across-the-water” sort of way to offer comfort to American and Commonwealth airmen—especially volunteer fighter pilots and the bomber crews who flew on thousands of missions beginning with the Battle of Britain and, later, the massive American bombing raids on the German heartland.  These men were offered invitations to spend recuperative leave in various country houses scattered about the British Isles, including several of the Downton Abbey variety.  The war ended, but the Trust continued for a time to operate.  Its administrators, seeking high and low for suitable surrogates for shell-shocked ball turret gunners, came upon Rhodes Scholars.  They were from America and the Commonwealth nations, and by all appearances some of them were pretty shell shocked.

The vacations at Oxford are ample—three eight-week terms are punctuated by two vacations of six weeks and the “long vac” of the summer.  There was more time for foreign travel than money to sustain it, and I personally enjoyed numerous gratis baronial rustications, including one at Glamis Castle, famous in Macbeth.  But there was one place to which I made return visits, at Coldstream, in the extreme south-east of Scotland near Berwick-upon-Tweed.  It was a modest country estate belonging to a collateral branch of the Sitwell family, to which the famous siblings Edith, Sacheverell, and Osbert (none of whom I ever met) belonged.  I became quite friendly with my hostess, Elizabeth (Betty) Sitwell—at least to the degree that a youth from Arkansas and a middle-aged eccentric English grande-dame can be friends.

England at the end of the ‘Fifties had not yet entirely emerged from the rigors of wartime austerity.  I rarely found myself in an adequately heated room or house.  Cramped, chilly bathrooms were the national specialty, and most plumbing features struck an American as archaeological.  The default toilet paper in many domestic as well as all public toilets was something called “Bronco”—packaged in small and apparently impermeable and anti-absorbent waxed sheets.  I never did grasp the engineering design concept.  I suppose it was slightly better for its designated purpose than Saran Wrap, though not by much.  The bathroom of my quarters in the Coldstream mansion, on the other hand, was quite magnificent.  The toilet paper was real, American, on rolls, and abundant.  There were always no fewer than ten unopened rolls in clear sight in a little cabinet.

I eventually became sufficiently comfortable with my hosts to raise these somewhat forbidding topics in conversation.  When I jokingly congratulated my hostess on her American toilet paper she told me the following story.  Her late father, an industrialist, had been great friends with some American counterparts.  When war broke out in 1939—at first without notable hostilities—there was a large Anglophilic movement among the upper crust of New York moneyed society to demonstrate solidarity with France and Britain, especially the latter.  The wife of one of Sitwell’s American industrial buddies was particularly zealous in organizing these efforts.  This lady was sure that there must be many indispensable items—coffee, sugar, chocolates, woolen underwear, Pall Mall cigarettes?—that wartime conditions would soon render difficult of access.  Could she ship some of these items?  The thing was, the Sitwells didn’t really need anything. They lived in a stately home and burned forty tons of coal every winter.  But the New York benefactor was importunate, and the father, to be diplomatic, suggested that the charitable lady herself pick out a few things “of the sort you think most necessary.”

Time passed, and the Sitwells forgot about the whole thing. Soon they really did have other things to think about.  In May of 1940 the “Phony War” ended with the German blitzkrieg through Belgium into France.  By the beginning of June the shocked Brits were desperately evacuating Dunkirk.  One day a few weeks after that a telephone message informed the Coldstream mansion that a freight car of goods was waiting to be claimed on a siding at the Berwick station.  “What is it?” asked the befuddled butler.  “It seems to be mainly—mainly toilet paper” was the astonishing and as it turned out inaccurate reply.  Because it was only most of a box car and entirely toilet paper.  If I could believe my hostess, the household and “half the village” had been slowly working its way through this stockpile for the last twenty years.  “That’s how I learned what Americans consider ‘most necessary’,” she told me.  “We were of course most grateful.  Now we can defecate securely until Doomsday.”