Words of my Life: Slouch

When I was a boy, I was regularly reprimanded with these words (or some variation of them): "Don't slouch." "You're slouching! "You're slouching again!" "Why are you slouching?" 

Apparently I was a natural sloucher.  

It was a difficult criticism to absorb or to counter. I wasn't entirely sure what the word "slouch" meant but I sure knew that it wasn't anything good. In my mother's eyes, I believe, "slouching" was not only a physical but a moral lapse. But to be accused of something of which my body, not me in my own person as I knew myself, was guilty -- well, that was surely puzzling.

To slouch is to "sit or stand in a casual, lazy, drooping, or improper posture." "Lazy?" -- I was definitely lazy. "Improper? -- I'm not so sure. Nor do I know why being repeatedly accused of "slouching" was going to turn me into an upright proper person.

The most famous sloucher in literature is the villainous Orlick in Great Expectations, who was "always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident...  and when he went ...away at night, he would slouch out.... He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on working-days would come slouching from his hermitage." Slouching is unquestionably a marker of evil for Dickens. Was it so for my mom?

Then there's Yeat's "rough beast... slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." A second coming of sorts, and not at all a good one.

So there you have three slouchers: the "rough beast," Orlick, and me.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

I'll be the fourth, and my slouching is due to a defective seat in P.S. 217 I sat in all term in Mrs. Goldstein's room in the 5th grade. The seat was in the row next to the windows, and it slanted downward dramatically. It was impossible to sit in it without slouching. From that year on, I have slouched in every seat I have sat in, and my back is a wreck. It never occurred to me to refuse to sit in that seat, and it never occurred to Mrs. Goldstein to blame the seat rather than me whenever she rebuked me for slouching.