Pretentiousness

Your pretense was your protection, and could also make you into a target.

A concept rock album about a fictional Edwardian military band, featuring musical styles borrowed from Indian classical music, vaudeville and musique concrete, its sleeve design including images of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Gustav Jung, Sir Robert Peel, Marlene Dietrich and Aleister Crowley?

Fitting in would be the new standing out

As fellow Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood reputedly said, Mick Jagger is ‘a nice bunch of guys’.

‘Go with the flow, find what has been forgotten, put it together in a new way.’ Stay busy, out of phase, in love.

I was lucky. I understood pretension as permission for the imagination.

Pretentiousness keeps life interesting. Without the permissions it gives — the licence to try new experiences, to experiment with ideas, to see if you want to live your life another way — people from all kinds of backgrounds will not be exposed to difference, to new ideas or the histories of their chosen field. A rich culture sustained by people who devote their lives to it, often with little reward or recognition, is a pretentious one.

To fear being accused of pretension is to police oneself out of curiosity about the world.

The accuser of pretension always presumes bad intentions. Truth is, more often than not pretension is simply someone trying to make the world more interesting, responding to it the way they think is appropriate. It’s more likely that what you think is one person’s pretension is another’s good faith.

Cutting someone down for pretension reveals, ironically, the mark of embarrassed arrogance rather than humility.