Everyone Is Made of Glass

I always liked stories about eccentric royals doing mad things.

Queen Christina of Sweden reportedly had a miniature cannon made for firing tiny cannonballs at fleas in her bedroom. Louis XIV made a proto-reality-show of his daily routines, allowing an audience of courtiers the honor of watching him dress, bathe, and use the toilet.

Peter the Great famously returned from a tour of Western Europe, and refused to let men have beards near him. Intent on “modernizing” Russia, he personally shaved many of his noblemen, and implemented a beard tax.

The weird behaviors of aristocrats always seemed especially fanciful to me. We probably only know about their quirks because they had the power to make others take them seriously.

When a famous person expresses a novel form of madness, it sometimes catches on. In the 1390s, Charles VI of France came to believe he was physically made of glass. Insisting he could be easily shattered, he wouldn’t let people touch him, and had iron reinforcing rods sewn into his clothes.

In the centuries that followed, this same odd delusion reappeared several times, all in members of the educated classes. From Fear and Fragility: The Glass Delusion and its History by Tamara Sanderson:

The physicians André Du Laurens and Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz independently documented a nobleman who believed himself to be shaped specifically like a glass pitcher. Not merely made of glass, but also contained by it: he slept buried in straw, terrified that he might tip in the night and pour himself out across the floor. The Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, treated a patient who was rational and highly functional in every respect save one: the absolute conviction that his buttocks were formed from the same stuff as windowpanes.

My first reaction was that this was all very funny, especially the illustrations. There’s something about art depicting European nobles, with their tights, decadent hats, and throngs of attendants, that makes it hard to take their distress seriously.

When I read about what was happening in the second painting, my attitude changed. It depicts a masquerade party gone horribly wrong.

King Charles and five dancers had dressed up as “shaggy forest creatures,” wearing linen suits coated in pitch and feathered with flax. The king’s brother Louis, drunk and arriving mid-dance, tried to inspect one of the dancers with a torch, and the costumes went up one after another.

The king was the only one who didn’t catch fire. His quick-thinking aunt hid him under the billows of her skirt. One dancer saved himself by leaping into a vat of wine, and the other four died of their terrible burns.

It was only a few weeks after this incident that Charles ordered his attendant to sew iron rods into his clothes.

The previous summer, he’d been involved in another tragic incident. While the king was riding with some of his men, a commoner ran up to him and warned him he was about to be betrayed. A man-at-arms dropped his sword at that moment, and the king spun and killed him. He charged at his other men, presumably thinking they were assassins, killing four of them before being dragged from his horse.

Charles was catatonic with despair for days following the incident, and slowly improved over the autumn. The masquerade party, in January, was meant to cheer him up.

Reading about all this made me feel embarrassed. I had always seen the royal-class people in those paintings as out-of-touch fools at best. One of them going mad and thinking he’s a turkey or a glass decanter fit this prejudice perfectly. I didn’t quite see them as people with minds and hearts like mine. By title Charles was a powerful king, but he was also an overwhelmed young man, lying in bed, wracked with guilt, afraid someone might bump him and shatter him for good.

It’s easy to dismiss someone’s anxiety when you think they’re delusional. Of course you’re not a glass pitcher who might spill everywhere. Why don’t you worry about real problems? A guy at work is distraught because the FBI is monitoring him through old TV antennas. A college student is certain the communist revolution will free the world from oppression, and she’s terrified it won’t come soon enough.

Everyone lives in their own mental world, and each of us is certain of things that others can see are delusions. But we’re all completely entangled in our stories, and even if the facts are wrong, the anxiety each person feels is as real as the floor beneath them. We know how vulnerable we are, and how easily things go wrong, so we fixate on any story that feels like a path to safety.

When you regard someone as having the wrong beliefs, contempt comes easily, even ill will. How could they think that?! But I think it’s worth focusing on the reality of their anxiety instead, because that’s the real common ground.

That line of thinking often occurs to me when I’m stuck in traffic. Everybody wants to move, nobody can, and it always seems like someone else’s fault. Over the years I developed two tricks for managing your impatience with other drivers. When you notice you’re getting indignant, you can do one or the other or both.

The first one is to imagine that the person in the offending car is your aunt. She might turn too wide, signal late, or be slow to react to the green light. She’s not the best driver, no. But she doesn’t deserve your contempt.

The second one is similar but broader. You picture all the cars around you as being driven by creatures that are as breakable as fine china. Even though everyone is zipping around in these high-tech machines, the drivers inside are all very delicate. Just like you, even a mean word could wound them for a long time. No matter what people believe, everyone is made of glass.

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