“One convention has been replaced by another. When I attended a bourgeois bohemian funeral in Paris recently, it was I who stood out in my dark suit and tie—so provincial, so conventional! Everyone else looked as if he or she had just popped into the cemetery after a bit of shopping in the local grocery . . . Did it matter? . . . It is not difficult to construct the bohemian argument against any kind of formality of dress at funerals: that what counts is what people genuinely and authentically feel for and about the dear departed, not how they dress; that the assumption of special clothing encourages hypocrisy and pretense, as if hypocrisy and pretence were so easily eliminated from the human repertoire” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, pp. 40-41).
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