A consummately romantic figure is the baggy suited professorial bespeckled man with a butterfly net in his hand, reaching skyward, in hot pursuit of his delicate and elusive prey. A romantic is always on a search. Collectors are all romantics, searching for the one missing element in their collection for one more Pez container or cookie jar or for one more Picasso or perhaps one stamp from a country no longer in existence. Finally, the romantic life must be pursued for its own sake or for the sake of beauty or art, with which it is closely akin. Or, unless they are fans.
Fans are among the most romantic of all species.
Fans concentrate on and pursue their objects for their own sake. While baseball, mired in the greed of players and owners alike, seems to have lost all romance, young fans still intrepidly carry on, trading sports cards and longing to be taken out to the ball game. Fans of opera and ballet, fans of movie idols and rock stars, all display severely romantic behavior, concentrating on their objects of desire and adulation, pursuing them, hoping for sighting for the sake of nothing but romance. A wonderful book about romance in the broadest sense is Barbara Lazear Ascher s Dancing in the Dark . She identifies bird watchers as consummate romantics.