How could our self-opinion be overthrown, when it is based on nothing at all? If it weren’t so groundless, it might not be so hard to shake. No success reared it, so what shock could topple it, or even leave a dent in it?
Why do we sweat for the pay of the world’s respect, when we could live at ease on the independent income of our own self-regard?
None but the proudest people have the modesty to grasp how immodest they are. How could we see our own vanity, when it’s the eyes that we use to scan ourselves and everything else? It is the parent of our plans, habits, outlook and feelings, which they are too abashed or too insolent to own. Conceit saves us from recognizing that conceit has spawned the bulk of our deeds. Something in the style of our own egoism assures us that we are not egoists.
We can’t break the grip of our egoism which stings us to act with such ruthlessness. Yet nor can we conceive the rare accomplishments that might prove our right to our ambitions.
VANITY
Beauty jilts the loveliest and leaves them bereft. But vanity stays loyal to the homeliest. Beauty is as delicate and fleeting as vanity is resilient and enduring. Time despoils beauty. But vanity triumphs over time.
Vanity gives its possessor an ease and confidence which mere beauty or talent could never provide.
Our vanity inventories each slight alteration in our aspect, while overlooking its long geological collapse. Our very flaws help to conceal from us the wrecks that we’ve become.
We take most notice of our own mirrors, since they have learnt to flatter us so well. How did we teach them? And there are no more gratifying mirrors than our friends or spouse.
Beauty is a rapidly depreciating asset, which vanity preserves in its balance sheet at its initial value.
Some women who were once graced with a sumptuous beauty comport themselves like ruined duchesses, who still presume on their title, though they lack the means to keep it up.
Our vanity, like our hypocrisy, may be the best part of us. In all our low compromises with the world, what else could call us back to the high aims that we once aspired to? ‘Virtue would not go so far,’ as La Rochefoucauld tells us, ‘if vanity did not keep it company.’
Some people rate their worth so high because they can envisage a better self that they might one day become, and some because they can’t. We’re too vain of what we are, but we lack the imagination to see what we might be. ‘No one,’ as Multatuli says, ‘has a high enough estimation of what he could be, or a low enough one of what he is.’
Our smugness is like an ever-flowing fountain, which can’t get any fuller, but can’t run down.
1 Perfection
What extraordinary toils the most ordinary of us cumber our lives with, in order to prove that we are not ordinary. All that work and worry, just to become a nobody. Our fate, as Cioran wrote, is
‘to have accomplished nothing, and to die overworked.’ I give way to my lusts without tasting fulfilment, and I harrow my heart without obtaining glory. Those who are irreparably flawed still flog themselves to prove how marvellous they are. We can’t be at peace, unless we are
embarked on some mad scheme of self-betterment which is predestined to leave us no happier than we were before. Why not on the contrary follow the character in Balzac, who ‘was wise
enough to estimate life at its true worth by contenting himself in all things with the second best’?
We ought to thank life each day for illustrating that we were right to rate it so cheap. What pangs I cause myself and others by striving to perfect my perfectly mediocre life.
Our vanity projects for us an enhanced self, but tells us that we have already formed it. How hard I toil to improve, but how enamoured I am of the botched job that I make of it. I tense all my nerve to perfect myself, yet I’m smugly satisfied with the faulty self that I patch up. I go through life, assuming that I am extraordinary, and evincing that I am not.
Perfection is mediocrity polished to a high sheen.
How could we make ourselves the best that we might be, when we are so bent on
demonstrating to our peers that we are superior to them? We spend all our strength striving to prove to ourselves that we’re better than we are and to others that we’re better than they are.
We judge that we are struggling to make the best of our gifts, but aren’t we just scrabbling to get the most into our grip?
Some people are sure that they have no faults because they have darned and patched them so many times, and some are sure that they have no faults because they have never felt the need to. I don’t doubt that I must be wise today, since I now see what a fool I was till yesterday. Vain people are not unaware of their flaws, but they assume that they will have won through to perfection once these have been rectified. My past botches promise me that I must be progressing, rather than alerting me to how far I’ve gone adrift. And my own faults are mere chips which I’ll set right with a few revisions, but others’ are unquestionable proofs that their design was wrong from the start.
We don’t want to change, but we do want to grow perfect, and we trust that we will have done so once we have grown more perfectly who we are.
2 Beliefs
The belief that sustains us is our belief in our own importance. And the faith that justifies us is our faith in our own integrity, which is the one catholic and universal creed. Our day to day self-trust beats the blazing certitude of the most fanatical ranter. So long as we self-trust in our own unique gifts, we don’t need to trust in much else.
Vanity, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen by others. And yet the vain still need others to have faith in them.
How did we end up with so many illusions yet so few beliefs? Though I am willing to trade most of my misconceptions, I cling to the overestimation of my self-worth. ‘We can bear to be
deprived of everything,’ Hazlitt says, ‘but our self-conceit.’
We use up our potential for belief by believing in ourselves. The only things that we have a strong belief in are the good things that we believe about ourselves. I trust so fervently in my own destiny, that I have a cold credit to spare for anything else. But I can coax myself to give my faith to all sorts of things, since my faith in all of them is transferred from my faith in myself.
Our creeds are dim halos emitted by the fiery core of our self-belief.
We’ve known for a long time that the earth doesn’t stand at the pivot of the universe, and so I’m thankful that I am still the axis round which all bright things revolve.
I am resigned to my small and undistinguished place under the sun, not because I think so little of myself, but because I think so much of it. It is not our modesty but our conceit that makes us content with our lot.
3 Providence
Providence is the metaphysic of our ego. It justifies the fortunate, since their good fortune is blessed by God and will go on for all time. And it comforts the unlucky that their bad luck will one day be paid back in full. Our littleness stretches a vast way. We may not believe in God, but don’t we all trust in a power immeasurably bigger than us which is there to smooth our pathway through the briars of this world? Our inflated sense of our own entitlement translates the most inconsiderable coincidence into momentous destiny. No event that turns out in my favour is too insignificant to form part of God’s plan. How ready the unassuming are to see fate busy in their own small lives. We know that the hand of God is at work when we prevail, and that blind
chance must be in charge when our rivals do. ‘No victor believes in chance,’ as Nietzsche points out. Providence has patently awarded us most of the merit, but has unaccountably awarded others most of the luck. ‘The power of fortune,’ as Swift wrote, ‘is confessed only by the miserable.’
When you’re young, you may fancy now and then that you can hear the loom of the fates weaving your destiny, but when you’re old all you feel is the threads unwinding.
Some of us would rather believe that we are dogged by a malevolent demon, than that we have been abandoned to a cold universe. ‘Our egoism,’ Renard says, ‘is so excessive, that in a deluge we believe the thunder to be directed at us alone.’
Many people sigh and whine that luck has allotted them such scant pay, but few that it has allotted them such scant talents. The humblest people presume that they would be blissfully
happy, if only they got what was due to them. Has anyone had a revelation that told them that they don’t matter enough to damn or to beatify?
Many people reckon their success so massive, that they feel obligated to ascribe it modestly to luck or to the gift of God. So they disguise their self-worship as gratitude to some superhuman source.
We swell our self-worth by our insistence that we are self-made or else by our praise of those who have made us what we are.
The poor know that God loves them because he loves the poor, and the rich know that God loves them because he has made them rich. Providence is the complacence of the prosperous and the consolation of the afflicted.
Some mortals believe in divine intervention, not from faith in the most high, but from faith in their own dim star. They trust in the Lord because they trust in their own lofty destiny, and they hire him as an assistant to help them bring it to fulfilment. God plays a part in our story, not we in his.
Some people who don’t believe in God still act as if they were placed in the world to serve as his chosen instruments, and that they are under his particular protection so that no harm can come to them.