Kill pride and self-will, and you kill all that is fearsome and precious that we make. ‘Pride and egoism,’ Keats said, ‘will enable me to write finer things than anything else could.’ They are the forces that frame all style and find out all our truths. Where there is no pride, look for no truth, no worth, no achievement. Where there is no greed, look for no hope, no pleasantness, no
progression, no life. So the world, by indulging these two worst sins, mindlessly accomplishes what the most mindful divine planning could not, and out of evil brings forth good.
Truth alone could shame us out of our pride. Yet none but proud souls can pluck up heart to seek out the truth.
Only the proudest people feel called on each day to make good their claim to fill up a place on earth. They must disagreeably prove that they are exceptional, the rest of us just assume it. We take our self-estimation for granted as an axiom, but they have to put their pride to the test of incessant experiment.
The proud feel that they must defend the steep price that they set on their own merits. But they scorn most of the usual undertakings that could prove it to their peers, and so they spend their force on the rare ones which fail to.
High aims work you like a navvy and shackle you to anxiety, but show you all mercy in the end.
If you don’t reach them, then you don’t matter. And if you do, then nothing else matters. Fame will ransom you from obscurity, or obscurity will ransom you from scorn. In the grave, as Housman wrote, ‘silence sounds no worse than cheers.’ Time is both the justest and most lenient judge. It pays the deserving their due, and dismisses the rest with no penalty. It
discounts your divided aims, and crowns the best that you have made. Death will ask the carver just one question, Did your works warrant the expenditure of so much fine marble?
We are unable to shrink our selfishness. So we ought to strive to make the most capacious self that we can. Most of us do this arithmetically, by supplementing it with more selves, by our love of kin, tribe or native land.
Heroism is the healthiest exertion of a soul mortally disordered by pride.
The brave are spurred on by a grand and self-forgetful egoism. They may forget themselves, but not their heroism. Though they hold their own lives cheap, they hold others’ still cheaper.
‘They weighed so lightly what they gave,’ as Yeats wrote. They are ready to lay down their lives
for a cause, which they would cast off as readily for the sake of their own renown. The finest things are achieved by selfish men and women who set aside their self-interest in the achieving.
‘Egoism,’ as Nietzsche said, ‘is the lifeblood of a grand soul.’ Noble minds have the most unflinching dedication and the coldest contempt of rewards. They’re thrust on by a fiery pride, and disciplined by a chill aloofness. They don’t care how dear an act might cost or how much it will pay, but what its true worth is. They have found a devotion as deep as their despair. ‘Real nobility,’ as Camus wrote, ‘is based on scorn, courage and profound indifference.’ If you hope to bring off some great feat, you must love it with a reckless ardour. But it will turn all your love to derision, and look on it with sightless shining eyes, and hear it with deaf ears, and grant you no return. The sole comfort that I have for the failure of all my work is to go on hopelessly working. I prayed that nothing of me should matter but my work. I got half my wish.
Aim high, shoot straight, claim little. The great-souled ask for nothing and yield nothing, confide nothing and conceal nothing. They demand no more than is their due. They seek only those goods that they have a real regard for. Yet they retain all the ardent disproportion of youth.
The noble have the steadfastness to keep up the first bounteous impetus for their chosen course all the way to its tedious end. They wait but are not corrupted by their own impatience.
They give in to passion without letting go of restraint.
The corpse of archaic heroism stiffened into the rigor mortis of roman stoicism.
Life may plunge you in such degradations, that you have to strive for dignity as a drowner struggles for breath.
Heroes need both the courage to defy all illusions and the confidence to keep up the supreme illusion of their own heroic devotion.
A hero, such as Joan of Arc, does with a fierce awareness the mad deeds that a crank does with none. Yet a blockhead may be trivially right where a hero goes tragically wrong.
A hero may fight in a bad cause but not in a small one.
A hero needs a cause, but any cause will do, and the more bloody it is the better. Caesar’s, in the words of Montaigne, ‘had as its vile objective the ruin of his country and the debasement of the whole world.’ The brave feel that they have to prove themselves, but all that they prove is their own bravery. Each fateful creed has its heroes, the obnoxious no less than the honourable, and the most illegitimate no less than the justified. The SS pullulated with them. All the virtues can be used in a bad cause as well as in a good one. The force of courage may trump the claims of right. The grossest hokum arms them in a sterling resoluteness.
Some people have all the flaws of a hero but none of a hero’s high merits. They are headstrong, overreaching, defiant and unyielding, willing to waive their own good to keep up their exalted self-conception. But where is the grand cause that would breed from these failings golden feats? There may be some people who have the vices of their own virtues, as Sand said. But don’t most of us have only the vices of other people’s virtues?
The independent are incorruptible. But it’s the corrupt that are indispensable. It is they who keep the world turning so smoothly. The self-sufficing are too proud to submit and too disengaged to rebel.
5 Admiration
Admiration is the intellect in love. ‘To love,’ Gautier says, ‘is to admire with the heart, to admire is to love with the mind.’
True admiration is a stern justice and proportion. When distilled as form it shapes the most appealing style. Fake admiration is a crafty self-aggrandizement posing as generosity. ‘The worship of God,’ Blake says, ‘is honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius.’
Be sure to commend and contend with the right people. How could you grow an inch larger than these? Rivalry makes you as puny as your puniest opponent or as ample as your own best self.
Those who would excel can’t afford to admire what does not deserve their admiration, but those who aim to climb can’t afford not to. We learn by genuinely esteeming what merits our respect.
But we please and thrive best by pretending to prize what does not. We rise in the world by lowering our standards. ‘Among the smaller duties of life,’ said Sydney Smith, ‘I hardly know of any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.’
6 Imagination
The best we can hope to attain is neither true humbleness nor true heroism but a mere semblance of them. But by aspiring to nobility we may bring off rare achievements, whereas when we try to put on lowliness we stunt and deform our high faculties.
True nobility precludes all acting and dissembling. Noble souls remain just what they are, since there is nothing in this world that they respect enough to change for it. Their pride won’t stoop to pretend to be what it is not, and it forbids them to act contrary to their own nature. Yet they reach their best by becoming greater than they are. The truly proud take pride not in what they are but in what they might make of themselves. The vain preen themselves on what the world takes them for.
Imagination makes the coward as imagination makes a hero. The faint-hearted see the threat in all its horror. The fearless see the fine figure that they might become by defying it.
The resolute have both the imagination to glimpse how much they might gain by losing all and the fortitude to lose it.
Heroes must be the sculptors of their own lives. Artists strive to make new forms that they imagine. Heroes strive to remodel their clay as an ideal that they imagine. Saints dream that they can turn themselves into paragons that they take to be real.
VICES
We are held in thrall by two dark angels. There is our roguish Mephistopheles, who is mocking, impish and malign. And there is the cool devil of profit, the prince of this world, who is grave, reputable, prudent, grasping and well-liked. He keeps you to casual crimes and casual virtues, and bans any kind that strays from the common path. He cautions you not to do wrong, but abets you in absconding when you do. He advocates none but unavoidable evil, as he knows that those who have sold their souls need only be perfectly upstanding to gain the whole world.
Like Baudelaire’s merchant, he exhorts, ‘Let us be virtuous, since in this way we shall bag much more cash than the sots who act dishonestly.’
It may be true that most virtues are vices in disguise, as La Rochefoucauld showed. But aren’t many vices merely more arduous virtues? ‘Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell,’ as Jonson wrote. My self-interest and vanity prick me with the stigmata of a saint, and rack me with a martyr’s anguish, just so that I can earn a clerk’s scant pay.
Even the devil’s disciples are sure that they are doing God’s work.
Sermonizers can’t quite make up their mind whether turpitude is proved more by the filthy bliss that it wallows in or by the buffets that it brings on its own head.
The Lord may have made our metal, but it’s the devil that beats it to the shape he wills.
God made this globe for us to thrive in, and the prince of sin to teach us how. God’s existence accounts for the creation, and the devil’s accounts for everything thereafter. The Lord made the heavens and the earth, but the devil made the world. God may be the chairman of the board, but he leaves its day to day running to Satan, his trusty lieutenant. Who has not seen enough of destructiveness to believe in the fiend, or enough of our own rapacious race not to need to?
In this world to have God on your side is the next best thing to having the devil. The sanctimonious are in the saddle since they have the both of them.
My vices are not pure, though it’s not virtue that contaminates them. When my motives are not mixed, they are all bad.
Most of us are too callous to be cruel, too smug to envy, too jaded to betray, too pleased with our lot to lose heart, too acquisitive to sit idle, too inconstant to nurse a long revenge. Some of us have such grave faults, that we need to grow strenuously good in order to live them down.
Virtue is a balance of conflicting vices. We don’t hold fast to a single vice because we are torn between so many of them.
Those who childishly crave approval cravenly idolize transgressors. Timid and ailing people, like Nietzsche, make fools of themselves by celebrating the crimes of the strong and hearty.
1 Anger
I give way to anger, because I can’t control myself, or in order to control others.
Anger is the screech emitted by naked will grating on the unyielding steel of circumstance.
Fury is the sudden explosion of a will that has been long compressed by its own ineffectiveness.
A person in a rage acts like a man who tries to cure a headache by hammering himself on the head.
When you sense that you’re annoying people, you may be tempted to keep on doing it, to prove to them that you don’t mind or that they ought not.
As Franklin points out, lose your temper and you’ve lost the debate. Hold on to your good humour, and you won’t need to find good reasons.
2 Greed
Life is greed, thirsting for one more day, for one more brief taste of sugar. Consumerism has changed how we feel about death. Now we are not even afraid to die. We are just too
possessive to let go of this life which has given us so little. As consumers we seem to be reborn with each fresh desire. We feel that we will never die, since there is always one more want to fulfil. We no longer fear death as the king of terrors. We merely resent it as the cessation of all our getting and spending. We loathe it because it cuts short our career of guzzling and
devouring, though we never think of it because we are too busy cramming our maws. Life is what is next, and we hate death, because when it comes, nothing at all is next.
We lose ourselves in our mad haste to gain so much costly trash. We have drained the globe of significance by clogging it with objects. But we hoard like gold nuggets the scum that we’ve scooped up, since it seems to have so much more solid actuality than we do ourselves.
Everything that we possess threatens to possess us. Yet we never really own what we have got hold of.
Our greed is a calculating insanity.
Life leaks away, and we try to bung its holes with dollars and replenish it with our bottomless wants. It brings us such meagre satisfaction, that the best we can do is scramble to get more of
what has failed to satisfy us. We boom along to sweep up more and more of what we crave, so that we won’t have to see what a handful of sand it all adds up to.
We are ghosts striving to devour as much as we can in our rage to gain some substance in this spectral world.
Greed fills up each of our lives, and hollows out life as a whole.
We have to keep multiplying our desires so as to give some purpose to our affluence. What was all that frantic accumulation for, if we could have satisfied our needs so much more
economically?
Now that we have cheapened all that is truly precious to the sordid touchstone of money, what is left for us but to sell our souls to get as much of it as we can? When everything can be
weighed and counted, the sole gauge of value comes to be quantity. And when we can measure most goods, we denigrate the few that we can’t. So we will stop at nothing now to snatch as much as we can of what’s most readily measured.
Money acts like an Archimedes lever, which has wrenched the world from its rightful station.
Nothing now could put it back in its proper place.
The racket of our hectic greed has drowned out the sad canticle of our forlorn hopes. How could we hear the voices of the luckless and the lost above the buzz of our devices and the fizz of our churning desires? ‘Man was made to mourn,’ as Burns wrote. But now all that we care to do is chortle and make money and forget.
Money is dense yet abstract. Its density fills up our emptiness, and our fantasies fill out its abstraction. Though it seems so tangible, it turns to wind all that has real worth. It makes everything transitory, liquid and volatile. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’
We can now pile up such fabulous sums of money, that money itself looks as if it were something fabulous and transcendental.
We can’t get our fill of our cupidity. But since nothing suffices for us, almost anything will do.
Junk is good enough for us, so long as we hope to grab enough of it. We would rather want anything at all than not want something. We forge our chains when we choose our iron desires, and these eat into our souls and rust them.
We bring to the banquet a yawning maw, but neither taste nor gusto. Why can’t we curb our hunger for what we know we don’t even want?
Life is a child’s game in which we play for a prize that we can’t carry home.
How profitless for philosophy to recommend what all deem to be good. But how vain for it to do otherwise. No one dares to speak up for a vice such as greed, since no one needs to, as all of us are pledged to its service. As Johnson said, ‘You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live happily on a plentiful income.’
Money has no memory, and leaves none. It scorns the past as a dead force which would trammel its desires. And since it has no stake in the future, it feels no remorse for the rich heritage that it’s squandering. Why should it mind if the game will be broken up the minute it has raked its own winnings off the table? And why would it care to bequeath a slow and exacting work to live on in our remembrance? It is the solvent of time. Greed is the voracious now labouring to fill the future with its sieve of gold. Our world and its rapacious scheming will soon be consigned to the oblivion which is all that it’s good for.
The world that we leave behind us will only prove how much we craved and how little we
The world that we leave behind us will only prove how much we craved and how little we