Sentences

Michael Curran

Copyright 2013 Michael Curran

CONTENTS

Art

Taste and tradition

Style

Know yourself

Psychology

Religion

Happiness

Self-interest

Success and failure

Pride

Vanity

Praise

Shame and modesty

Work and independence

Vices

Virtues

Pity

Conscience

Politics

The end

We don’t think

Thinking

Cynicism

Genius

Illusions

Imitations

Kitsch

Goodness, truth and beauty

The purpose of life

Time and death

ART

Contents

Order and imagination

Causes of art

Effects of art

Amorality of art

ORDER AND IMAGINATION

1 Order and energy

Energy and order are the two great things in both art and life.

Order is frugal, chaste and sober. Energy is irregular, promiscuous and self-delighting.

Art must fix its energies in form, and free its order by imagination. The energies of art are at
once anarchic and organizing.

Writers spend half their strength to discipline their energies, but then they have to spend half
their discipline to temper their discipline, to make words sing in their chains. The artist may be
exuberant, but beauty is calmness and control. And yet control may be so confident that it looks
like exuberance, as it does in Matisse. Intensity makes one sort of force, and restraint another,
and power is manifest in both.

Imagination is electricity, order is gravity. Order builds in stone. Imagination writes in flame. It is
the god that answers by fire. It knows the joy of speed. But beauty has the serene dignity of
stillness.

Energy is at its maximum in the most orderly, least entropic, states.

Orderliness, grown to an excess, stiffens into autism. Imagination riots into schizophrenia. Form
congeals into ritual, force flares into rapture.

Energy is harder to attain but easier to forge than form. So we are left with the restless fever of
this exhausted age.
2 Imagination
In art energy is imagination, and order is form. A great work is imaginative force organized into
permanent shape.

Imagination breeds thoughts that are worth remembering, and form stamps them in the
memory.

‘Write the vision, make it plain.’ A visionary imaginer, such as Dante, Bunyan, Blake or Yeats,
must keep to the simplest style, as Coleridge said. A verbal imaginer, such as Shakespeare,
Melville or Conrad, frames a varied, profuse and highly-wrought dialect.

Writers who have a painter’s eye, such as Blake, Lawrence or Valéry, have a clarity of thought
and style. Those, like Milton, Browning or Joyce, who have a musician’s ear, weave a baroque
and intricate harmony.

Break the capacious vessel of tradition, and the wine of imagination spills out wasted. Its fruit
buds and ripens on the tall tree of form. But we have now sawn this down, since it stood in the
way of our automated ascent. Nothing without imagination, but no imagination without tradition.

Imagination is the wings which we have not yet grown.

Imagination must be compacted in form, and form expands imagination.

3 Angels of order, demons of imagination

‘Good is the passive that obeys reason,’ Blake says. ‘Evil is the active springing from energy.’
God works by order, and the devil by energy. And whoever lives by imagination can’t help being
of the devil’s party. ‘Order,’ as Pope wrote, ‘is heaven’s first law.’

Some of the angels of order were the egyptians, the greeks, Johnson, Mozart, Cézanne, Mies
van der Rohe and Brancusi. And some of the demonic imaginers are Milton, Melville, Hugo,
Beethoven, Pollock, Le Corbusier. Shakespeare was unique in his blending of controlling form
and uncontainable verbal force.

Disruptive imagination springs from the downtrodden celts and gauls. Regulation is enforced by
the legions of Rome.

Some art is charged with a stored potential energy, which strains with a vast pent force, though
outwardly mild and sedate. And some has a kinetic power, erupting into excess, gushing and
tumbling like a waterfall of delirious volubility, as it does in Milton, Hopkins, Faulkner or Joyce.
4 Pattern and variation
Pattern and repetition are the heart of beauty. And variation and strangeness are the root of
originality. Coloured writing must make good its exacting strangeness by its lush suggestions.
And plain writing must make good its plainness by the grand truths that it brings to light.
Similarity makes plain the form, difference discloses the sense. Form iterates, force varies.

Form shines clearest where it shapes plain patterns out of what is similar. But it works most
potently where it frames dappled patterns out what is different.

The mind delights in similarity of structure and diverseness of hue. It loves forms when they are
repeated, and colours when they are varied.

Nature and art love imperfect symmetries. Awkwardness is at times the height of artistry, and
roughness may be the most exacting precision. And some superlative works, such as the Bible
or Dickinson’s poems, hold us in the toils of an ungainly grace.

Art, like nature, is force made form. It calls on disorderly imagination to rival the earth’s feckless
prodigality. But it subjects it to laws just as stern and fixed.

Intelligence beams like white light, pure and limpid. Imagination shivers into the rainbow’s
scattered hues. The intellect works by fission. Imagination works by fusion.

A word gains its force by its repetition or by its rarity.

5 The part is greater than the whole

Only a dull work adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The fragment means more than the
whole. Better then to preserve only the fragments, and not pretend that they make a whole.

Shakespeare, like the Bible and all true poets, is great sentence by sentence, line by line,
phrase by phrase, and not by his overarching plots and designs, which he stole from others. As
a storyteller he is derivative, contrived, naive and inefficient. As a poet he is deep, new and all-
knowing. So Emerson wrote, ‘Every poem must be made up of lines that are poems.’

Order coheres and unifies, imagination disunites and disaggregates. Mental play is a centrifugal
force that spurts out in a myriad sparkling fragments which never coalesce to form an unbroken
whole. Why else would Shakespeare’s plays be such prodigal medleys of lushly embroidered
episodes? A single page of a great writer’s book is worth as much as the whole, and its
sidelights disclose as much as its centre. ‘Digressions,’ Sterne says, ‘incontestably, are the
sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading.’
6 Structure and lexis
Imagination is lexical, order is syntactic.

Some authors write with words, and some with sentences. The best do both at once.

Shape sets out plain symmetrical motifs. Imagination plays with a lavish palette of effulgent
colours.

Greek and roman writers used a convoluted syntax but a penurious vocabulary. The hebrew
Bible used the plainest diction and syntax to make a rough music. French writers have stripped
and planed both their vocabulary and their syntax. English ones have set the most copious
lexicon in the simplest structures.

The best sentences would fuse the crisp syntax of french prose with the exuberant vocabulary
of english verse.

Whitman’s verse has a flat democratic syntax and an inclusive pluralistic diction.

7 Art is imagination not observation

Artists don’t see what no one else has seen. They make what no one else could make. They are
fabricators, not observers. So the poet is a sayer, not a seer, a voice, not an eye. They throw a
cloak of words over things that we can’t see, so that we can make out their essential form.

‘The imagination,’ Joubert says, ‘has made more discoveries than the eye.’ It lends a brief
reality to unreal things, so as to show them as they are at their most real. Artists don’t glimpse
similarities that no one has glimpsed before. They shape things that contrast with those that
have been shaped before. They don’t find beauty, they find formlessness, and make of it a
lovely work.

8 Metaphor
A metaphor doesn’t bring out the latent analogies that link two objects. It applies the words used
of one to enrich the other. It’s not discovered but invented. It does not assimilate things, but
differences language. It is a substitution, not of one thing for another, but of a fresh set of words
for a familiar one. It’s the verbal energy that is unloosed when one entity is forced to take on the
form of another. It doesn’t show that one reality is like some other, but transfigures speech so
that it resembles no other. It’s not a new way of viewing the world, but a new way of using
words.

A metaphor does not fuse things. It multiplies points of view. It doesn’t clarify but complicates.
All metaphors are mixed.
We owe to our flair for substitutions both our craziest swervings from what is and our most fertile
dreams of what might be.

Mathematics proves rigorous equivalences between interchangeable quantities. Metaphor spins

improbable parallels between incommensurable qualities. ‘Each thought,’ Nietzsche says,
‘originates through equating the unequal.’

To avoid clichéd collocations, some writers smash them and build up their language from the
most basic elements, and some substitute their own new compounds of metaphor.

Other languages use metaphors as embroidery. In english they are the warp and weft of the
cloth itself.

9 Art is imagination not invention

Most people take imagination to be nothing more than invention, visualization or empathy. But
these are its mongrel likenesses which are prized by those who lack the real thing.

‘Imagination, not invention,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is the supreme master of art as of life.’ Invention is
the arid substitute for the free play of the mind. And our age is so frenetically inventive because
it has no vision. Both naturalism and fantasy are sure signs of its atrophy.

True writers don’t dream up new worlds. They recast speech to bring out the richness of this
one. They make form strange and truth vivid. It’s not the world but words that a text makes
strange and luminous.

Most tales of fantasy lay bare how poor and grasping our fantasies are.

To imagine is not to make up things that might take place in real life. It is to see through to truths
that are obscured by real life.

If God had had more imagination, he would have had no need to make a world.

Inventiveness mints new stories, but it requires a visionary power to raise their plain prose to
poetry. Invention belongs to the mere tale, imagination to the telling. And the tale is all that most
of us can take in.

10 The tropes of realism

Literature begins as ritual and myth, and it ends as fantasy and realism.

Romanticism and realism have combined to corrupt all our precepts and practices of art. They
have dissolved form, which alone can inspire rich thoughts, and have put emotion, imitation and
spectacle in its place.
A great artist shapes a world as rich and inexhaustible as the medium. A poor realist makes one
as thin and meretricious as life.

The one style for which we now have any relish is a debased democratic realism. And so we
can’t praise Shakespeare except by demoting him to a democrat and obsequious realist. But the
few times that he brought commoners on stage it was to make them the butt of a joke. And his
aim in writing was not to crack the canonical mould of form by forcing it to make room for real
life. He took it over and filled it with more and more imagination.

Realism has starved art till it has grown as bloated and hollow as life itself. It is the style of a
world emptied of meaning but crammed with stuff.

When painters figured out how to use perspective, the end of art was in sight.

11 Art is not reportage

People treat a fiction as if it were a guidebook to another time and place, a historical document
or an archaeological artefact. So they deal with it as they would with a record of real acts and
persons, on which they must pass moral judgment. And they call it complex if it poses a moral
conundrum in which there is some right on each side. They enjoy it as if it were a piece of
gossip about neighbours who lead slightly more exciting and scandalous lives. Those who have
no imagination respond to fictions as if they were recitations of real life.

12 Art is not dream

Those who hatch no rich thoughts while they’re awake don’t doubt that they do so when they
are asleep. Dreams come to us through the low gateway of ivory, imagination’s true visions
through the lofty portals of horn. Sleep is the mind’s idiot amusement park. We may seem most
like artists when we dream, but that is when they are least like artists. ‘A dreamer,’ Cocteau
says, ‘is always a bad poet,’ as a madman is a bad actor who has lost all sense of self-mockery.

Art and thought have gained far more from the vacancy of sloth and tedium than from the gaudy
hyperactivity of dreams. Dreams and wish-fulfilments are the type not of art but of kitsch.

We confuse art, the most formed and considered thing, with dreams, the most unformed and
random one.

Dreams are like cheap novels, with too much story-content and too little form. In a great fiction
form overshadows story.

Dreams are phantasmal but not imaginative. Art is imaginative but not fantastic.
13 The emptiness of invention
Good fictions draw their plots from life or else make them up from scratch. Great ones take
them readymade from previous fictions. Shakespeare was able to find fresh words for all things,
because he felt no urge to frame new stories. He sourced his plots from second-rate historians,
chroniclers and romancers. He turned sows’ ears into silk purses, which his commentators turn
back into sows’ ears. Only his words are his own. If the making up of stories is the test of
originality, then he is the least original of writers. But now storytellers have to surprise us with
their sharp plot twists, because they lack the capacity to reimagine their form. ‘It is,’ Wilde says,
‘only the unimaginative who ever invent.’

The task of art is not to give shape to life, but to give life to shape.

Good writers amuse us with their intricate tales. Great writers awe us with their rich truths. They
forgo the crude and evanescent shocks of plotting for the enduring marvel of fresh insights.

14 Imagination is beyond belief

Belief petrifies imagination, and paralyses reason. What is faith but frozen vision? The mind is at
its best when it flies out into the possible. But it is at its stupidest when it stays fixed in its
beliefs. The mind at play can dare to tell the truth, because it has no desire to be believed.

Truth has one god, poetry a whole pantheon, ‘many gods and many voices.’ There are a
plethora of gods, and Shakespeare is their prophet. ‘What shocks the virtuous philosopher
delights the camelion poet.’ A poem glows, not by virtue of the one meaning that it states, but by
the hundred that it darkly hints.

Shakespeare had the most realistic grasp of human life, because he knew that it was no more
real than a play.

The tribute due to beauty is not love but admiration. And the tribute due to truth is not belief but
comprehension.

15 Ideas are the enemies of art

Only the immature live their mental lives through the intermediary of ideas. These are the hard
cash of the intellect. And a thinker, like a great speculator, works with a currency much richer
and more abstract.

A well thought out worldview is a lead weight in a work of art, as Lucretius or Dante show.
Shakespeare could find words for everything, because he believed in nothing. And he is free to
dally with all views, because he is wedded to none of them.
Romantic writers aim to make you feel. Realistic writers aim to make you see. But the best
rouse you to imagine. Yet they use a means other than ideas to do so. Most novels of ideas,
such as those of Anatole France, Mann or Bellow, are novels of second-hand and second-class
ideas. Shaw was an intellectual shopkeeper, retailing coarse copies of continental dainties to
the english suburban trading class.

If a work of fiction has a worldview, then its author has not thought deeply enough.

16 The eternal beings of the mind

‘For the life after death,’ Butler says, ‘it is not necessary that a man or woman should have
lived.’ To the imaginative mind existence is the drabbest attribute that a creature can possess.
The gods, like the rest of the beings of fiction, mean no less for never having lived. A literary
persona, like a deity, has life but stays free of the taint of being real and human. The figures of
art, like those on Keats’s urn, win the one brief immortality that this world can grant. The work of
art is the city that Tennyson wrote of, which ‘is built to music, therefore never built at all, and
therefore built for ever.’

God and nature are both dead. But their names are still as useful as ever for poets to invoke.

17 Art against the creeds

The gods were one of our most fertile fictions, but one of our most fallow convictions.

Before the gods came there was art. And now that they have gone there will be nothing but
kitsch. The stage of our dreams shrinks when they cease to play on it.

Art comes out of the decomposition of belief, when the old gods are departing, but reason has
not yet arrived to fill their thrones. ‘Art rears its head where creeds relax,’ as Nietzsche said. It is
a gas exhaled by decaying faith, and the christian one festered more luxuriantly than the rest.

Philosophers dissolve faith with their corrosive doubts, and art eludes it by its imaginative
plenitude.

18 The dance of ravishment and disillusion

Art is a dance of ravishment and disillusion. Poets dream visions as sensual and tormenting as
an unrequited lover’s. They imagine as aboundingly as they think severely and stringently. Their
task is to make us drunk with their pure and fresh distillations, while sobering us from the flat
confections of life. They dry up our trust in the lies by which we live. They don’t have enough
faith to doubt, but we lack the mental daring to be disabused.
Some writers rouse you from your sleep, and some call you back to dream again. They wake
your mind to its proper glory, and show you a new world of thought.

Only an audience of infants suspends its disbelief, and is transported out of its own place, and
thinks it can play a part in the show.

CAUSES OF ART

19 Art does not come from the whole

The part is worth more than the whole. The effect is worth more than the cause. And the object
is worth more than the being who makes it. Art is richer than the culture that gives birth to it.

A great work of art is not the product of a whole person, much less of a whole people. And great
thoughts are not the work of a whole mind. They are the outcome of the symbolic codes in
which they are conceived. The english are the least poetical people on earth, yet the english
tongue has made the richest poetry.

20 The savage god

For lack of brutality art will die. ‘The modern artist must live by craft and violence,’ Pound wrote.
‘His gods are violent gods.’ Like some savage idol, art will have blood. The consummate artist
would devote one half of life to making music and the rest to making war. Such a fierce creator
would be half dandy and half thug, not an artistic Socrates, as Nietzsche claimed, but an artistic
Caesar, still at work in art’s old vocation of decorating the slaughterhouse, and singing a song
‘as if he had a sword upstairs.’ Art is a priesthood, as Cézanne said. But it is a blood-steeped
priesthood which still practises human sacrifice.

The sacraments of great art are valid, no matter how flawed the ministrant might be. But none of
its sacraments are efficacious, however attentive the congregants might be.

No kingdom has been the source of more art and thought and science than the worldly kingdom
of Christ, since none has been rent by such gory civil brawls. It gave rise to the finest works of
the mind, as dung breeds the sweetest roses and lilies.

21 All things adverse

How but in fret and tumult could you shape an art of calm and poise? The one place you can
write from is the end of your tether. The mind works most forcefully not in rest and composure,
but in weariness and despair. It must come to the brink of disintegration, before it can build up a
whole. Insomnia keeps a fatiguing but instructive night school. And debt has been the relentless
muse of some of the best writers, such as Balzac, Dostoyevsky or Scott, chivvying them into
inspiration.

Why would a soul that bathed in a tranquil bliss feel the need to make beauty or to find truth?
Art thrives on all things adverse. If you would set the artist going, make their lot a touch less
propitious. Dante was reborn by his banishment, and Machiavelli by his fall.

Paradise is decked with the works that artists make in their purgatory. The art ascends to a cool
Elysium. The artist stays below in the flames, burning and unregenerate.

Neglect and obscurity, though they mar the artist, make the art, which blooms in the shade,
where the artist would wilt and wither. The artist works, as Proust said, in the abyss of the
primeval fears of silence, solitude and the dark.

22 The art of loss

Art is what we make of what we’ve lost. The work preys on the artist, to feed the art. A flawless
piece grows up on the wreck of a life. And the success of a work of art is the sum of its maker’s
failures. ‘Misfortune is the midwife of genius,’ wrote Napoleon.

The writer is a sponge, from which language squeezes all the thoughts it can, and then throws
away.

If it weren’t for all our failures, we could grow no larger than our success.

The artist is content to be a fool, that the work might grow wise.

Life hates artists and thinkers, because they strip bare its secrets. But it is so stupid, that it
makes them reveal even more by torturing them.

You earn perfection extremely cheap, at the mere cost of your life. A choice work is made not by
the life but by the days, and not by the days but by the hours. The days and hours make the
work. The life is a poor offering that is burnt up in its service.

There’s no need for the artist to have lived through a catastrophe. Life itself is all the
catastrophe they need. Each cruel day takes from the artist and adds to the art. And for both of
these the artist gives thanks. The work gains for all that its sad maker has lost.

23 Art is deliberate not unconscious

The unconscious is not an artist but an automaton. If the unconscious were creative, the beasts
would be the best artists. And an artist makes art, not by descending into the unconscious, but
by climbing to the most perfect consciousness of art. And in order to take in the fullness of art,
you have to be as conscious and deliberate as the artist who made it. As Thoreau wrote, ‘We do
not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.’

Art works by a studied mastery of deliberate form, not by the momentary indulgence of
unrehearsed feeling. The spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion breaks out not in poetry but
in pop tunes and kitsch.

A feather falls as fast as a cannonball. To fly, you need weight and effort.

The best authors may write from the subconscious, but so do the worst.

No art is dionysian, either in its inspiration or in its effects. Dionysus is the god of kitsch. Art
does not well up from the oceanic, chthonic and orgiastic. It must be drawn out by solitude,
patience and conscious craft.

Creators are sure that what they make is such a miracle, that they must disclaim their
authorship of it and shyly ascribe it to some higher power, such as a god, or to some deeper
source, such as the id.

24 Inspired trash
An artist must keep vigilantly on the watch for inspiration, and just as vigilantly on the watch
against it. Beware that your brains don’t melt in its white heat. We might have more faith in it, if it
were not so undiscriminating. It throws up all the duds as well as all the marvels. Scribblers of
the most dull-witted ditties or chirpy lyrics don’t doubt that a trance takes hold of their soul when
the muse visits. In those rare and blessed hours when the flame of inspiration hovers over me,
all I make is lacquered trash.

It feels as delightful to be inspired as it does to be drunk, and it’s just as likely to lead you to the
truth. Artists lay claim to inspiration, to validate what they make by the state of mind in which
they made it. But how does the warmth that you feel when you form a thought vouch for its
truth? Is the bliss of conceiving a child a pledge that it will tell no lies?

The constant rapture of inspiration is what keeps artists at work in spite of all the dispiriting
dross that inspiration loads them with.

Inspiration is like a parasite that must paralyze the judgment before it lays its eggs in the mind,
so that it won’t kill them before they have hatched. But it lays far more than are fit to live, and
once out of its shell each must fight to prove its worth.
25 Art is made by form not feeling
An age of great poetry is not an age of strong feeling but an age of rich forms. ‘All that is
beautiful and noble,’ Baudelaire says, ‘is the product of reason and calculation.’ Strenuous form
counts for far more than slack sincerity.

Inspiration is the ease and fertility that comes with the prolonged application of a tensed will.
Centuries of inherited practice steer the spontaneous strokes of all true designers. They owe
their instant inspiration to the long craft and tradition which they boast it lifts them above. They
carefully fill a pot with water, light a fire under it, and then call it inspiration when it boils.

Inspirations rain down on earth as thick as neutrinos. But they pass straight through most of us.
They are detected only when they strike a genius.

Most of us speak with glib and hackneyed candour as poets create with glib and vivid artifice.
They think as frivolously as the poem thinks profoundly. But by patient craft they raise their
shallow frankness to the dispassionate veracity of art.

26 Inspiration is the consequence of creation not its cause

Poets don’t write because they have rich thoughts, they have rich thoughts because they write.
They don’t create because they are inspired, they grow inspired by creating. Inspiration, as
Renard said, is ‘the joy of writing. It does not come before writing.’ It is the bait that the muse
lays to lure you to keep working.

A poet comes to be a poet by the habit of composing poems. The poem is the parent of the
poet. ‘That which is creative,’ Keats said, ‘must create itself.’

You don’t write because you need to, you write because others have written. And then you go
on writing because you have written. ‘All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate,’
Wilde wrote. ‘No poet sings because he must sing.’

EFFECTS OF ART

27 The effects of art

There are four great heresies of aesthetics. First we assume that style ought to try to look like its
content. Secondly we hold that the meaning of a fiction is the tale that it tells, as the meaning of
a painting is the scene that it depicts. Thirdly we are sure that great art must have strong
emotional effects or ought to have a strong moral effect. And lastly we hold that a work of art
should spring from the artist’s whole self.
People pay choice art the tribute of tawdry emotion which is the due of cheap soap opera. Like
Proust’s Madame Verdurin, they greet with unearned feeling works which were conceived with
rich poetic fire. And they deem that they thus confer on them the highest praise.

If great works of art touch deep chords in us, it is by playing on the most tenuous strings.

Great books live on in spite of the lack of interest of those who don’t read them and the misuse
of them by those who do.

We don’t laugh at great comedies. We don’t sob at great tragedies. ‘The wittiest authors,’
Nietzsche says, ‘elicit a scarcely noticeable smirk.’ But the most asinine farce whips up gales of
hilarity.

The spectators go through a far more impressive range of passions at a football game than they
would at a play or piece of music.

28 The effects of art are cognitive

The effects of art are cognitive and not emotional. But it has so little cognitive effect on most of
us, that we conclude that its function must be to stir our feelings. If a work touches us through
our emotions, it must be kitsch.

Artists make such shrewd use of emotion, that they take it that the real goal of art must be to
rouse strong emotions.

We take it that the purpose of art must be to move us. But who now cares enough for art to be
moved by it? And kitsch treats us to such lavish feasts of feeling, what need have we of art?

Most people presuppose that art at its most potent should work on them like an emotional
pornography, titillating them with an unceasing arousal of their worthy passions and climaxing in
some happy ending. But even this would seem too bland if there weren’t some villain caught in
the cogs of its moral machinery.

Art holds out to you nothing but the frail and makeshift comforts of perfect and permanent form.
It falls short of our pretend praise, but outstrips our real one.

Our reception of a work of art is at best a pallid shadow of the radiance of its own vision.

29 The best art has the feeblest effects

We don’t doubt that what is precious, good or beautiful must touch the bottom of our hearts, and
that if it fails to touch the bottom of our hearts then it can’t be precious, good or beautiful. But
the impact of a work of art is in inverse proportion to its quality. We know a profound work by
how insipidly it affects us, a genuine work by how spuriously it affects us, and a priceless one by
how cheaply it affects us. You can tell a strong work by how limply it moves you, and a slipshod
melodrama by how evocative it seems. Don’t the hollowest tales stir in us the most piquant
effusions, be they tears or laughter, horror or condolence? A good book knows how to play on
our feelings, a great one doesn’t care to.

The greatest works of art are those that give the smallest amount of pleasure to the smallest
number of people.

The distillations of pure thought or pure poetry leave us stone-cold sober.

Poetry is a liquor which fails to intoxicate even the few who have a taste for it. Poetry is that
which even those who love it care for least in a poem.

30 The impotence of art

To hear people blather about how profoundly art moves them, you would expect galleries,
concert halls and theatres to be full of people blubbering or cackling, in shock or bliss, pale with
terror, or flushed with compassion.

No work of art is able to do what the sublime is reputed to do. It cannot dizzy us with unbounded
vistas, or sink us in unscaleable darkness, or frighten us with tempestuous violence. Nor can it
curdle our blood with uncanny horrors, or melt our hearts with compassion, or prostrate us
before unimaginable grandeurs, or plunge us in deep glooms, or send our minds reeling into
fathomless voids. And great art is the furthest from being sublime, since it can find adequate
forms for all it has to say. Its vision does not dimly make out things that are beyond its form to
lend shape to.

The martyr dies for dogmas that will save no one. The artist works for effects which will impress
no one. Renard in his last days voiced the double despair of all who have lived for their art. ‘I
could begin all over again, and do it better. But no one would notice the difference.’

Most witty writing, such as Dorothy Parker’s, is too palpably pleased with its own wit to please
us much.

31 Fake art has real effects

Art is the most genuine thing that we have, and so most of our responses to it are fake.

The most calculated pretences of feeling go straight to our hearts.

For every one who has been touched by a poem, there are a thousand whose souls have been
saved by a pop song. And they learn how to live from comic book superheroes. In dark times
they don’t turn to art to show them hard truths. They turn to kitsch to amuse and divert them.

Music is better at calling up a fake grief than at assuaging a real one. And if it does console us,
it does so by distracting us.

We are soothed or roused by mere dross, and thrilled by the shoddiest tricks.

Life stirs us so much more feelingly than art. Life is pressing and personal, while art is cool and
ageless. We are untouched by art’s bland perfections. But we delight in life’s squalid gaudiness.

It is hack style that stirs us, dull art that improves us, and phony affects that fire the soul. The
only verse that calls forth instant tears or smiles is on greeting cards.

People need to have everything adulterated for them. In its pure state it would have no effect on
them at all. They don’t need a thing diluted so that they can bear its potency. They need to have
it artificially flavoured so that they can taste it at all.

What impotent books ravished our youth.

32 Art does not remake us

We don’t grasp how rich a work of art is till it has remade us, and that would take more than a
whole life.

How mortifying, that a great book finds me so facile, trite and forgettable when it reads me. And
I don’t improve on a second reading. This book deserved a better reader than me. I shall strive
to become that reader.

Great books are fastidious, and have no desire to read most people.

Cheap minds must cheapen a great work in order to make it their own, by sentimentalizing and
simplifying it.

Culture calls many to the feast of great works of art, but it’s the works themselves that choose
the few who are worthy of them.

You must be blind indeed, if you need a painting to teach you how to see, or a book to teach
you what to feel. It’s not art but kitsch that makes us see or hear the world in a new way. Art
does so only if it gets turned into an advertisement. If art could change the way we view the
world, it would make artists of us all. Art doesn’t modify how you see anything save art, and then
solely if you are an artist. A painter looks at each thing with the cold impassioned eye of a
professional, on the alert for what might be of use for art.

33 Surprise
Real surprises go on astonishing us over and over. Yet they don’t show us things that we have
never seen, but pour new light on what we see each day.

Surprise is to wonder as lust is to love. Surprise craves unremitting variation, wonder is content
with the simple and unshifting. Ignorance loves to be surprised, but only knowledge can feel
wonder. So surprise fades with familiarity, but wonder grows more bright.

The one kind of surprise that none of us likes is a new truth.

We keep on the watch for surprises, since they corroborate our stock views, which prime us to
keep on the watch for surprises. ‘In the playhouse,’ Tristan Bernard says, ‘the onlookers want to
be surprised, but by what they expect.’

34 Bright surfaces, false depth

‘It is only shallow people,’ as Wilde says, ‘who do not judge by appearances.’ Why are we so
reluctant to rest our senses on the surface where surfaces are grace? Why prefer treacherous
clefts to translucent shallows? Surfaces alone are fathomless. ‘The less it means,’ as Warhol
said, ‘the more beautiful it is.’

What a rich text unfolds each time you read it is not more depth but a more lush and complex
surface.

Form rescues us from the depths. And yet in order to love art, we feel we must act as if art goes
deep. A painting or a piece of music may seem to mean something, but don’t they mean only on
the outside? Deep within they are pure form. This is their true meaning, and this is why it is so
hard to make out what it means. ‘Form and colour,’ as Wilde says, ‘tell us of form and colour.
That is all.’ But we are too shallow to see the wonders that stare us in the face.

Beauty does not dive to an unplumbed depth. It basks on a boundless surface which dazzles
our eyes. Beauty is skin deep, ugliness is soul deep. What heart is as handsome as a
handsome face? What soul is as beautiful as a beautiful body and its lovely covering of flesh?

If beauty comes from within, is it any wonder we humans are such ugly sods?

THE AMORALITY OF ART

35 Art is an antinomian
Imagination, like the body, is free from sin because it has no conscience.

True artificers treat the moral code of the age as a kind of furniture. They may note how ugly it
is, but they don’t try to reform it. It’s those who don’t know their own trade that try to renovate or
reconfigure it. Moral seriousness in a work of art would be a frivolous shirking of the real
seriousness of art. Yet this is the sole kind of seriousness that most of us know or care for. ‘The
morality of art,’ Wilde says, ‘consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.’ Right and
wrong are nets that enmesh small souls.

Creation is love. Criticism is justice.

It’s hard to tell whether studying literature for the sake of the morals it instils would do more
harm to literature or to morals.

Shakespeare was a moral and religious idiot, which is one of the first qualifications for being a
great artist. He used the moral notions of his time and place as theatrical props, and he could
scarcely keep in mind which of his puppets were supposed to be pagans or christians.

36 Artists don’t forgive, they justify

The creatures of fiction inhabit a spacious country of the mind. So why do we persist in judging
them by the stifling moral protocols of the low cavern in which we lodge? Pious writers pardon
their villains, to tout their own good heart, and to show that the villains have not earned it.
Peerless writers, like Shakespeare, Milton or Dostoyevsky, don’t indulge their malefactors with
cheap clemency. They charge them with their own demoniac force. They send their rain on the
just and on the unjust. Thus they show us kinds of justice more capacious than our suburban
codes of right and wrong.

Shakespeare gives the devil his due, not because he cares for justice, but because he knows
that he can count on the devil to repay him by acting as a conduit for some of his best verse.

Moralizing writers such as Dickens draw much more vivid and complex villains than heroes,
since they feel no temptation to turn them into whitewashed portraits of themselves. But when
honest and unsparing writers portray rogues and monsters, they use themselves as models.

37 Bad art, good intentions

Only secondary artists care so much for the world that they want to reform it, though some of
the best, like Picasso, still fancy that they do.
‘All bad art,’ as Wilde said, ‘is the result of good intentions.’ Art is strong enough to rise above its
producer’s best purposes or worst prejudices. But it can’t fulfil the former or fix the latter. Art
cares too little about our prejudices to want to overthrow them. And our prejudices are too
coarse to be touched by art.

A strong poet such as Milton dares to assert as an artist the same overweening pride that he
damns in Lucifer.

38 Sermons in story
Any glib storyteller can make the good prevail, but only one as fine as Austen can make it
fascinating.

People relish fictions that show the triumph of the fine qualities that they don’t doubt they
possess. I am touched by tales of people like me, who choose love and integrity instead of
lucre, and are then recompensed with a fortune. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these
things shall be added unto you.’ And when they are added unto us, we take this as a sign that
we must have found the kingdom.

Sermonizing writers, like Dickens, sense that a bald moral victory will not do. They must show
you the good gaining the world, and wrongdoers forfeiting their loot as well as their souls. They
guarantee that if you leave off jostling to get what you want, it’s sure to fall in your lap. Though
excoriating greed, they take care to make their heroes millionaires. And they rail at
vengefulness, while arranging a crafty retribution for the culpable. And though they paint
hypocrisy as the one unforgivable sin, their own art works by devious indirection. Their narration
makes use of all the wiles for which they so righteously condemn their villains.

Fictions never tire of warning their readers of the dangers of taking fiction as a guide to life.

39 Art does not improve the world

The world is in such a mess, that if poets are in fact its unacknowledged legislators, would we
not do well to burn their books?

Only dull artists could improve us and crop us to the shape of the latest moral stamp.

The only writers who have any influence in the real world are those that are as shallow, vulgar
and mediocre as the real world.

A poem that could change the world would have to be doggerel.

I have no doubt that it’s myself that art improves, and my neighbours that it needs to.
Authors can’t set the world to rights by their scrupulous use of language. They can’t even set
language to rights. The corruption of language is not the cause of corruption in society or
thought. It is not even an effect of it. If the misuse of language caused the ruin of the state, why
when language was pristine were states brutal and obscurantist autocracies?

40 The egoism of the artist

Art is indirect, egotistical and devouring. It acts more like vindictiveness than pity.

Arctic hearts have ardent imaginations. Those who live for art, as Keats says, ‘must have self-
concentration.’ They conceive so fervently, because they sympathize so coolly. What sets them
on is not a generous and dissipating compassion, but an omnivorous and focused self-will. Their
sympathies are both profligate and thrifty, on the watch for any scenes that might fertilize their
art, or for any feeling that they might milk for a cheap effect.

As a payload, the ego is a deadweight for artists. But it’s a good propellant to fuel their
explorations.

The iron integrity of an artist is one sort of ordinary egoism. They take ‘as much delight in
conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.’ They create without risk, and destroy without responsibility.
Their hearts are at once unworldly and unscrupulous. ‘I value people for what I can get out of
them,’ said the sainted Beethoven. They have an icy fascination with the lives of others, and we
mistake their fascination for pity and their iciness for impartiality.

We take it that the task of art must be to celebrate ordinary lives. But Stevens, when asked what
set him off as a poet from an ordinary man, sanguinely retorted ‘inability to see much point to
the life of an ordinary man.’

41 Art is irresponsible
Art gazes like an imperturbable olympian on the inferno of this world. Like the deities of
Epicurus, it sits blank and uncaring. And its makers are like the bright gods, moral infants with
more than mortal capabilities. The few who aspire to build a work for the ages must, like the
ages, be unhasting and inexorable. The finest, as Flaubert said, are calm and pitiless.

We are now so incurably ill, that we mistake artists for healers, and look to them to relieve us.
But they have the ruddy carelessness of the hearty, while those who write for therapy make
their readers sick.

The artist’s thought is as apt to flash out in playful cruelty as in heart-rending pity. In his scenes
of deepest pathos, Shakespeare is laughing at his puppets, at us, and at himself. He could see
the jocular side of Gloucester’s blinding as well as its horrors. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals
be.’

42 We care for the characters of fiction

The sterile sympathies of art don’t rouse us to share the sorrows of live men and women. I
gorge myself on pity in literature, as I would choke on it in life. Have we learnt to pity by
simulating bad art? Or have bad artists grown maudlin by mimicking us? We think that we feel
for figures in books because they seem real. But it may be that we feel for people in life because
we look on them as if they were figures in books and suffered from the same kind of troubles.
We are vigilant to see justice done at every turn, save where it might do some real good. History
or fiction lack the power to make you care for what lies outside them. They may move you to
feel for others, but only for the others of history or of fiction.

The true pathos we feel for great characters comes not from our belief that they are like people
in real life but from our knowledge that life holds no place for such as they. They belong to an
eternal country.

43 Art fails to make us feel for others

Why do we assume that artists have no better use for their imagination than to train it to view
the world as the rest of us who are not artists and have no imagination view it? Their task is not
to feel the same as us. It is to think quite differently from us, and they have a gift for fashioning
forms which we would be at a loss to frame. They must work not by empathy, which stays
behind to nurse aching hearts, but by audacity, which dares to press on and leave them
uncared for. Sympathy sees likenesses, art makes differences. Empathy is a mirror, imagination
is a torch.

By reading fiction we don’t learn to pity the afflicted. We learn to feel that we must be as grand
and as significant as its heroes, and that the rest of humankind are as unreal and as marginal
as the bit parts. Keep clear of people who have formed their moral sensibility on the pattern of
great novels. They are prone to be self-righteous, pharisaic, devious, mawkish, malevolent and
cruel.

Art does not enlarge our sympathies. It plays on them. But it flatters us that it has only brought
out their real strength.

44 The infernal method

Art owes more to evil than to good, both for its content and for the alienated energies which
goad those who frame it.
Scrupulous writers don’t waste their evil or their truth on life. They save their justice for their
style, and their mischief for their thoughts. They teach their malice to think, and their virtues to
dance.

The artist moulds celestial shapes from infernal fires, marrying calm harmony and wild fantasy.

Sin is both the motive and the material of art. There would be no art, if we had stayed in Eden.

A work of art, like the resurrected flesh, ‘is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption.’ How is
it born, but by debauching innocence? An artist is an undiscovered traitor. They are so eloquent
in broadcasting their love for our sad dust because they have left it so far behind them. The only
pacts they make are with the prince of sin.

45 The corrupt creator

The artist stems from a long and august lineage of magicians, mountebanks, pimps, quacks,
counterfeiters, loafers, spongers, grifters, forgers, thieves and liars. Great writers may have the
traits that go to make a great banker, as Stendhal claimed. But don’t they need still more the
traits that make a great bankrupt, reckless audacity and a carelessness with truth? ‘I have heard
of no crime that I should be incapable of committing,’ as Goethe said.

Writers are the sort of people who would eavesdrop at keyholes and then make up what they
have heard. They choose to lie even when they would be safe in telling the truth, and they insist
on telling the truth where we want them to lie.

The artist is a liar that art makes use of to show us the truth.

Wordsworth, who wrote so tenderly of leech gatherers and idiot boys, joined in a scam to profit
from actuarial computations of the lifespan of old men. Faulkner said that, in order to win the
time to write, ‘a writer would rob his mother. The Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of
old ladies.’

Hold fast to your integrity, but don’t let it taint your work. As Catullus wrote, singers ought to be
chaste, but not their song. ‘Art,’ Picasso said, ‘is never chaste.’
TASTE AND TRADITION

Contents

Tastes

Standards

The medium

Forms and genres

Tradition

Periods

Beauty

TASTES
Taste, like all the rest of our traits, is not unified and whole. It is disjointed and fragmentary. Try
to trace the shape, and you miss the colours. Contemplate the colours, and you’ll fail to catch
the form. Even those who love art don’t have much zest or judgement for more than one or two
of its forms.

Imagination is the car, taste is the driver.

Let pleasure guide what you read, but only if you have first learnt to read for some worthier end
than pleasure.

‘He that ploweth should plow in hope,’ as Blake urged. Create your work in hope, but judge it in
despair. Who of us has not felt the exhilaration of working better than we know, and then the
dismay of discovering that what we have made falls far short of what we had planned?

A writer has a brace of foes to tussle with, first the blank page, and then the full one.

Tact is the passive of taste. Taste selects, tact forbears.

What a blessing, that life hands us so few outlets to show off our true selves. Most of our good
taste we owe to our inhibitions or our lack of opportunity.

1 Taste begins in disgust

As we grow more discriminating, the more things we see and hear both to delight and to disgust
us. Cursed are they who have the taste to see how ugly we have made the world, but not the
vision to remake it. ‘Taste,’ Renard wrote, ‘ripens at the expense of happiness.’ Life for the
discerning is one long process of getting disgusted. God was the first to learn this hard lesson.

You can’t have much taste, if you’re not disgusted with the world by the time you’re thirty. And
the world has been made by people who are not.

‘Taste,’ as Valéry wrote, ‘is made of a host of distastes.’ All discernment begins in disgust. A
fastidious taste has a distasteful prehistory. Bad taste is made by our desires, good taste is
made by our disgust.

We judge ourselves and our works both more harshly and more indulgently than we judge
others.

What a swamp of mortifications you have to wade through in learning how to judge cleanly.
Shame piques us to acquire a fine taste. Yet we are still vain of whatever taste we have
acquired. Taste is honed by shame, imagination is heightened by pride.

Some people are not hard to please because they have no taste, a few because they have
enough to know that most things are not worth their displeasure.

Distaste is pleased with itself for being so displeased with all it sees.

2 Pharisees of taste
When style seems to have won out over substance, most times it is crass and smug
mannerisms that have won out over subtle style, as in the case of Chesterton. Gaudy writers
boast that they love form, but they are just enamoured of its crude effects. Style too has its
hypocrites and pharisees, who confuse it with the frills, flounces, flourishes and embroidery
which mask its absence. ‘All their work they do for to be seen of men. They make broad their
phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.’ When they think that they are
mastering their craft, they are learning the flashy stunts that will take in their fans.

Few of us have the taste to feel disgust at anything that flatters our own taste.
3 Success debauches taste
Each day good taste gives up a touch more of its influence, but bad taste goes on insensibly
gaining ground.

Years of success had depraved his taste. He had lapsed from plain dignity into purple
decoration, and had bought publicity by peddling his judgment. He ‘ruined a fine tenor voice for
effects that bring down the house,’ as Auden phrased it. May you be spared the misfortune of
success. And may you die before praise gets a chance to debauch you.

We don’t emulate the best, but we ape those who know how to spark the most striking effects.

All that cultured sight-seeing, the brilliant friendships, those fine dinners and great
conversations, have gone to make us the complacent mediocrities that we are.

Life is a slow erosion of all our standards. You must leave them to sink if you want to succeed.

4 Taste and prejudice

We can’t rid ourselves of our prejudices. So we should try to make them as discriminating as we
can.

Take care not to let your quirks, habits and reflexes do the job of your taste. We raise our
prejudices to the rank of principles and our predilections to the rank of taste. We pervert our
precepts to give a pretext for our likes and dislikes. Instead of elevating our taste by
undergirding it with our judgment, we contort our judgment by coercing it to ratify our choices.
‘How quick come the reasons for approving what we like,’ as Austen said.

5 Taste and wealth

My taste calibrates its standard to suit the class of things that I have had the means to pay for.
Like my conscience, I use it not to weigh what I ought to do or get, but to weave shrewd pretexts
for what I have done or got. Most people get a taste for the costliest grade of vulgarity that they
can pay for.

The rich use their wealth to hide how cheap their taste is or else to show it off. Their taste is
their avarice straining to live up to the demands of their coarse or cultivated snobbery. Elegance
is the plush luxury that the rich have in place of beauty. It’s the bourgeois substitute for real
style.

Our greed keeps ruthlessly up to date. But our taste lags hopelessly behind the times.

Most of us don’t doubt that we deserve the best. But we feel sure that the best must be
whatever we have the money to buy.
Others lay waste their powers by getting and spending, but I flex and strengthen mine. Their
covetousness makes life ugly. But if I had a fortune, I could make mine graceful. My plain need
is their uncontrolled greed.

Anyone poorer than me must lack the sense to know how to get money, and anyone wealthier
lacks the taste to know how to spend it.

6 Fastidious bad taste

Those who have a decided taste are sure that they have an exquisite one. If they prize
discernment, they presume that they know what it is. And if they presume that they know what it
is, they have no doubt that they possess it.

Lax taste discriminates as fastidiously as finicky taste. And a nice taste is as pleased with itself
as a nasty one. A fine palate spurns most foods, but so does a coarse and uncultivated one.
People are exceptionally choosey, and most of what they choose is trash. We aren’t deaf to
style, but most of us prefer a trite style to a choice one. ‘People do not deserve to have good
writing,’ as Emerson said, ‘they are so pleased with bad.’

Style is something that most people fail to notice, except when it’s cheap and showy, in which
case they find it exquisite, or when it’s rich and solid, in which case they call it pretentious.

What we find disgusting in others we find natural and healthy in ourselves.

7 Bad taste is born with us

Most people have bad taste, but it is not even their own bad taste. And if it were, it might be a
great deal worse.

A good heart is a likely sign of bad taste. But bad taste is no proof of a good heart.

Our parents give us a template of bad taste, first of all in their choice of each other. And the one
badge of good taste that they show comes when they can no longer stand the sight of each
other.

Our natural bad taste has crammed the world with such ugly unnatural things, that the taste we
learn is even worse than the one we have from birth.

The bad taste we are born with craves what is false and spurious, while the only taste that we
learn is to disguise or deck out the vulgarity that we are born with.
8 Good taste must be learnt
Bad taste is born, good taste is made. Nature will supply you with your fake taste. Your true
taste you have to piece together by your own efforts. ‘It is,’ Reynolds said, ‘a long and laborious
task to acquire it.’ First you have to learn what is worth admiring, then you have to act as if you
admired it, till at last you start to admire it for real, and gather why it has earned the admiration
that you give to it.

We keep our good taste in trim by battling our innate inclinations. Each advance in taste is an
advance of inhibition.

There’s more vitality in vulgarity than there is in good taste. And vitality consumes more than it
creates.

9 Good taste, bad reasons

If you want to gauge the quality of a person’s likes and dislikes, don’t ask them what they
admire, ask them why. It’s much easier to acquire good taste than good reasons. As your taste
matures, you admire fewer things, but you admire them more, and you know why they deserve
it.

Sophisticates cry up a masterwork for reasons no less fatuous than those for which oafs hoot at
it. Cultivated people have no more valid grounds for admiring fine things than bumpkins do for
deriding them, though they may have more valid grounds than the perfunctory ones that they
profess. They bolt them, and then belch their appreciation in stale patter. ‘A painting in a
gallery,’ the Goncourts wrote, ‘hears more ludicrous opinions than anything else in the world.’

Some people’s enthusiasms are good for nothing but to warn you not to waste your time on
what they praise.

Admiration knows more than understanding. We prize the right things for the wrong reasons.

It’s more surprising when an uncommon mind is fêted than when it’s vilified, since in both cases
it is misunderstood. ‘To be great,’ as Emerson says, ‘is to be misunderstood.’

10 Popularity and posterity

Popularity is the anteroom of oblivion. An artist who works to win an audience must be content
to be forgotten. The book that millions now can’t put down in a few years no one will want to
pick up. The most enduring writers have the fewest readers in their own or any other age.

A bestseller is a book that everyone reads because everyone else is reading it.
To refer to a book as a bestseller used to be to dismiss it. But now that we fetishize numbers
and success, sales are the sole endorsement that we take note of. ‘Nothing indeed can be a
stronger presumption of falsehood,’ Hume wrote, ‘than the approbation of the multitude.’

These days in order to make the rich works of the past palatable, we have to cheapen and
vulgarize them so much, that they are not worth preserving.

11 The proof of popularity

If a thing is popular, it must be fake. And our sole touchstone of truth is popularity.

The things that a great number of people think they believe in are not even worth refuting.

We take it that a work of art will be no good if it aims to make money, but that if it is any good it
will be sure to make bags of it. Our estimates of value are both mawkish and hard-headed.

There may be no arguing about taste, but there is no arguing with numbers.

These days there are so many heads, and we can tally them with such exactness, that the
quality of what might be inside them is of no account.

An age that prides itself on its individualism is a slave to number, quantity and mass.

The one thing that awes large numbers of people is large numbers of people. And the one
quality that they respect is quantity. We don’t know what makes a work of art good, but what
sells is good enough for us.

Most of us know or admire nothing of a rare work save its reputation. ‘The more a work is
praised,’ Gourmont said, ‘the more beautiful it grows to the multitude.’

The one sure way to spruik a thing these days is to tell people that hordes of other people are
sold on it.

12 Taste and fashion

A masterpiece lasts, because it gives each era rich ideas which it can misinterpret in its own
way. Tradition links a chain of fecund misconstructions. It is so necessary, just because almost
all the things that people believe from age to age are false. Time tells you what to value, but
fashion tells you why. People keep up in the sweep of the centuries the same catalogue of great
works. But they adjust the reasons for which they praise and misread them to suit the stock
views of their own age. So they come to admire them for the very traits that they lack. They
make them their contemporaries by misconstruing them.
We read great and desolating books to find the anodyne cant which dull and pious preceptors
have trained us to look out for.

Fashion makes our naturally false taste even worse than it might have been. The sluice of
tradition is the one thing that can cleanse it.

STANDARDS

13 The rule of taste

Where there are no strong rules, there will be no sweet exceptions. And where there are no
limits, there will be no striving to pass them. ‘The law alone brings us liberty,’ as Goethe wrote.
A strong artist must frame strong laws, though it’s all case law. ‘The rules of style,’ Johnson
wrote, ‘like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated.’ By revering rules artists free
themselves from following fads and trends. ‘Precept must be upon precept, line upon line.’ How
many inhibitions a mind needs to be bound by in order to think free thoughts.

Artists are not like moralists. They practise better than they preach. Their art knows more than
the artist. Most of them have a theory of art, so it’s just as well that they don’t stick to it.
Shakespeare’s plays give the lie to most of what he wrote about playwriting. And if Flaubert had
paid heed to his own impeccable aesthetic code, would have disciplined his scandalous
brilliancy into dry correctness. Had he excised his own persona from his books, he would have
robbed them of their richest character. Few tellers intrude so unremittingly in their tale.

14 Creating taste
Poets must create the taste by which they are relished, as Wordsworth said. First they mould
their own, to make it both exacting and permissive. And then they need to raise their readers to
be the next best thing to poets. They must enable the most impetuous flights, yet build to fit the
most stringent specifications.

In art it is the exceptions that must set the rules, and the purpose of the rules is to spur further
exceptions. Of course the real rules are not those that the academies teach.

15 Breaking the rules of taste

Artists don’t breach the rules, they lay down better ones, to found a new freedom and a new
rigour. They strengthen them by enlarging their writ and by showing how much they can
achieve. Genius, as George Eliot said, ‘comes into the world to give new rules.’

Half the pleasure of creation comes from the destruction it entails. And, as Picasso knew, ‘the
urge to destroy is also a creative urge.’
Where personal taste holds sway, standards don’t just fall. The very notion of standards is
bound to be done away with, and replaced by the criteria of relevance, popularity, profit and
feeling good. Kitsch is the democracy of taste.

‘Beauty,’ as Alberti said, ‘is the revelation of law.’ But each beginner now parrots the platitude
that precepts are made to be transgressed. The ordinances of art are as trite and disregarded
as the ten commandments.

Our iconoclastic age has smashed art and set up kitsch on its gilt plinth.

16 Freedom and decline

Artists these days don’t lack the aptitude to create, but they have lost the power to conceive
what a fine work might be. ‘All men can do great things,’ Butler says, ‘if they know what great
things are.’ How could they craft a piece of abiding beauty, when they can’t make out the most
basic axioms or won’t obey them?

In vigorous eras artists make strong works, though they may hold incorrect views on art. In
spent eras they can do nothing great, even if they hold the right ones. They glean leaden
lessons from golden instructors. We have now swallowed such a crop of faulty postulates, what
could purge us but the dawn of a new dark age of unlearning?

It’s often said that if Shakespeare were on earth today he would be a copywriter or a
screenwriter. But that is just the reason why there can be no more Shakespeares.

We now churn out great reams of shoddy verse, since it’s not the age of poetry, and great
reams of shoddy prose, since it is the age of prose. Most novels are written by people who are
too bright to write them or not bright enough.

17 The good and the great

Major artists don’t do better what minor ones do well. They have quite contrary aims, and gain
quite contrary ends. They differ in kind, not in degree.

The best, as Voltaire said, may be the enemy of the good. But in politics the better is as deadly
a foe of the good as the best, while in art the good perverts the best and promotes the dull. A lot
of good books are much better than great ones, and the best may have more in common with
the bad than with the good. And some of the finest books, such as Wordsworth’s or
Hawthorne’s, are not much good. ‘In art,’ as Goethe points out, ‘the best is good enough.’

The few great books differ more from the many good ones than a good book differs from the
mass of bad ones. Or else they may differ less, but the differences matter far more.
18 At home in the world
A middling artist makes you feel more at home in the world, a golden one makes you wish that
you were and content that you are not. Good art soothes us with its predictable satisfactions.
Great art desolates and exhilarates us, ravaging us with its lacerating truths, and delighting us
with its intrepid imagination.

Great things both exalt us and annihilate us. Kitsch diminishes us, but plays up to our low
pretensions.

We want stories to take us to a threatening place and make us feel safe there, just as we want
to go abroad and feel familiarly at home.

THE MEDIUM

19 The work knows more than its maker

The work knows more than its maker. And the metaphor knows more than the poet. As Dirac
said, the equation knows more than the mathematician.

The creative spark gives light to the work, but leaves the man or woman who made it in the
dark. And the work, which is all on the surface, is far more profound than the soul that gave it
birth. Imagination inheres in the medium. It is only an occasional visitant to the maker.

If authors were to explain all they know, fools would assume that they understood them, and the
wise might see that they weren’t worth understanding.

Speech has more imagination than any of its users. So the best writers are content to serve as
the clear spouts of its upwelling.

The poem has a wisdom that the poet lacks. And poetry has a wisdom that the poem lacks.

20 The medium is the true muse

A choice work of art is born, not when a thought finds its fitting form, but when a form fathers
fresh thoughts.

The passion that fires a painter is the passion for paint. And the love that stirs a poet is the love
of language, ‘smit with sacred song.’ Their true muse is the medium of their art. Writers see
visions, but only visions of words and their translucent forms. They labour more to clarify form
than meaning. A poet like Shakespeare is promiscuous in his thoughts, because his one true
love is words.
The poet does not put ideas into poetic form. Poetic form puts ideas into the poet.

Prophets and religious poets are made fools by their narrow faith, and must be redeemed by the
abounding grace of language.

Forms call forth imagination, and imagination shapes new forms.

When the hand is working right, the best solution to each problem of form proves at the same
time to be an enrichment of its content.

21 The muse of language

A poem is not a thought struggling into words. It is words giving birth to thought. ‘The real artist,’
as Wilde wrote, ‘proceeds not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.’

For a poet language is the code that cracks the safe.

Language is like rain. Where it waters the ground, thoughts will spring up. Most may turn out to
be common weeds, but in a few receptive minds the seeds of fresh ideas will sprout.

Speech has tormented a few men and women to perfect them as the organs of its power. They
are the pipes through which it plays its airs.

A poet is a bird gliding on gusts of language.

If tradition didn’t think one third of poets’ thoughts for them, and speech one third, they would
conceive no thoughts of their own at all.

22 Inspired by words
It is not the job of poets to think. Their job is to find the words that will think for them.

In a poem the accidents of form shape the inevitabilities of thought.

For the true writer real things don’t reveal their colours till they have been forced to pass through
the prism of language.

The crucial influence on writers is not their family or country, but the state of the language into
which they have been born. They live in a language more than in a nation. Shakespeare was
the child of elizabethan english. In any other age he would not have been Shakespeare.

Writers are people with whom language has some private business to transact. And their job is
to make it the general business of all.
Other plays gain by being put on stage. But Shakespeare’s are so rich in thought and language,
that they lose by it.

23 Born again into language

A poet must be born again into language. In composing a poem, they give birth to a being who
is able to retrieve the poem which is already there in words. They are ravished by words as the
mystic is ravished by God.

In a poem words rediscover their innocence with beguiling craft.

Poetic souls are a dime a dozen. What is needful is poetic craft. When this is lacking, the soul of
the poet is stillborn or sterile. The soul that a poet gives voice to is the soul of language.

A poet is saved by words or not at all. And writers live by language, but know that it will not
avail. They feel empty if they can’t empty out their soul each day in words on a page.

Shakespeare loved nothing but language, and language loved no one more than Shakespeare.
Other loves seemed to him thin and insubstantial when set against the love of thin and
insubstantial words.

24 The poet is the tool of language

A weak poet uses language as a tool. A strong poet is a tool used by language. ‘Painting is
stronger than I am,’ Picasso said. ‘It makes me do what it wants.’

Poets are not lords of language. They are its most obedient servants, and at times they may act
as its jesters.

We are the cracked kettles on which language raps out tunes for bears to dance to. But when it
finds a poet, it may move the stars to pity.

The soul of the poet is so thin and empty, that words have space to jiggle about in it and form
new compounds.

It is the hand of the painter, not the soul, that is inspired. As Picasso said, ‘my hand tells me
what I’m thinking.’

A poet is a mind plugged in to one of the high-voltage powerlines of language.

Before the poet can choose the words, language must first choose the poet.

Words make use of ordinary speakers when they want to go on foot. When they want to fly, they
use a poet.
Words give a poem richer thoughts than its rich words give its readers.

25 The taste of language

Words are the one net in which we can catch the truth. We can grope our way through the
dimness only by following the echo of language.

Words are the best and worst of us. We pack them with all our hollowest freaks and all the
fullness of our minds.

Form guides a great writer to deep insights, but it waylays a mannered one into the paths of
cheap imposture.

True writers follow the trails of language to reach new thoughts. And then by clarifying their
thought they cleanse their language.

For the philosopher life is mediated through schemes of thought. And for the poet life is
mediated through speech. ‘Between me and life,’ Wilde said, ‘there is a mist of words always.’

26 Language is imagination
Language is hidden poetry in wait for its bright revealer. It is, as Wilde wrote, ‘the parent not the
child of thought.’ Language is not the body of thought. Thought is the body, and language is the
soul which gives it form and actuality.

The play of language leads us to deeper springs of truth than the strait path of belief.

The music of language pipes us to truths past our ken.

Instead of striving to make our language the image of our mind, we would do well to make our
mind more like language, promiscuous, open, free-flowing and constantly recreating itself.

It is language that is myriad-minded, and writers must be single-minded in their dedication to

make the most of its vast range of resources.

Shakespeare’s plays are a field of dancing verbal energy, and speech is their one true hero.
There’s magic in each line. They are a perennial springtime of language.

The true drama of a great fiction is the drama of its author’s vision travailling to find the shining
words to blaze forth its splendour. It’s what Lawrence calls the ‘struggle for verbal
consciousness.’ But our sense for words is so dulled, that the true drama is no more than a
dumb show to us.
27 Words are deeper than we are
It is we who are glib, not words. Words go deeper than we do.

We are too glib to grasp to what depth words might tow us or to what height they might loft us.
Poets do both by ravishing us with their ecstatic dialect.

The writer’s struggle is not with the poverty of speech but with its plenitude. It holds out to them
at every turn a more exuberant range of possibilities than they know what to do with.

It’s those who have impoverished ideas that rail at the poverty of language. For poets it is all too
rich for their poor passions, which they therefore feel they must make out to be bigger than they
are. And then when we read them, we take it that we have these outsized passions too. And so
we think words must be too poor to give them flesh.

Why do glib and mawkish people insist that writing is deeper than words, and a picture deeper
than paint, and that all music tends toward silence, and that the poetry lies in the pauses? If
there is anything in the pauses, it is the fake feelings that we fill them with. We try to read
between the lines of a poem, so that the blaze of its verbal fire won’t blind us.

28 The taste of the medium

Why do people fete one form of art for doing imperfectly what some other does so much better?
Why praise a book for appearing cinematic, or a statue because it seems to move, or a building
as if it were readable, or prose for being poetical, or a tune as if it could recount a tale? ‘The
attempt to stir astonishment by means that form no part of the art in question,’ Baudelaire said,
‘is the great resource of those who are not born artists.’

A painting manifests pure matter by remaining purely abstract. The sole body that a painter can
mould is a body of paint.

A painting should be seen and not read, as a text should be heard and not seen. So a picture
that tries to relate a story is as false to its form as words that try to paint a picture. A picture is
worth a thousand words only to those who have learnt what it means from some other source.
Most of us don’t care for a painting, if we can’t turn it or its maker or its making into a corny tale.
And many of the most renowned painters, such as Michelangelo, have been mere illustrators.

A sense organ can put up with discordance in inverse ratio to how primitive it is, the nose least
of all, and the ear less than the eye.
29 Words are not pictures
A book must be feebly written, if it means more than the words that it’s made of, though if it’s
undergirded by nothing but its words it will soon crumple.

The standard view holds that a text encodes pictures in words, which we then project as a film
on our mind’s screen when we read. So inadequately do we grasp what goes on in our own
heads, and so prone are we to mouth borrowed nonsense rather than make our own sense.

Words stand for concepts, not for sense impressions. And their true sensory power lies in their
sound, not in the pallid duplicates that they form of the entities that they refer to. In order to take
in their glory, you have to shut your eyes and unstop your ears. They become flesh by making
their subtle music, not by forging crude images. But we have no ears to hear their melody.

Words throw a veil over things, which reveals their outlines, but softens their contours.

Words are not pictures. They impart vague, imprecise and indistinct visual images, and bland
and watery feelings. ‘Nothing we use or hear or touch,’ Clausewitz said, ‘can be couched in
language that equals what is presented by the sense.’ Language is translucent to thought, but
not transparent to action or sensation. Who would read a description of a peach to find out how
it tastes? Just bite its pulp.

FORMS AND GENRES

30 Taste and form

For a true writer a genre is no more than an incitement to find fresh forms of words. Order is
generic, imagination is wayward and perverse. Genres are the bowls into which artists pour their
vision. They fix its shape, but not its quality.

Creative energy, like a people, is real and enduring. Genres, like the borders that enclose them,
come and go.

Architecture builds the music of space. Music shapes the architecture of time. Writing designs
the music and architecture of thought. Ideas are the melodies of writing, words are the
instruments that play them.

The rest of the arts can be abstract, because they have a satisfying sensuous form. But
literature must be packed with material, because its form cannot stand up on its own.
31 Genres
An epic is a core of one third intense tragedy with a wadding of more or less tedious
digressions.

Tragedy is not a certain kind of story. It is a certain choice of language. It is a grand character
responding to the deepest outrages with a commensurate depth of imagination. So in life there
are no tragedies, but mere mishaps.

If fate is what makes for tragedy, then every insect is a tragic hero.

Greek and french tragedies are formally frigid, imaginatively impoverished and emotionally
incontinent. The sole reason to read any of them is to learn how great Shakespeare is, and how
right he was to keep clear of their bombastic minimalism, pompous choral insipidities, kitsch
mythology, crass spectacle, sophistic debates, copybook moralism, pretentious yet prosaic
rhetoric, and formal monotony. All their bellowing has less to say to us than one quiet work of
heart-breaking savagery by Conrad or Faulkner.

A pastoral poem is not a poem that shows a love of nature. It is a hymn of victory boasting of
our triumph over nature.

Great stories of crime, such as Dostoyevsky’s, Hawthorne’s or Hugo’s, tell of the vindication of
the culprit’s soul or of the damnation of the detective.

Biography is gossip and anecdote, literature is form and imagination. And so people much
prefer biography to literature. And when they do read literature, they treat it as if it were a
fictional biography, setting out tattle and anecdotes to be raked over and judged by our tawdry
moral prejudices.

32 The stupidity of story

The plot counts as little in fiction as opinions count in speculation. Stories are the despair of art,
as opinions are the desolation of thought. ‘The story,’ Henry James wrote, ‘is just the spoiled
child of art.’

The story is the golden calf which readers adore. Language is the god for whose voice they
have no ears.

The tale belongs to mere entertainment, the treatment to high art. But we care for art only
insofar as we find it entertaining.

Stories are the thralls of our desires. Art sets our minds free to rove, by raising them above our
desires.
People read stories in the same way that they consume all the things that they crave. So avid
are they for the next frisson, that they miss the wonders that are unrolling right in front of them.
A plot surprises us by where it ends up, but a poem must astonish us with each step on the
way.

Lesser writers know how to narrate a plot most effectually, since they have no rich insights to
deflect them from it. Thrilling plots do not make for great novels, and great novels do not tell
thrilling stories. There are so few great short stories, because they have no time to do more than
race through a piquant tale.

33 Great fiction is greater than its story

In good fiction the tale justifies the telling. But in great fiction the telling justifies the tale, ‘the way
to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,’ as Henry James phrased it. And yet we
treat the workmanship as a gaudy and wasteful packaging which we rip off to unwrap the tale as
fast as we can.

A fiction is as great as it is greater than the story that it tells. And it means nothing at all if it
means no more than that. Its grand characters outshine their fables as art outshines life, by
illuminating its drift. Form and imagination are the pearls of writing, the tale is the dry twine on
which they are beaded. Plot is not the soul of a great fiction. It is its dry bones.

Great writers know that a good plot is necessary to make a great fiction. Readers think that it is
sufficient.

34 Selection and taste

Why do we assume that an artist makes art by extracting the illustrative details from life? As if
life, when its quotidian slag were scummed off, would leave a concentrate of unalloyed gold. But
not even the fire of imagination burns at a high enough temperature to transmute banality’s
refractory ore. A writer who knew how to delete would not, as Stevenson claimed, make an Iliad
out of a morning paper. They would just report trite incidents in the random vein of a morning
paper. Art does not select from life, but adds to it. It distorts and reshapes, intensifies and
simplifies.

35 Music is not a language

Music arranges formal associations between sound and sound. It does not forge associations of
meaning between sound and sense. Though we call it a universal language, it is in fact neither
universal nor a language. It can convey neither rich ideas nor complex moods. The only ideas
that music gives play to are musical ones. And the feelings it evokes are coarse and obvious,
not much more than sad or glad, up or down, sunny or spooky. And it’s the crudest sort that
thrills us with the most intense effects. If music had anything to say, it would speak. And when it
does use words, it shows that what it has to say is nonsense.

Most of the emotions roused by a piece of music come not from the music itself, but from the
associations and recollections which have nothing to do with it.

Music seems the most profound art because it has no content. It is all depthless form.

Music is made with notes, not with emotions. And these notes touch our sonic imagination, not
our moral or narrative or pictorial one.

Music can’t tell the truth, because it can’t say anything at all. And yet so much of it is still a lie.
Music like Wagner’s is even worse than it sounds.

36 Music good and bad

Music is how the gods do mathematics. It’s an ineffable algebra for the ears. It is, as Leibniz
says, ‘the pleasure the mind feels from counting while not being aware that it is counting.’ It is at
once the most sensual and the most abstract of the arts.

It was a great mischance for music that it came of age in the nineteenth century, just as
european taste was declining into kitsch.

Bad music now sounds like good film music, overblown, mushy and thrusting, cuing our
responses scene by scene to lead up to some grandiose climactic fanfare.

In most songs the tune is so flat that it needs the words to raise it, and the words are so thin that
they need the tune to fill them out.

37 Savage dance
Ballet is the Fabergé egg of the arts, the over-refined knick-knack of an epicene age. It is a vain
attempt to mime feelings by stereotyped gesticulations, and to rival feline poise by an
unachievable bodily control. If it makes music visible, as Balanchine alleged, then it plays it on a
sorry instrument. It’s like performing Bach on a kazoo. It should leave off straining for fluid
organic grace, and aspire instead to the affectless awkwardness of a puppet. Nijinsky alone by
his rigorous anti-ballet gave back to the dance its savage vitality.

38 Painting and sculpture

Cézanne is the ideal painter. He framed a style scoured of feeling, ornament, history and
expression. He kept nothing but the solid and fundamental, and purged his art of all the
extraneous seductions for which even connoisseurs love a painting. So he made pictures that
hold out to us nothing to flatter, to soothe or to allure, no fable, drama, psychology, sympathy,
depth, memory, mystery or meaning. Rembrandt is the anti-painter, always using stage effects
to bring out some inner depth which has nothing to do with the truth of painting.

Sculpture is a more one-dimensional art than painting. A sculpture has more spatial facets, but
a picture has more formal ones.

Only the most infamous tyrants deserve to be satirized by a brazen public statue.

39 Portraits of bad taste

We hold that a portrait can bare the depths of a soul, since we know only the dry husk of both
life and art. Is the heart so thin and transparent, that mere paint can unveil it? The face may be
a map of habits and experiences, but only those of its own flesh, and not what lies behind it. The
phrenologist Lavater, when asked to differentiate a sketch of Kant from that of an infamous
highwayman, singled out the markers of the true metaphysician in the robber, and the
unmistakable tokens of a brigand in Kant.

Our clothes show more about us than our face. At least they are our own choice. But what they
show is that the economic system determines most of our choices for us. Our bodies show our
born ugliness, and our clothes flaunt our fashionable bad taste.

A good portrait is one that doesn’t pretend to lay bare the soul of its sitter. What it lays bare is
the soul of art.

40 Architecture
Architecture is art contaminated by utility. It fouls pure form with gross functionality. Literature
lights it up with truth.

Mawkish people claim that no building is worth as much as the acts that take place beneath its
roof. But the form of a great edifice is worth far more than what it does. And it doesn’t start to
live its real life till it has ceased to work. It’s as great as it is greater than its use. The best
structures outlast their function for the longest time. And a building that is perfectly fit for its
present purpose will soon be pulled down. A pyramid was a tomb for a booby, a cathedral a
barn for superstitious cows to congregate in. Do the grubby fingers brighten the ruby that
bejewels them?

41 Modern builders
If form does follow function, then every building would be a uniform precast box.
The rest of the arts may despair, but architects must frame an art of hope, since they are
building a new world.

Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe shared out modern architecture between them. Wright
was the builder for those who don’t like modern buildings. Le Corbusier made titanic, protean,
joyous, southern structures, Mies reticent, cool, sleek and serene ones. Le Corbusier fashioned
the fresh morning poetry of the new design, Mies its taut and severe prose. So the complete
writer would blend the barbaric force of Le Corbusier and the delicate discipline of Mies.

42 Film
Cinema is beggared by the wealth of its resources. Like Orson Welles, it will do nothing great,
since it can do such a range of facile things so well. Like life, it is vibrant but insipid, saturated
but vacuous, raucous but inarticulate. It thrills us with the pap of fantasy and the infantile
delights of plot. It feasts our greedy hunger for happy endings and our need to identify with
attractive stars. A pseudo-intellectual is one who treats films as if they were works of art.

Film is as mechanically precocious as it is aesthetically regressive and juvenile. It is advanced

in everything except its sensibility. It is the epitome of present-day art, since it is neither modern
nor art but a lucrative branch of the global business of kitsch.

A film is too rushed to paint luminous images, and too stuffed with visual details to make
thoughtful drama.

Great novels make poor films. Films may tell the same story, but they lose the vocal life and
glory. But since they burst with banal details, we have to speak as if they were dense with
symbolism.

The cinema did not thaw out our brains, as Cocteau claimed. It inflamed our senses, and
overheated our sentimentality.

TRADITION

43 Time and taste

Time is the best critic. The ideas that we stick to may be merely the ones about which we have
not thought long enough to reject.

Inspiration is instant, judgment is slow. It takes me six weeks to see that two thirds of what I
have written is no good. It takes me six months to see that two thirds of what is left is also no
good.
God was the first to find out that the bliss of creating is the sole thing that makes up for the
bitterness of existing, but that this joy too soon sours. If he is happy with his work, then he must
have as little taste as ability.

God spent a bare week on the creation of the world, and so he had no one but himself to blame
that he regretted it so soon. Would he not have come to a far less encouraging appraisal of
what he had done, had he not been in such haste to judge if it was all very good? As a creator
he was precipitate, as a critic he was fickle. How often he must have said to his angels, What a
lovely planet earth might have been, if I had spent a few more days on its making, or else had
stopped on the fifth.

44 Time is wiser than taste

Time is wiser than taste. And tradition knows more than the individual. We need the stolidity of
tradition to counterbalance the gross obstinacy of our own judgment, and to preserve the works
of deep originality from each epoch’s thirst for crude novelty.

Good taste preserves the old forms, imagination revitalizes and extends them.

Some writers, such as Emerson, who have lived at ease on a rich legacy of tradition, urge their
juniors to throw up their patrimony and earn a toilsome livelihood of their own.

Why commend what time tells you to? Yet time will tell you where to find all the best things.

The past, which reigns as the sovereign of the long age, saves us from fashion, which rules as
the usurper of the hour, more boorish and more peremptory. But we have mutinied against the
majesty of the old ways, to kneel down to the despotic imbecility of the clanging now.

45 The wisdom of tradition

The soul is too shallow to harbour the huge bulk of a work of art. It must moor out in the broad
sea of tradition.

Nine tenths of a great book is lost on its readers, as it was no doubt lost on its writer. A great
work is a permanent possibility of wonders which must be preserved in a tradition. And the
tradition doesn’t know anything at all.

A book acts like a virus which must infect a long column of unaffected carriers till it latches on to
the one victim that it was meant for.

As art tells the truest lies, so tradition is the most sagacious foolishness. Tradition is priceless,
though all traditions are worthless.
The dead make up the most vital community, because they are not a community at all. And
posterity frames the best consensus, since it is made with no need of agreement.

Tradition works like love. How do your deeds come to mean anything at all but by their
communion with the ones whom time has made dear to you?

A healthy tradition must have the strength to excrete as well as to absorb, to forget as well as to
keep in mind.

46 Tradition and individual taste

Tradition is all, the individual nothing. ‘The richness of a work, of a generation,’ Pavese wrote, ‘is
in all cases due to how much of the past it contains.’ But to save the past alive, artists must act
as if they were all and the past nothing. ‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the
dead,’ as Blake urged. All good comes by the tyranny of tradition and by the wilful audacity of
the few who fight to depose it. Creators cherish it only if they hope to join its lists. But how can
they enrich it but by being unequivocally of their own time?

Artists make a god of beauty. But they want to smash its old images and set up their own on the
unfilled pedestals. They are at once idolaters and iconoclasts, lawmakers and lawbreakers.
‘Each act of creation,’ Picasso said, ‘is first of all an act of destruction.’

A painter hates art museums, and wants to be hung in every one of them.

Tradition used to be the care of a whole class. Now it is the endangered possession of a scatter
of rare individuals swamped by the heedless greed of the giddy crowd.

All are born heirs to the past’s inexhaustible bequest, but you must labour for long years to
make it your own. ‘What you have inherited from your antecedents,’ Goethe said, ‘you must first
win for your own use.’

PERIODS

47 The arts are not one

The muses don’t dance in unison, as Degas points out, or grow at the same rate, or age in the
same way. They may all be of one sisterhood, but they don’t have much in common. And
though they form one family, they each retain their own characteristics. Each obeys its own
laws, and takes its own course of growth. ‘That urge to find counterparts and analogues in the
various arts gives rise to queer blunders,’ as Baudelaire points out. Music had its rebirth long
after the renaissance of poetry and the visual arts.
Classicism is at its best an architectural and sculptural style, baroque a musical one,
romanticism a literary one, and modernism a painterly one. A period has a paradigm form rather
than a common style.

The english and russians can write great books but not make great paintings. The french can
paint and write but not make music. Germans can write and make music but can’t paint. Italians
can paint and make music but not literature. The irish can write but can’t paint. The english put
all of their music into their poetry. And the french put all of their music into their prose.

48 Degenerate art
All great art is degenerate. And all healthy art is kitsch. By the time art was born, culture was
already in decay, as images had come to seem more alluring than the real thing. ‘How sickly
seem all things that grow,’ as Trakl wrote. Each advance is a step on the road to decadence. ‘All
mortal greatness is but disease,’ as Melville said. A decadent is one who has gone further and
seen more than the sound upright soul would dare to. And human kind owes all its creative
force to its maimed, abortive, afflicted, accursed specimens. So don’t look for a cure for your
malaise, but for a form to make it fecund.

There has never been an artistic epoch, as Mallarmé said, and if there had, it would have been
too weak to make great works of art.

Every civilization, no matter how ancient, is decadent. Babylon and Egypt are not part of the
childhood of the race but of its old age. And civilization itself is a long march of decadence, in
which intellect and technique more and more drive out instinct and custom.

Art is a fruit that grows on the tree of knowledge, not on the tree of life.

A sick society makes its artists weak. But a strong artist cannot make society healthy.

The eighteenth century was still flushed with the health that it was squandering. Its elegance
and sprightliness was the lively glow in the cheek of the dying consumptive.

49 The greeks
The greeks were teenagers, beautiful, sad, lost, dangerous, but not very deep. They were
shallow enough to see a lot of things clearly. They might have rescued us from our false
complexities by escorting us back to a bright simplicity and surface, ‘the whole Olympus of
appearance,’ as Nietzsche termed it. But now that we know them better, we can’t glean a thing
from them. They were sculptors, not psychologists. They carved the embodied abstractions of
architecture, geometry and myth. So they kept their gaze fixed on the plastic and formal. Their
eyes looked outwards to the serene shape, not inwards to the chaos of the soul. ‘For us greeks,’
as Valéry wrote of them, ‘all things are forms.’

The hallmark of the greek and latin classics is how overwritten they are. They found the most
complex forms to phrase quite simple thoughts. They had too much ingenuity and too little
imagination. Their prose is turgid and baroque, and their verse is literal and declamatory. It is
rhetoric in metrical form. They are models of how not to do it.

Homer and Plato are the only two top-rank greek writers, Homer because he embodies the
greek spirit, and Plato because he negates it.

50 Classic and romantic taste

Classicism is obedience. Romanticism is rebellion.

Classicism is a shallow pond. Imagination is a shoreless ocean. Classicism cramps art by

trussing it in organic form and subjecting its exuberant parts to a dulling coherence.

A classic age spends its time fussily reworking the tropes that have been passed on to it from
an earlier heroic age. That is to say, a classic age is a decadent age.

Classicism was a stiffening of the joints. Romanticism was a softening of the brain.

Unrivalled artists, such as Velasquez or Shakespeare, Bach or Dostoyevsky, are no more

classic or romantic then the tallest peaks are tropical or temperate. Their weather is made not
by the latitude which they share with the surrounding countryside but by their own lone altitude.

Paganism was a boon for painting and sculpture, because it was so picturesque. And
christianity was a boon for literature and psychology, because it was so perverse.

Raphael’s pictures, Mozart’s music and Austen’s prose are three miracles of transcendent
worldliness. Like Palladio, Rossini or Emerson, they fashion a sane classic art for those who are
born for joy.

The old classicism was olympian, the new classicism is industrial.

51 The rupture of the modern

Discontinuity is the essence of modernity and the mainspring of all modern art, as quantized
energy is the basis of the new physics. It works by dissonance not harmony, by multifariousness
not oneness, by fragmentation not by integrity, through the elementary particles of unpredictable
imagination. The modern artist must use the fragment as the sole weapon with which to combat
kitsch and the whole. ‘Unity,’ as Blake wrote, ‘is the cloak of folly.’
In a traditional culture the first duty is filial piety. To be modern is to kill the father, the source
and symbol of all brainless authority.

52 The styles of modernism

There were two strains of modernism. The first, the modernism of order, that of Hemingway,
Cocteau, Mondrian, Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe or Schoenberg, was a clean white apartment.
It pared back reality to uncluttered, austere and angular shapes, sleek and metallic. The
second, the experimental modernism of Joyce, Faulkner, Le Corbusier, Kandinsky, Miró,
Pollock or Stravinsky, enriched and complicated it with bold, eclectic, liquid and lyrical forms.

The arts grew modern by battling their own history. So painting, in its struggle to break loose
from its past, came to be more and more abstract, and so more like what it essentially is. But
music, which was already abstract, came to sound less and less like music. By trying to raise it
to its quintessence, composers reduced it to noise.

The impressionists had dematerialized the subject-matter of painting. The modernists

rematerialized the medium of paint.

Modern novelists refurbished the great house of form, but for clerks and salesmen to lodge in.

Most recent verse is cryptic yet prosaic, mystification illuminated by flashes of cliché. Poetry
used to be the verbal audacity that you couldn’t risk in prose. Now it’s the local and
autobiographical inanities that you couldn’t get away with in prose. It’s a reel of trite riddling
anecdotes that lacks a sustained narrative.

BEAUTY

53 Beauty
Beauty lives solely in its proper element. A swan out of water is a clumsy duck.

What is the difference between beauty and ugliness? A few grams more or less of fat, and ten
years more or less of time.

Beauty is the most seductive lure to life, and the saddest memento mori.

Nudity may be beautiful, dress is at best decorative. Clothes are a needless adornment of
beauty, and a vain disguise of unshapeliness.

When a girl speaks, her voice smiles. When she sings, it desires.
Beauty is not a line that speeds straight to a goal. It snakes like a sinuous curve. A tune is the
most roundabout way to get from c to c.

There are a hundred ways to look beautiful, but a thousand to look unattractive. There are a
hundred ways to write well, but a thousand to write lamely, a hundred of reasoning right, but a
thousand that miss the mark.

The body is a sturdy prose. The face is an enchanting poetry.

54 The mystery
What could be more tangible or more mysterious than beauty? You may enfold it in your arms,
but you can’t grasp it with your mind. Nothing is more firm to the touch or more elusive to
thought. It is perfectly rational and yet quite incomprehensible. It sparks an epiphany which
discloses nothing but its own sweet self. You glimpse in a flash what you still fail to compass
after years of exploration.

The least disturbance of the configuration of a face may make it unsightly, but one lovely touch
is enough to make it adorable. It doesn’t take much. A quite ordinary miracle will do it.

Beauty is a complex equation which the senses solve in the blink of an eye.

Only love beauty, and the world turns to an endlessly varying wonder.

Beauty falls like rain on a soul that has been parched by truth.

The constant miracle of beauty is the sole force that can wake you from the daze which the
profusion of everyday beauty has lulled you into. ‘The mist of familiarity,’ as Shelley wrote,
‘obscures from us the wonder of our being.’ The world spoils you with its never-ending, ever-
changing shows of loveliness.

55 The shock of beauty

Beauty is a perfect poise which throws you off balance when you meet it. ‘Every angel is
terrible,’ as Rilke wrote. Beauty is the serene form that still shocks us, no matter how habituated
to it we may have grown. And it would take more than one life to get used to the beauty that
meets you each day.

Beauty is a temporary tyrant. Its gravitational force seems to bend time and space round it.
Each lovely thing that you see banishes for a trice all rival kinds of loveliness, as a strong
writer’s style blanks out for a short spell all the rest, and lends you the key to tune all the
discords of the world.
56 The taste of beauty
We pass our youth in a delicious sickness of tremulous desire. We burn with beauty’s
voluptuous fever. Artists are prone to this infection their life long. It will not let them rest, till they
have made some offering worthy of the god that plagues them. It is the sweetest addiction.

The lightning strike of beauty first stupefies, then illuminates.

The length of Cleopatra’s nose may not have changed the face of the earth, as Pascal claimed.
But the curve of a lip may change your life, or at least make you live to rue that you didn’t let it
do so.

Love beauty, and the world will make plain to you how ugly it is. Love truth, and it will show itself
to be a lie.

Beauty should shock us out of our habitual ways of perceiving. But often it hardens us in our
habitual ways of desiring.

57 Lift up your eyes

The indifferent sky with its azure bounty and its shifting theatre of clouds should be enough to
gladden us. But we won’t lift our eyes from the crawling miseries and cravings of this blighted
earth. The crystal heaven has nothing that I want, besides a lofty peace. So I fuss and bustle
through the world, blinded to all its glory by all my greed to grab my slice of it. The only beauty
that we care for is the beauty that we own or hope to make our own.

Epiphanies of beauty come to us at every moment, and we are looking away. And truth hovers
round us, and we have our minds on other things.

People rarely glance at the sky, but what would they not do to buy an exclusive view of it, if they
knew that others set a high price on it.

We long to grab hold of beauty, but we have no time to savour it. And our lust of possession
makes the world uglier by the day.

A thing of beauty is a joy for the first ten minutes that you’ve got it in your hands. After that your
eyes swivel to the next thing of beauty that you want to hunt down.

58 Spoilt beauty
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what all beholders find beautiful is their own image
radiating from the objects they have got.
Beauty is a rare visitor from the realm of being to our world of time and becoming. No sooner
has it entered our corrupting air but it starts to sicken and decay. It is a spark of eternity, which
soon sputters and goes out in our thick and filthy air.

We have a disgusting bent for manufacturing ugliness where there was once beauty, and a
charming gift for reclaiming frail redoubts of beauty in face of the encroaching filth. How much
loveliness we found, and how much ugliness we made.

The world craves beauty, and wants to get hold of as much of it as it can, so that it can drag it
through the mire.

Ugliness is a far more solid and lasting quality than beauty.

59 Generic beauty
Beauty is exemplary not original. It is neither particular nor abstract but generic. It is not a
universal platonic form, nor can we judge it in isolation from the class of beings to which it
belongs. So you have to learn it by experience. You can’t deduce it from reason. And it comes
to seem unique by perfecting the traits of the class of which it is a member. You can’t grade the
loveliness of an individual till you have seen more samples of its type. We get to know the
features of its class by induction from its examples, and then we love the class in its particular
embodiments. The proportions of a flamingo would look out of place in an eagle, and the
plumage of a peacock would spoil a swan.

If beauty were proportionality of parts, then each of the animals, which are all so beautiful,
would share the same ratio. How could a horse and a giraffe both be handsome?

Ours is an ugly species which is full of breathtakingly lovely individuals. And a human being is
beautiful because for a few short years she possesses in an abnormal degree those traits that
typify the human form but which most humans are deficient in.

Our unattainable ideal of beauty is the slenderness of a girl filled out by the shapeliness of a
woman.

60 Beauty recalled
‘All our tastes,’ as Lamartine said, ‘are but reminiscences.’ This present angel shape ravishes
you now because it brings before your eyes its lost twin from the past. And it prefigures one
which will someday enthrall you when it calls back this one here in front of you. Beauty is old
wine in new skins.
The resemblance may catch your eye, but it’s the contrast that rends your heart. Everyone
reminds me of her. No one is like her. Soon she too won’t be. But she will live on as a pale
remembrancer of what she once so radiantly was. ‘Like, but oh, how different,’ as Wordsworth
lamented.

Beauty ravishes our memory just as it’s on the verge of evanescing. Formed by the past and
promising the future, it stands apart from both and lives eternally in its own ever-vanishing
present. It is the one carnal god that can resurrect our buried hearts. Each lovely thing enjoys a
timeless bloom which is prey to all the sad injuries of time.

In order to take in the full radiance of beauty, you have to feel the ecstasy of its presence and
preview the desolation of its fading.

61 The aging butterfly

So much beauty is botched by the very process that should perfect it. Adolescence is a potter’s
kiln. It mars most of the shapely figures that time puts in it to finish. They go in so fine, they
come out so pocked and sallow and flabby. Beauty is the light that youth gives off as it burns
itself out.

The human butterfly, as Chekhov said, turns back into a repulsive grub. Beauty’s lease is up
almost as soon as it’s moved in. Why does our species age more hideously than all the rest? Is
it gravitation paying us back for presuming to walk erect and renounce the reticence of fur? Or is
gluttony distending our flesh to force us to share its own overfed and florid likeness?

Human kind is at once the ugliest and the most beautiful species. The rest of the animals are
beautiful in the type, and ugly in the botched exceptions. Humans are ugly as a rule, and
beautiful only as rarities, and that for such a short season. They are unsightly in the aggregate,
though enchanting in the individual.

If the story of our life is written on our face as we age, what an unedifying one it must have
been.

If God made us in his own image, what an ugly devil he must be.

Beauty is an aristocrat, but the body is a leveller.

62 Time’s war on beauty

The young have all had a taste of what it is to possess beauty and what it means to lose it. They
have all known the delight of the body and the sadness of the flesh. As they age, their face parts
with its pure and clean contours, and folds back to an unreadable map of experience. The
young have classic profiles but romantic souls, like Canova’s statues or Baudelaire’s verse. And
their lineaments must subside to romantic ruins before they can grow classic and harmonious
souls.

In childhood and youth beauty is a free gift. After that it is a rare and arduous feat.

To be beautiful is like being rich in a country with ruinously high taxation. The vainest girl
doesn’t know how beautiful she is, or how much she will soon be losing.

Beauty’s season is as brief and brilliant as a nordic summer.

The young and lovely troop into the future like the unending waves of a russian brigade, soon to
be mown down and replaced by those in the rear.

Time wages a war on beauty which leaves no survivors. It will soon be treating the young with
the same careless brutality that they treat their seniors.
STYLE

Contents

Poetry and prose

Styles

Style and self

Irony

Character

The best style is plain, terse, various, intense and strange.

Short plain words, short plain clauses and sentences, plenty of verbs with plain personal
subjects, firm connectives to rivet it together, all galvanized against the rust of cliché. These
build a prose which is sturdy and aerodynamic. But it needs imaginative fire to make it fly.

An artist frames a style to give calm sensuous form to an imagined pattern of delirious beauty. It
is a way of speaking to the soul through the conduit of the senses.

Thought gives form to the chaos of reality. Language gives form to the chaos of thought. Style
gives form to the chaos of language.

An artist makes works of perfect taste by weaving patterns that border on vulgarity, alliterations,
puns and plays on words, rhythms and jingles, neat paradoxes and parallelisms.

Style is to language what beauty is to biology, superfluous but redemptive.

POETRY AND PROSE

1 Poetry
A poem is a small formal house that opens on to infinity.

Poets must be sober to execute their elaborate dance, though they may look drunk as they are
not just walking.
Shakespeare trips up our blame and outruns our praise. He contains almost all that is worth
saying and all the many ways to say it. He is as noble as Antony, as various as Cleopatra, and
as shrewd as Enobarbus. Bacon is a plodding Polonius to his quicksilver Hamlet.

Most poets are dead by forty, though they may continue to live and write for thirty years more.
They keep on pumping, though the well has long gone dry. A prose writer’s prime lasts for a
bare twenty years, customarily from when they’re thirty to fifty. And their golden age lasts for as
short as seven. After that the mind starts to grind on its own gears. So brief an instant between
two eternities in which to catch a timeless world.

2 Concentrated prolixity
Poets concentrate thought and feeling in a prolix form. And the style of their prolixity lends their
verse its special complexion. Pope’s is brittle and sententious, Wordsworth’s prosaically
sublime, Tennyson’s melodious and plangent, Pound’s hectoring and sentimental.

In poetry it’s the purity of the gold that counts, not the amount of the alloy. Artists are justified by
their best work. A parent is as guilty as its worst child. Judged by their average productions, all
but a few poets are not much better than average.

Few poets have it in them to write more than fifty top-flight pages. And some, like Virgil, Dryden
or Shelley, have in them not much more than fifty lines. A slim passport, but sufficient to earn a
place in paradise, or at least to justify a life.

3 Style in poetry and prose

A poem dances to the rhythm of song. Prose strides to the thrust of thought. Prose, like an
equation, must press on to its conclusion. Verse, like a tune, returns in each line to where it took
off from.

Prose transports you to a destination, poetry is the journey.

The errant moon holds sway as the goddess of poetry, the stern sun as the cruel god of prose.
The vocation of the poet is to enrapture, that of the prose-writer is to undeceive. ‘The words of
Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’

A poem, like Antaeus, springs from the soil. But prose should seem machine-tooled rather than
hand-tooled, flawlessly engineered not flawlessly expressive, taut, exact and inhuman. It sounds
more like gunfire than music. Each sentence is a storm of steel.

A poem must both mark out its unlikeness from the everyday speech around it and braid
patterns of similarity of the sounds and structures within it.
Money is not a kind of poetry, as Stevens claimed. It is rather, as Emerson said, the archetype
of prose, cool, colourless and unforgiving, which peels all its statements back to a stark and
abstract grammar. Money dissolves illusions, as prose dissolves poetry.

4 The poetry of language

Poetry is the grand sacrament of language, which acts out a rite that each poem makes new. It
is poised between revelation and ritual, astonishment and repetition.

A poem is speech most essential and most gratuitous. It shows us words showing us the world.
It points inwards to the small perfections of form, and outwards to the immense world of thought.

Electric poetry restores to dulled words their buzzing magnetic pulse.

A poem is a measured ecstasy of language. It is a brief surge of life’s unbound erotic current
transmitted through words.

Poetry is language operating at full pressure and highest pitch, overstraining all its sinews till
they crack.

Poetry is distilled imagination decanted into words.

Verse is regulated language which would be ruined by too much regularity.

A poem is a choice lexicon classified according to the mad alphabet of uncanny imagination.

A poem sounds like a strange translation from a perfect tongue which the poet had not quite got
the trick of, or like a fragment from some lost play.

Poets get nearly as far as the truth. Then they fill the gap in between with blazing words, to
disguise that they failed to reach it.

A poem is words that mean more than their meaning.

A great poem is hard to translate into a foreign language, but it is impossible to translate into its
native one.

5 The music of words

A poem is the manifestation of an intense vision of the world in words that match its intensity. It
is speech imagined most passionately and composed most musically. A poem is above all else
a piece of verbal music. It builds its frail house of sound to give a lodging to thoughts that will
live throughout the ages. It orchestrates words as melody, and conceives the world as
metaphor. The poet turns the riot of day-to-day life to an ordered magic, and the cacophony of
day-to-day speech to an eloquent music.

The unit of verbal music is not the word but the syllable.

As light is both wave and particle, so a poem is both form and content. When heard as form, it is
a verbal music, and when looked at as content, it is an intensity of thought.

Poets make an art of strange conjunctions, which they brace with plaited bands of assonance.

Clumsy writers use clattering alliterations, artful ones arrange delicate traceries of assonance.
Assonance is the more subtle sister of stiff and strutting alliteration. It is the difference between
Swinburne’s jingles and Shakespeare, who is the master of assonance.

The poet paints with lines of consonants and colours of vowels.

Poets compose their music using vowels as their woodwinds and consonants as their strings.

The music of english verse is due in large part to the range of its vowel sounds.

6 The style of prose

Great prose, like the Bible’s, is as impassioned as poetry and as stern as truth.

Prose must be meticulously patterned, as it has no predetermined form, and it must be packed
with insights, as it lacks imagination.

Prose may be chiselled in stone, as in the Bible, or curiously carved in wood, as in the
elizabethans, or etched on glass with a diamond pencil, as in Chesterfield or La Rochefoucauld,
or wrought in steel, like a hard modern style, cold, tensile, polished and unnatural.

The best modern prose was written in the glazed textures and simple shapes of Mies’s
buildings, Mondrian’s pictures and Brancusi’s carvings. Like modern building, it is a modular,
horizontal art of clean transparent lines.

No one wrote a purer white style or a more rank purple one than Wilde.

The best prose has been written by ecstatics or by cynics, by those who see what is not of this
world or those who see through it. Thus Isaiah and La Rochefoucauld. Language can be
purified either by prophetic fire or by moral fury, by the dry light of malice or the drenching flame
of revelation.

Most writing is not prose, as most building is not architecture. And most writers are not writers.
They are mere storytellers.
A poem makes a regular music, rhetoric regular structures. A grand piece of oratory is the
poetry of syntax. It makes similar in form what is dissimilar in sense by repeating patterns of
sounds, words and constructions.

Most poetic prose is doggerel that lacks the excuse of verse.

7 Aphorisms
The world is radically discontinuous and heterogeneous. How then could we set out the truth but
in unconnected bits? ‘Aphorisms,’ as Schlegel points out, ‘are the true form of the universal
philosophy.’ Only jagged fragments are sharp enough to slice their way through the rough skin
of the real, and it’s their fracturing that gives them their serrated edge.

An aphorism must assume much that the writer would be at a loss to explain, and imply much
that it would be at a loss to explain. Like a proud lord, it would prefer to be misunderstood than
to give an account of itself. And even those of the same author can hardly stand one another’s
company without quarrelling.

Hard bright sentences attack like blitzkrieg. They strike with swiftness and focused force, and
leave broad swathes of terrain encircled but unsubdued.

A style needs to be tightly organized, to unleash the havoc of new ideas into the minds of its
readers.

The aphorist works like a lone and patient sniper, stealthy, precise and lethal. ‘Artillery is still too
cumbersome, too complicated,’ Napoleon said. ‘There is yet more to simplify and retrench.’

An aphorism, though uniformed in its crisp impersonality, still reeks of the blood and pain which
it is too proud to show.

A maxim blows up like a little stick of dynamite when ignited by the reader’s insight.

If a book asked its readers to stop and think, they would stop reading it straightway.

8 Poisoned pen
A maxim with no malice would taste as bland as a dish with no herbs. Kind sentences caress
you, but it’s the cruel ones that stick. A poem, Goethe says, is ‘a kiss bestowed on the world.’
But an aphorism is a bite. And if you don’t feel its teeth, then it most likely won’t leave any mark
on you at all. A pungent saying secretes an acid which tries to dissolve the things of time before
time can erase it. And it’s this acid that will grave it in your mind.

Aphorisms condense wisdom in pill form, though most of the pills are poisoned.
An aphorism, Kraus says, ‘is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half-truths.’ It packs plausible fibs
so tight, that when it detonates, its stunned students think they see the truth in a flash.

A shrewd maxim depicts its victims so accurately, that they fail to make out their own likeness in
it. It’s written for those who think that it doesn’t apply to them, so that they can apply it to those
who don’t think at all, as satire is, as Swift said, a mirror, ‘wherein beholders do generally
discover everybody’s face but their own.’

STYLES

9 Style against matter

The realm of form stands aloof from the realm of truth. Good style is not an echo to the sense. It
is its counterpoint. It’s only in kitsch that form strives to mimic its content. In a great work it
masters it. It does not pretend to enact what it portrays. Its task is not to display the object more
legibly, but to manifest its medium more shiningly.

Style transmits thought without trying to look like it, and gives voice to the vigorousness of a
being who is not of flesh and blood.

We lack the eyes to see the form, and so we guess that it must be a transparent window to its
content.

A great line of poetry is made of sound and sense tightly coiled together, but insulated one from
the other.

Style is a cold moon. It has its own shape, but must draw its light from the sun of its sense.

Thought is the food, style is the flavour. Ideas nourish you, but words give them zest.

10 Creative tension
A work of art gains its force not from the harmony of its form and matter but from their
disjunction. The gap that you must jump to get from the word to the thing makes the adventure
so exhilarating.

Form and sense are not one, though imagination makes them seem so. It renders beauty as
stark and strange as truth, and makes truth glow with a dark allure.

Imagination is the most arbitrary thing in the world. But the task of the artist is to find a form that
makes it seem inevitable. Strong writers make their own strange phrasing of a thought seem the
one shape that it could take. A flawless sentence flows like water and stands as stiff as stone.
Style is not a lens through which the artist views the world. It is not vision, but creation.

11 The violence of life, the serenity of style

Art is an unbearable world of truth made bearable by an unblemished world of form. The
bleakest vision projects the brightest style, which is the jubilee of art. The sole benediction that
artists have to bestow on this hellish world is the transfiguration of their style.

Nature blazes like a heraclitean fire of dynamic violence. Art is a parmenidean sphere of
faultless equilibrium and repose. Art is as fierce as a warrior, and as stately as a priest acting
out a decorous ceremony for its savage god.

In a lustrous poem, such as Homer’s, the form fights the content, and moves as sedately as the
action seethes with broiling violence. The style rests as crystalline and white as the tale steams
with a scarlet grandeur of blood and fire.

Thought is the gunpowder, style is the match.

12 Style is not natural

Artifice is art’s nature. To write plainly calls for great artfulness. And to write unaffectedly, you
have to forsake nature. You reach spareness by an extravagance of effort.

Simplicity is so foreign to our nature, that we can come at it only by way of an elaborate self-
alienation.

Not one thing about writing is natural. And if there were, it would be the lazy conventionality
which words each thought in the first stale phrase that comes to mind. Set out to write artlessly
or extempore, and what you make will be a hotchpotch of habit and fashion. But most readers
think a style looks natural if it conforms to the unnatural catchphrases that they are used to
hearing.

13 The artifice of style

No literary style is like everyday speech. It must be more artful, whether too complex and
embellished, or too simple and stripped down.

Only a seeming artist aims at seeming artless, though to look too artificial is a naive failure of
art.

Artists never let themselves go. And they are never more controlled and calculating than when
working up their most passionate effects.
The style of a primaeval age is as far removed from nature as can be. Nothing could be more
artificial, stylized, hieratic and conventional.

It takes a great deal of practice to appear spontaneous. And you earn vivacity by dint of
systematic drudgery. Thus Matisse by joyless toil made designs of radiant vitality and delight. In
art free grace must be won by grinding labour.

The best writing is too simple to be natural. Is there any style more mannered than Whitman’s
barbaric yawp?

14 The style of place

Craft your style out of the place that you imagine and the language that is given. A style is a
time and place that has found its own shape in words. Those who aim to make a work that will
last must trace the timeless contours of their age by eschewing its incidental idioms.

True originators shun historicism for anachronism. What do they care for archaeology or
antiquarianism? ‘There is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the
present,’ Picasso judged, ‘it must not be considered at all.’ Rapturous vision makes all things
new. The historical sense benumbs the imagination. ‘All beautiful things,’ as Wilde says, ‘belong
to the same age.’

Torrid zones such as the Mediterranean have fashioned a limpid formalism. Frosty cities like
Paris or St Petersburg have sniffed out a clammy fevered psychology. The shivering north
disclosed the sweating secrets of the heart. The warm nude south carved the cool essential
forms.

Dialect in fiction should make a strange tribal poetry, as it does in Twain or Faulkner, not a
documentary transcription.

Some writers have shaped a desert style, stark, remorseless and sparse, which lays bare the
unadorned lines and planes of the form beneath. It is language pared to the bone. The Bible is a
flinty wilderness of burning sublimities, Shakespeare a teeming woodland of boundless
imagination.

All spots on earth are fit settings for art, since all are outposts of hell.

15 The style of pride and shame

Pride gives life to form, conceit kills it. Sincerity makes the style of conceit, artifice the style of
pride. Presumption and habit pervert taste, pride and premeditation purge it. All that is great we
owe to pride, all growth comes from its monsters.
Conceited people presume that all that they say is worth saying. The proud know that they must
make good each word that they dare to use. Braggarts are as loquacious as the fastidious are
laconic, who are too proud or too modest to explain.

Artists draw their energy from their pride, and their taste from their shame. Pride directs, shame
corrects. Pride bestows force and exuberance. Shame supplies awareness and restraint.
Audacity spurs you to write, and shame schools you to write well. Pride hates to seem
conventional, and shame hates to seem eccentric. But when they couple they breed fresh
thoughts in foursquare bodies.

There can be no taste or standards where there is no shame. And we won’t put up with
standards, because they might teach us to feel shame. So we have democracy to spare us from
both.

Good taste is a kind of pride, which instils in us a kind of modesty and restraint.

Guilt and fear dig up the truth, and pride shapes for it a form, which craft refines in line with the
inherited canons of taste.

Shy people write as a way to show off without needing to quit their room.

16 Simplify, simplify
Life complicates but impoverishes. The task of the artist or thinker is to enrich the world by
simplifying it.

Simplify your means, elevate your aims.

‘To be simple,’ Emerson says, ‘is to be great.’ Simplicity is the test of great thoughts. ‘When a
thought is too feeble to be stated simply,’ Vauvenargues says, ‘it ought to be repudiated.’ Those
who don’t have enough matter to write short sentences have to write long ones.

In art simplest is strongest, as the Bible shows. To do justice to large thoughts, you have to
keep to the smallest words. Great writers have a power to simplify which finds the most spartan
terms for the most sumptuous ideas. ‘Style,’ as Cocteau said, ‘is a simple way to say
complicated things.’

The glory of english and the key to its poetry is the wealth of its one syllable words.

What is simple will last longest, since it will coast through time with least drag from the diurnal
tides of fact or fashion.
What is truly simple looks unfathomably strange or unbearably dull to our eyes, dazzled as they
are by all our intricate novelties.

A perfectly plain style must be perfectly executed, since it has no extrinsic adornments to fall
back on.

17 Exactness
An exact style has the abstract rigour of a geometrical figure, not the representational accuracy
of a photograph. It crafts precise forms by disdaining slight details. It doesn’t deign to discuss
the pennies that it owes to low fact. So it seems neat, since it has trimmed off the roughness of
specifics. And it glides, because it meets so little friction from turbulent actuality. It subjects the
chaos of real life to the dispassionate canons of abstract form.

Don’t search for the narrowly correct word. Search for the strange and uncontainable one. The
right word points to what all the world knows. The wrong word may give you the key to a
startling truth that no one has an inkling of. But you have to hunt diligently to find just the right
wrong word. The exact word crimps your vision, the inappropriate one sets it free to wander.
‘The cistern contains, the fountain overflows,’ as Blake wrote.

In most texts more is lost in the original than is lost in translation. It is those books that are not
much worth reading that need to be read in their own language.

18 Detail
Art distils truth, which too strong an infusion of vapid fact would dilute. ‘Our life is frittered away
by detail,’ Thoreau warns. ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Like all grand authors, the Lord, when he wrote his
holy books, cared more for style than for the literal truth. ‘It is the nature of all greatness,’ Burke
says, ‘not to be exact.’ What you gain in exactness you lose in elegance.

Good art has an eye for the telling nuance. Great art cleaves to the abstract and elemental.
Good art is detailed, fluent and relaxed. Great art is stark, stilted and hieratic. Good art reflects
life. Great art imprints on it its own strange vision. A good writer shows you how life looks and
feels. A great one shows you what it means. ‘Art,’ as Aristotle notes, ‘does not detail the
outward guise of things but their inward import.’

19 Brevity
You have to keep to a few terse words, if you hope to reveal the vast essential. But we now go
too fast and want too much to submit to the strenuous concentration of brevity. And writers have
had to grow more and more voluminous, to catch up with our distracted haste.
The best writers, as Renard points out, had few things to say and said them in few words. But
most authors lack the patience to find out how little they have to say, since they have such
ready means to say as much as they like. ‘Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give
account thereof in the day of judgment.’ And the judgment takes place at every act of reading.

Most works, like most lives, would be the better for being shorter. We scribble too much, and
live too long. ‘A big book,’ as Callimachus wrote, ‘is a big evil.’ How small a part of a great book
is a great book. How small a part of a great man or woman is a great man or woman. And how
short a part of a great life is a great life. ‘One could say of almost all literature that it is too long,’
as Renard remarked. But what author would not exempt from this stricture their own lapidary
works?

The writer must be a spendthrift of thought and a miser of syllables.

20 Compression
Even the most frugal style draws from a rich mine of linguistic resources. And even the most
opulent style is a deliberate impoverishment of means. As Goethe points out, ‘Mastery is shown
in limitation.’ In life luxury is bought with tremendous diligence, in art bareness is. There is, as
Yeats wrote, ‘more enterprise in walking naked.’

Rich style is unnatural redundance and unnatural compression. It is at once rigorously sparing
and impetuously abundant. Not one word more than is needed, but a whole book more than is
wanted. And verse is both the most extravagant and the most concentrated form of speech.

The energy of art both compacts and expands what it works on. It is finely focused yet
luminously suggestive.

Good prose is compressed. A good poem is infinite.

Language is a tree that needs much pruning to bear fruit.

Verse and prose are both prone to wordiness, verse by the fluency of its form, prose by the
ease of its formlessness.

21 Clarity
Writers know that beauty looks like lucidity. So they polish their style so smooth that it seems
transparent, but it’s in fact reflecting back its own opaque effulgence.

Keep clarity to the surface, and let all below breed darkness and ambiguity, heaving monsters of
the deep.
The best sentences are clear enough to be grasped at one reading, but they are so rich that
they need to be read over and over before they will yield up all the juice of their meaning.

22 Bad style
‘Plain living and high thinking are no more,’ as Wordsworth said. How could we write well, when
we don’t wish to live well? We want to live luxuriously and hectically, so how could we write
thoughtfully and unpretentiously?

A prose that has been scoured of stale phrases would seem dull to most readers, who have
grown used to their gloss and smoothness. They find it flat, if it doesn’t pop and fizz with newly
bottled clichés. But writing that tries to match vernacular verve and liveliness dies soonest and
smells worst.

People don’t just fail to avoid clichés, they go out of their way to find them, considering them the
smartest form in which they could frame their thoughts.

You can learn as much from some bad writing as you can from good. Or if you can’t, at least it’s
not as hard to find.

Young people love striking effects. And so they are prone to mistake vehemence for intensity,
and intensity for profundity.

Climaxes have their place in fireworks, not in art. Strong works of art, such as Shakespeare’s
plays or Paradise Lost, fade out on a quiet note.

23 Out with the adverb

Adjectives tint the plain face of beauty with cosmetics, adverbs scent it with a false fragrance. A
healthy sentence should smell of nothing but its own clean form. Those who have little to say
work up its effects with colourful qualifiers. They use sheaves of words as vain italics to lend
emphasis to their hefty ones which they don’t trust to speak loud enough on their own.

Only authors who pay no heed at all to their style, and those, like Pater, who seem to pay no
heed to anything else, have found how to write execrably.

24 Cannibal style
Some writers, such as Babel, Céline or Houellebecq, have fashioned a cannibal style, brutal,
lean and agile, at once savage and tender, like Pollock’s paintings or the Rite of Spring. As
Dickinson wrote, they ‘deal their pretty words like blades.’
The artist needs all the traits of a cunning hunter, a fatal grace, a fierce elegance, a cold
playfulness, cleanliness, stealth, poise and equanimity, patience to wait for the right moment,
nimbleness when it comes.

With regard to timing, an artist, like a soldier, has to master five skills, frugality of time, which
abridges, modulation of time, to shift speed, exactitude and fitness, to time each thing right,
deceit of time, to wrong-foot opposition, and an eventual submission to time, which knows how
and when to end it.

Good prose, like champagne, should be both astringent and mildly intoxicating. Too little acid,
and a style lacks tang, too much, and it will curdle. ‘Take it, and eat it up, and it shall make thy
belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.’

The power of understatement is overrated. A tuning-fork is no match for a sledge-hammer. As

Swift noted, ‘Eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.’

STYLE AND SELF

25 The masks of style

Style apprentices artists to wisdom and tranquillity. And yet they prove wise or serene only in
their style, which is the better self that they don’t care to become in life. Like Poe or Baudelaire,
they are content to camp out in a grimy sty, while they build their gorgeous palace of art next
door. An artist is glad to swap the thin fictions of life for the imaginative superabundance of art.
A clean bright work can be founded only on the filth and squalor of a life.

False style is an involuntary confession of our flaws. True style is a deliberate atonement for our
mean virtues.

Style is the best of all that we cannot be.

26 The inferior stuff of self

Only those who have no more promising stuff to work on would make it their aim to fashion a
self. A saint aspires to self-denying subjectivity, an artist to an impersonal selfishness. Saints
effect their miracles by faith, artists create theirs by form. A person is subjective but not singular,
art is individual but abstract.

Style is pose not personality. Only a maladroit style is ‘the man himself,’ a grab-bag of
accidents, counterfeitings, lapses of taste, thefts, conformity and caprices, bad lessons badly
learnt. I hope my style is nothing like me, so ugly, stupid, vain and cowardly.
Style is what an artist has in place of a soul.

If living is our great work, as Montaigne claims, what clumsy and incompetent artists we must
be. And yet we are as pleased with the hash we have made as God was on the sixth day of
creation. Since each of us is the fashioner of our own life, what a masterpiece it must be.

We form our style out of what we most admire. But what we most admire is the whitewashed
image of our own heart mimicking the tired idols of our time. And so all that we forge is kitsch.

27 Self is not the source of style

We don’t write well, because we write as we speak or as others write. We try to express our
own personality or to mimic their manner. But true artists shape their style by not being
themselves and yet being like no one else.

A supreme artist, like a master criminal, leaves the fewest fingerprints. It’s the bunglers whose
smudge can be found all over the scene.

Strong artists don’t work to realize their personality. They surrender to their medium so as to
actualize all its possibilities.

To succeed in expressing one’s self through one’s art would be to fail one’s art.

Good style does not come from within. You must build it up slowly from without by painstaking
daily observation and practice.

People are in such haste to find a style of their own, that they rush straight into copying others.

Literature is an ardent expression of estrangement, a mocking expression of wonder, a sane

expression of delirium, a scrupulous expression of depravity, and a lucent expression of
bewilderment. ‘The finest things,’ Gide notes, ‘are those that madness prompts and reason
writes.’ The tale of every frenzied Ahab is told by sober Ishmael.

28 To reveal art and conceal the artist

Artists don’t aim to show who they are through their art. They aim to replace themselves with
their art. They bear no more resemblance to their work than the machine bears to its output.
What’s the point of working, if what you make is no better than what you are? ‘To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art’s aim,’ as Wilde showed. But to conceal art and display the artist is the
aim of kitsch. True artists flaunt their art in each line and tone. Vain performers strive to hide
their art and make it look accessible, as a trick to glue their watchers’ gaze to their own shabby
dramatics.
Only clumsy daubers spill their soul on the canvas.

An artist is a philistine who happens to have a knack for fabricating works of art. Their art grows
less where they try to be more than that, as Delacroix and the romantics show, whose pictures
and music were debauched by literature.

Art is a long vanishing, and artists put up a style to charm our eyes while they disappear. Style
is the personality of art, which they build up by dismantling their own.

29 The style of happiness

‘Only in work,’ wrote Delacroix, ‘have I felt altogether happy.’ Out of their pain artists make their
work, and out of their work they make their happiness, and this sets them free to go on working.
In its mellow autumn they harvest the fruits sown in less settled weather. ‘They that sow in tears
shall reap in joy,’ as the psalmist sings. They may learn by suffering, but they can make no use
of what they’ve learnt till they’ve found peace once more. The stings of life may school them, but
what they glean from them is a lesson of delight.

Sad days leave wounds, glad ones leave works. Delight purges artists’ style, and perfects their
disenchantment. Misery dins their ears like a pelting tempest, but in joy’s halcyon calm they can
hear the soft voice of reason and inspiration. When they gain their happiness and slough off
their illusions, they grow free to turn their back on the world’s work and do their own.

Some writers, like Beckett, have had their style scoured by desolation, and some, like Emerson,
have had theirs burnished by happiness. Sorrow grinds your style smooth, and joy polishes it to
a high finish.

IRONY

30 Irony
The world wants so much and so little from you, that the best way to meet it is with cheap irony.

Irony upholds true seriousness in the face of the self-serving solemnity of the frivolous world. It
is a revenge of the free play of the mind on our regnant moral code.

Irony doubles and disguises the self, imagination fashions new ones. It is imagination’s
adolescence. Its task is to wean you from the literal, the didactic, the earnest and the personal.
Sterne is the foremost ironic imaginer, as Shakespeare is the foremost poetic imaginer. Poetry
multiplies its perspectives by means of metaphor, prose does so by means of irony.

Irony is the bee’s sting, imagination is the honey.

Irony is mock modesty that we use for real mockery.

Self-knowledge strips you of all your decent self-deceits. So what can you use to clothe your
naked soul but a few rags of irony?

The most adroit ironists, like Flaubert, don’t tone down idiocies but pump them up, till they
balloon and burst.

31 Artifice not authenticity

Life deserves no more than your artifice, and art deserves no less. An artist who held to
frankness would be like a sailor who hugged the shore. They must put out on the deep sea of
dissembling. Insincerity, which others use as a permit to cheat, for an artist is a passport to
imagine.

The poet affirms everything, but believes nothing. Sincerity makes art small. ‘The truest poetry
is the most feigning,’ as Shakespeare wrote. Candour would make a plausible actor, but an
inept artist. Dickens, Emerson commented, was ‘too consummate an artist to have a thread of
nature left.’ A writer such as Hemingway who gives pride of place to authenticity ends up acting
the role of a smug poseur. The task of the artist is to ward off authenticity with artifice, sincerity
with irony, and spontaneity with care and labour.

32 Sincerity is the enemy of style

When the romantics made up their minds that the aim of art is to express the whole self, artists
were sure to become virtuosi, performers, showmen, celebrities, hawkers of their own
sensibility.

Scrupulous style is a calculated hypocrisy. ‘All profound things love masks,’ as Nietzsche said.
The mind that discovers loves to hide. A creator must put up a curtain of form to elude
earnestness and tell the truth.

Poets need not be sincere in their feelings, as painters need not be sincere about pigments and
brushstrokes, but they must know how to use them.

There is a bad poet in each of us, and it comes out when a true poet would be lost for words.

33 The ironist exposed

If you use irony to put others off the scent of knowing you, you must, like Hamlet, earn the right
to your irony by knowing yourself. Some people know how to mask their self, and yet don’t know
the self which it’s their aim to mask.
My irony, like my sincerity, conceals me from myself. And, like my self-concealment, it reveals
me to others. I use it on the assumption that I know my real self and that I’ll be able to obscure it
from others. But instead I bare it to them and obscure it from my own sight. We erect a screen
of irony to conceal us, and don’t see that all our deformities are projected on it.

We try so hard to hide from others, that we lose ourselves. And though proud of our ability to
see through all pretences, we end up hoodwinked by our own evasive postures. ‘We are so
used to disguising ourselves from others,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘that in the end we disguise
ourselves from ourselves.’

What literary private now isn’t kitted out in the regulation camouflage of world-weary irony?
Trust in its cover, and you’ll wind up lost in a wilderness of appearances.

Some people spoil their talk by larding it with too much irony, as some cooks spoil a dish by
adding too much salt.

An ironist is like those teasers who refuse to tell you a secret but love to keep hinting that they
have one.

34 Satanic style
God is in earnest. Bright Lucifer is an ironist. That’s why he was hurled out of heaven, and how
he survived.

The devil’s name in literature is legion. Most of its great characters are his avatars.

Irony is an aggressive game of cold power which is played by those who feel aggrieved that
they have none. It is a feint to draw in its enemies and lay them open to attack.

Irony is the revenge of the witty and impotent on the dim and self-important, who are therefore
too dull to feel its sting.

Self-mockery is the sly magnanimity of the powerless. And mercy is the disdainful mockery of
the victor.

Some people use deference as Socrates used self-derision. They lure their dupes into a trap
that will lay bare their fatuity more starkly. And fools may seem self-abasing, since they lack the
sense to be anything but foolish.

CHARACTER
35 Character is not personality
Great characters have three traits, awareness, menace and vulnerability. They know their
hearts so well, that they are a danger to themselves and others. Milton’s Satan is their
prototype, a fiend redeemed by verbal fire and impassioned intellect.

Art has characters, the world must make do with personalities. And character is to personality
what art is to life. Character is imagination, personality is cliché. Character makes music.
Personality makes noise, striking and vivacious, but random, meaningless and repetitious. A
figure on a narrow stage may display more depth and breadth in three hours than most of us do
in all our years. How little we cram into our long and hectic lives, but how much they bring to
light in a brief existence in words. We have nothing to say, and it takes us seventy years to say
it.

Great characters don’t have great motives. But they are greater than their motives. Real people
interest us by their knotty and recondite intents, grand characters by the eloquent sense that
they make of their intolerable plight.

Those who have no life but on a flat page or stage lead the fullest life of all. And those who
tenant the dream of fiction are able to wake to the truth, since they alone can bear its harsh
luminosity.

36 The great characters are poets

The great imagined characters are not personalities but poets. Each is a fragment of the poetic
mind, of which the poet is a yet lesser fragment. Writers don’t feel what a real lover, prince or
madman feels. They take on these roles as masks to voice the thoughts that no lover, prince or
madman would conceive. And they use words that no lover, prince or madman would use. They
fashion characters who have earned our ears.

A god or a great literary character must be more or less insane and yet possess an irresistible
discursive authority.

Character makes itself by what it makes. The best ones, like the authors who give them life, are
makers and not moral beings. What makes them interesting is not the events that have shaped
them but the words which they shape.

37 Shakespeare, master of character

Shakespeare made hundreds of poets, but not one lifelike personality, just as he wrote
thousands of lines of great verse, but not one that would sound natural in day-to-day talk. He
doesn’t inhabit the souls of real types. He multiplies himself to make unlikely imaginers. With
ungrudging egoism he makes all his figures prodigal imaginers like himself, endowing them with
a matchless articulate force. Unlike the demiurge who made this maimed world, he shaped
nothing that fell short of his best gifts. He is beyond compare, not because he knew how to
portray a convincing cobbler or knight, but because he didn’t deign to bring on stage a persona
who lacked the power to frame unsurpassed verse. And it was not by empathy with his fellows
but by mastery of form that he made such miracles of feeling language.

Shakespeare’s aim is not to make us feel that his characters are real people. That’s the job of
cheap movies.

Falstaff is ebullient comic humanity made flesh and words. So how could he be anything but a
monster of inhuman and selfish malignity?

38 Shakespeare’s heroes of language

The one action that Shakespeare’s heroes excel in is grand talk. His men and women of action
are men and women of words. Hamlet is their model, because he’s all talk. And what his lovers
love is language. His dark masters, such as Edmund or Aaron, are adepts not of crime but of
language. Like him, they are not ingenious but imaginative, great poets not great plotters. Their
best achievement is their bright words, not their black devilry, as the real witchcraft of his
tricksters, such as Prospero or Puck, is not their cheap sorcery but their rich poetry. They think
and speak compellingly about it, but the mischief or magic that they do is showy and
rudimentary.

Shakespeare’s art grew to ripeness, not as his characters grew more like real people, but as
they grew more like true poets, though the live poet of the Sonnets may be one of the least of
them. Lear outshines Richard, not because he acts like a more authentic king, but because he
speaks a more comprehensive poem.

39 Great characters are not their stories

It costs an author no pains to ascribe to their characters whatever traits or acts they please. But
they must prove their thoughts and words by producing them. They tell us what their puppets
do, but they must show us what they think and say.

The persons in pulp fiction are memorable for what they do. The persons in a great fiction are
memorable for what they say. Thus Conrad summed up the genius of Kurtz, ‘He had something
to say. He said it.’ Hamlet is not a man too paralyzed to act. He is of all characters the one most
energetic in the sole kind of action that is germane to a literary persona, the forming of
memorable phrases. A great literary character is a puppet which, like its creator, has been made
to speak words which will live.
40 Character is style
Personality becomes character where thought catches articulate fire. Like Cleopatra, all their
other elements they give to baser life. Character is the verbal play that is surplus to their role in
the plot. The most solid and indelible characters are words, mere words. So they can no more
be paraphrased than a poem. Both they and their framers have just as much power as the airy
speech that they use. They are more than anything else a voice, an emanation of language.
Their one accomplishment that can’t be shammed is their capacity to speak great words.

In life chance and temperament mould style. In art style gives shape to character.

41 Character and narrator

Each supreme work of fiction must have room for at least one genius. But in most of them the
sole one is the narrator, since the only kind of mastery that a writer knows or esteems is the one
that can write. Balzac the commentator overbears his creatures. Austen has more wit than
Elizabeth Bennett, and more spirit than Fanny Price. Ishmael’s diabolic eloquence overmatches
Ahab’s diabolic questing. Proust’s personages are dwarfed in the vast apartment of his
sensibility. Dostoyevsky may be the one author who made his characters more capacious and
articulate than his narrators. This may also be the reason why there have been no more than
two great dramatists, Shakespeare and Ibsen.

Any literary form that is designed to present the workings of a mind, be it dialogue, soliloquy,
internal monologue, free indirect discourse or stream of consciousness, is as engrossing as the
mind that it purports to present.

42 Character is not in the details

A great character is unencumbered with the minutiae that comprise live men and women, their
daily round, partialities and loathings, frowsy opinions, kin and credentials, or the patched-up
identity that they hug. Writers don’t assiduously individualize them with the shallow tics, quirks
and habits that distinguish a person of flesh and blood. Yet we still seek to know them as we
would a real man or woman. So we add these cheap traits back in, as if we were infusing them
with more depth, since this is the sole kind of depth that we see in life.

Great writers give us few clues as to the physical appearance of their figures, not because they
want to leave us free to visualize it, but because it is of no account. They don’t tell us what they
look like, they show us what they think and say.
KNOW YOURSELF

Contents

Self-knowledge

Costs of self-knowledge

Self-deception

If you have gained real self-knowledge, you suspect that others have not.

You could redeem most of your faults or misfortunes if you used them to learn what you are. But
most rob you of the will to do so.

We learn by doubting. And our self is the one thing that we can’t doubt.

The self is its own language. Self is its noun, bustling self-interest is the verbs, vanity the
epithets, personality the adverbs, and convenience the conjunctions. And, as with a language,
you don’t understand your own self till you’ve studied others.

The classic mode of avoiding self-knowledge is to identify the self with the norms of its society.
And the romantic mode of avoiding self-knowledge is to inflate, dramatize and idealize the
solitary self, while identifying it with the spirit of nature.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

1 Self-knowledge by knowing others

Self-knowledge comes from knowing others.

Nothing is so unlike you that it can’t help you to learn what you are. You are able to get to know
your true self because you are like others. But you are spurred to get to know it because you
differ from them.

The human race has grown in self-awareness, because there have been a few rare seekers,
such as Nietzsche, who have dared to anatomize their own souls, and who are therefore in no
way like the rest of our self-oblivious kind.

The sole thing that some people have to teach you is what they don’t know about themselves.
You get to know what you are by observing those who don’t know what they are.

2 The proud alone can afford self-knowledge

If your aim is to know yourself, you must call on your dignity to overrule your vanity. You have to
sacrifice some of the moral pride which assures you of your innocence to your intellectual pride
which is intent on mastering such an unpleasant theme. It costs a great deal, and you must be
rich in self to afford it. The defeated are too poor, and the conceited don’t wish to pay.

Those who have gained self-knowledge have climbed the peak of pride and have plunged into
the pit of humiliation. In order to know yourself, you must sink all the way to the bottom, where
it’s too murky to see a thing.

Pride and self-disgust plait the ropes by which you have to haul yourself up to self-knowledge.
Only the proud feel enough shame to learn who they are and have enough dignity to bear it.

How could we endure the awareness that makes us think poorly of ourselves, if we didn’t dare
to think still worse of others? And by a happy chance nature here stands us in good stead.

Those who win self-knowledge look with envious contempt on the rest who never meet with the
same misfortune.

3 Shame inculcates self-knowledge

The good have too much guileless innocence to want to know who they are, and the powerful
have too much brazen cunning.

Melancholiacs and cynics best know themselves, the first because they’re so shut up in their
own hearts, and the second because they burrow into the hearts of others. Shame flays you so
that you can see what lies beneath your own skin. And malice gives you the passion and
detachment to dissect your fellow patients.

If you set out to learn what you are, you have to dare to think as shamelessly as you see others
act. But most of us fool ourselves shamefully, so that we won’t have to feel ashamed.

A shameless age such as our own is an Eldorado for an explorer of silliness and vanity.

Shame goads us to know ourselves, and self-knowledge makes us more ashamed. And yet we
are proud that we know ourselves so well. ‘I know my heart,’ crowed the incorrigible self-
deceiver Rousseau.

Self-knowledge is embarrassment recollected in anxiety.

In order to reach self-awareness, you must first cross the valley of abjection. Disgrace shows us
the best but most unwelcome truths. When he plucked the pernicious apple of self-reflection,
Adam learnt to feel shame and to hide from the Lord who knew him.

Most of us are too self-intoxicated to sober up to the dry truth of our condition.

Shame is the golden inspirer. ‘Art is born of humiliation,’ as Auden said and Van Gogh proved.
Shame is the charcoal, which the pressure of thought condenses to the hard diamond of truth.

4 Guilt leads us to self-knowledge

How could the human race have grown so perceptive, if it had not been plagued by its penchant
for making moral judgements? But how could it have plumbed its depths, if it had not freed itself
from their shallowness? You can dive deep enough to locate the heart’s murky treasure only if
shame weighs you down. But you can’t rise to the air with what you have found if you have not
shrugged off its load. You can afford to learn who you are, if you possess a rich fund of guilt but
feel no duty to keep up a dear-bought faith in your own probity.

Guilt is morally infertile but creatively fruitful, quickening our invention of sins and our hypocrisy
in excusing them.

Hypocrites dwell so far from the wellsprings of their own acts, that they can scan them with a
clear eye. By disowning them they win the freedom to dissect them.

5 Self-knowledge through sin

Christianity scourged the instincts till they quivered with an excoriated sentience. Its depraved
angels have more to teach us than the innocent nymphs and spotless satyrs of pagan cults.
Only such a sick surgeon could probe our morbid souls. Faith was the serpent which tempted us
to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It uncovered the hell that we keep hidden
within us. It brought sin into the world. And sin taught us what we are, and made us more
perverse and more profound.

Pagan virtue was far more stupefying than christian depravity. Since we have been saved, at
least sin stings, attracts and instructs us more than it used. Faith forced the strong to turn
hypocrite, and so gave them the poisoned fruit of self-dissection. It urged them to vivisect their
sick souls. And this taught them that they are made not for charity or faith but for concupiscence
and self-conviction. It flayed some, such as Augustine, Pascal, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky or
Flannery O’Connor, and pricked them to catalogue each graze in a throbbing knowledge of the
infernal heart.

Only a misshapen mind can focus the rays of truth in one penetrating beam.
The greeks did not know solitude. So how could they know themselves?

COSTS OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

6 The cost of self-knowledge

If I knew myself better, I might not wound myself so badly, though I might not be able to bear my
wounds so well. Self-knowledge seems to cause you no hurt, till it has demolished your life. Like
an unexploded bomb, it does no damage till it’s been detonated by calamity. It is as much use
as an umbrella in a lightning storm.

Consciousness complicates our pain, and keys up our natural fears to a nameless dread. It tells
us that we each have a measureless worth, while reminding us that we are zeroes. It roots in
our remembrance all that we have lost, and whispers to us that we are soon to die.

Self-knowledge is like a bad smell which you can’t wash off. It makes you offensive both to
yourself and others.

It’s those who don’t know themselves that assume they would be gainers if others saw them as
they are.

To gain self-knowledge is to lose not only the whole world, but your own soul as well.

One of the things that those who come to know themselves don’t learn is what fools their self-
knowledge will make of them.

7 The hell of self-knowledge

Life is fraught with disasters, but none more dire than self-discovery.

Self-knowledge, as Socrates said, may make life worth living, but it also makes it so hard to live.

The only people who find happiness are the ones who fail to find themselves. Happiness
forecloses on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge drives out happiness.

The light of self-knowledge is a lurid hellfire. Heaven is bathed in the soft light of self-approval.

If we knew ourselves as God knows us, we would be in hell. So where is God, who knows us
all?

Beware of those who know themselves. Once they have seen that the moral law would damn
them, what can they do but reject it?

The self is a shallow bog. Try to fathom it, and it will drag you down to the muddiest death.
8 Self-knowledge is the enemy of the self
Self-knowledge disintegrates the self. It is self-deception that keeps it whole.

We are at once the maze, the monster and the seeker. And our self-recognition turns out to be a
self-consuming. The heart is a cramped labyrinth. Find its inmost chamber, and a pygmy
minotaur will devour you.

Self-knowledge betrays you like a fifth columnist, who knows all that you want to keep dark and
colludes with the world to bring you down. It opens a crack in your happiness for your anguish to
seep through. It skins you, and leaves you tingling at each stroke of woe.

Your self-knowledge tempts you to doubt your own self and to mistrust others. And both these
lead them to mistrust you. What reveals you to yourself will estrange you from those near you.
And what estranges you from them will reveal you to yourself.

9 We fear others’ self-knowledge

We relish fictional characters who know their depths as much as we are repelled by real people
who do so. It is only figures in books who can bear to know the hell that burns in their hearts, or
whose knowledge we can bear. And it is only in books that dissemblers, like Iago or Satan, fool
their gulls but own the truth to themselves.

We curse those who tell lies about themselves, but we shrink still more from those who blab the
truth about themselves, for fear that they might do the same to us. It’s their self-understanding
that we dread and not our own. If they are so indecent as to pry into their own hearts, how much
less would they scruple to pry into ours? They are like bees that can sting but not have their
bowels torn out, since they have torn out their own.

The world won’t want to know you, if you are foolhardy enough to know yourself.

People don’t fear what they don’t know. But they may avoid knowing what they fear, so that they
won’t fear it more.

SELF-DECEPTION

10 We do not know ourselves

Most of us know our hearts so partially that we don’t doubt that we know them in full. ‘So it is
with this knowing about oneself,’ writes Montaigne. ‘The fact that all see themselves as
satisfactorily analyzed and as sufficiently expert on the subject are signs that no one knows
anything at all about it.’ It’s hard to tell which we have more need of, to misapprehend who we
are, or to assume that we comprehend who we are.

When you set out to know yourself, the first lesson that you have to learn is that you never will.

Most fools have more sense than to want to know themselves any better than they do.

I don’t learn who I am, since there is no one that could teach me. It is the one subject that I
would have to get to know by my own introspection. ‘You are the problem,’ Kafka warns. ‘No
scholar to be found far and wide.’

I predict my own moods and responses no more presciently than anyone else would, and I
interpret them no more perceptively. And it’s from these slippery surmises that I form my
sensations and feelings. And what course they take will be due in part to the misjudgements I
make about what caused them.

A tree does not know that it is wretched, as Pascal said. But no more do most of us know how
wretched we are.

11 Self-deception
The mind is a finely-tuned instrument for playing itself false.

‘We are never deceived,’ says Goethe, ‘we deceive ourselves.’ How is it that we are such
shallow beings, yet such deep enigmas to our own selves?

When the heart knows itself, it is perforce double. When it does not, it is a far more duplicitous
organ.

I’m glad to hear anything of myself, so long as it’s not the truth. And I’m glad to hear the truth
about everything else.

I’m too lazy to get to know my real self. But how doggedly I toil to burnish the brazen figurine of
my sham one.

The motives of our own acts are no less mysterious to us than are their repercussions.

12 Self-interest makes us deceive ourselves

There’s no lie that some people won’t tell themselves to justify doing whatever they think they
have to do to get whatever they think they want.

‘The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?’ I have so many ways of not knowing
it, and such strong incentives not to want to. I want too many other things too much.
We can’t see ourselves as we are, because our vision is filled with the external things that we
crave. And we can’t see things as they are, because all that we care to look at is ourselves.

Latch on to the right illusions, and you are well on the way to fulfilling your dreams.

You get to what you want more quickly if you’re not saddled with self-knowledge. But if you don’t
know who you are, you will want what won’t satisfy you, and you will get what you don’t want.
But you will be spared this knowledge too, and you will be left free to go on wanting.

We are saved from the ravages of self-knowledge by the buffer of our smugness and by the
simple expedient of not thinking.

I can’t know myself in full, since some outcrop of ambition or vanity always blocks my sight. I try
to dupe my rivals to gain a start on them, and I have to dupe myself so as to enjoy the fruits of it.

13 Self-regard makes us deceive ourselves

We flee self-awareness, for fear that it might cost us success. And yet there are times when we
would choose to go under rather than grasp who we are.

Some people mistake their self for the half-truths that they hold about themselves, and some for
the half-truths that their admirers hold about them.

I love myself too well to wish to know myself better.

Our illusions play a wide repertoire of tunes, but all in the swelling key of our conceit. Whatever
tincture dyes them, we weave them from the unbreakable threads of our self-belief.

Most people are so full of rot because they are so full of themselves.

We shroud our motives in mystery, since most of them are so mean.

Self-love makes a life of self-deception absolutely essential. If we knew what we were, we might
not find it quite so easy to love ourselves as we do. We know others better than we know
ourselves, which is why we can’t love them so much. And if we knew ourselves better, we might
find that we don’t love others as much as we think we do.

We have good reasons not to know ourselves. And we have good reason not to know what
these reasons are.

I think I know others because I see their weak points. And I think I know myself because I don’t
see my own.
14 We love our false self-image
We surround ourselves with mirrors, so as not to see what we are. They reflect back to us what
we have made up our minds we look like. We want to gape at our gorgeous image, but not
come face to face with our true self. If they showed us the truth, we would have smashed them
all long ago.

There are two ways to hate a thing, by hating it for what it is or by hallowing its fake effigy. And
isn’t this what people do with the image of their own self? They love it more than all the world.
But since they know it so distantly, isn’t it a mere shifty similitude that they adore?

We so dote on this self of ours of which we know so small a part. Our self-love burns with a
queer kind of ardour. We can’t bear to spend a moment alone with its object divested of our
jangling distractions.

We set up our own self as the god of our idolatry, and like any deity we revere it from afar in fog
and mystery. The less we know of it, the more devoutly we worship it.

15 The world, the friend of self-deception

The world throbs with deception and self-deception, like the systole and diastole of the heart.
Few things are dearer to us than the cheap self-deceits which we hope to pass off on the world
for a high price.

The world, which knows nothing but the outermost shows, may sound us more inwardly than we
do ourselves.

Most people are ready to know what they are at their fringe, so that they won’t have to find out
what they are at their core. They see the margin where their self meets the world which they
plan to stamp their will on.

I know myself through the mediation of the world. And so I don’t know my true self at all.

The strong must be weak in self-knowledge, because self-knowledge would make them weak in
the world.

People want to learn how the world works because they want to control it. But they don’t want to
know what they are since they would have to control themselves.

Most of us know no more of ourselves than our own self-deceptions. And that’s all we need to
know to make our way in this world of fraud. To know more would do us no good, and might do
us great harm.
How could we guess how small we are, when we seem to cut such a large figure in our own
small world?

16 Too near and too far for self-knowledge

We can’t see others clearly, because they are too far from us, and we don’t see ourselves,
because we are too close. We don’t make out what others are like, because we care too little for
them. And we don’t want to make out what we are like, since we care too much. We can’t get
outside our own minds, but we have no will to go within them. The motives of others seem so
tangled and inscrutable because we can’t gain access to them, and our own do so since we
would gain nothing from their scrutiny.

The few who know their soul quite well are still not conversant with large tracts of it which those
who have met them a few times see straight off, as you may figure out a husband or wife more
unerringly than their mate does who has lived with them for years. ‘Most people,’ Lichtenberg
says, ‘are known to others better than they are known to themselves.’

Most people know their souls too remotely to blench at what they might unearth if they knew
them up close. But there are a few who know themselves well enough to dread what they might
find if they knew themselves better.

17 The cowardice of self-deception

Some of the bravest people, who would never flinch from a foe, hide from themselves their
whole lives. They have to go out to face the world, since they lack the nerve to stay in and face
the blank of their own self. They can stare down any threat except the truth.

We refuse to look in our own hearts in the hope that no one else will look in them, as babies
shut their eyes and trust that they can’t be seen. And the world plays along with our game as we
do with toddlers.

18 We pretend to deceive ourselves

To fool others, you must first fool yourself, though at times you need merely seem to.

Hypocrites try to dupe others, sincere people have to dupe themselves. If you can’t hide your
motivations from the world, it may be enough to act as if you were not aware of them yourself.
‘Some men,’ Bradley wrote, ‘are not liars because they always speak the truth, and others
because they never do.’ No one seems more honest than those who keep up a steady pose of
being taken in by their own lies.
Most of us lie to ourselves even when we seem to gain nothing by it. And the few who don’t still
have to put on the guise of a decorous self-deception. If you have glimpsed the truth, you need
all the more to act as if you had not. Self-discernment may be your glory, but ignorance is an
excuse. And often you need an excuse more pressingly than glory.

People fool themselves most of the time. But they also makebelieve that they need to fool
themselves still more than they do. Not even their self-deception is quite genuine. They are not
so dainty that they can’t admit the dirty truth to themselves once in a while. They intuit who they
are a speck more than they seem to, though much less than they think they do.

19 Secrets and self-knowledge

Some people put on a front of secrecy to hide that they have no secrets, and some put on a
front of unreserve to hide that they do. They hoist a bright curtain of ostentatious directness in
order to screen their real selves.

Those who don’t know themselves lay bare what they are by each word that they say. And
those who do know themselves lay bare what they are by each word that they do not say.

Keep your secrets sealed away, and they will keep you more imprisoned. Yet they may yield up
to you the key to unlock the chambers of your heart. Secrets ferment your self-knowledge in the
dark. And repression lays bare far more than openness.

20 Self-concealment
Few people are alert to all the secrets that they try so hard to hide. And if they were, they might
not be able to hide them so well. Those who don’t know what mischief they do still have the craft
to conceal it. How deftly they parry truths which they don’t even perceive.

Most people know themselves so little, that you learn more about them from the things they try
to conceal than from the things they feel driven to confess.

Those who are most opaque to themselves are most transparent to others.

I want others to watch me and feel for me, but not to see through me. So I waste my days
forging an effigy of myself for them to gaze at, and then curse them when they do so from an
angle that I don’t like. I long to be seen and heard but not read, to be exhibited but not exposed,
displayed but not disclosed, and famous but not fathomed. I like to be illuminated by a bright
stage light, but not revealed by a harsh search light.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow that you cannot but be false to everyone.

How do the blind fend off the importunate eyes of others?

21 Nowhere to hide
People spy into you more than you guess, but less than they guess. They spot that part of you
that you were so keen to hide. But that is all they spot. And they are keen to ferret out all but
what matters. They love to pry out a few shadowy secrets, but have no use for what is best in
you. Most of what we strive to conceal lies on our outside, and onlookers catch sight of it more
readily than we do, since we see ourselves from within. Our secrets form our outlying precincts,
which all comers get a glimpse of as they near us.

How quickly others see through me. And yet how little of the truth they bring to light. Those who
boast that they’re an open book would be dismayed by what there is to read in them. If you think
you have nothing to hide, you don’t know yourself very well.

Clothes are the emblems of all our disguises. We spend so much time and care collecting them,
but they don’t fool anyone. ‘Society is a masked ball,’ Emerson said, ‘where everyone hides his
real character, and reveals it by hiding.’
PSYCHOLOGY

Contents

Methods of psychology

Matter of psychology

Grief

Habit

Hope and despair

Love and hate

Friendship

Memory

Youth and age

1 Our many selved self

After a few hundred years we may be close to the uttermost frontiers of scientific learning,
though its propositions are hard to grasp and lie far from common use. But in thousands of
years of discussion, observation and experience, we have explored so little of the heart and its
emotions. And yet it is not a complicated organ. We know how to astonish it, thrill it, please it
and stab it, but we are still at a loss to understand it. Like the weather, its delicately poised
agitation is formed by simple but erratic variables. It’s a jumble of ill-assorted details. So it
seems complex, but is it any more than miscellaneous and overloaded? It’s not more intricate
than the world of matter, but more elusive and enigmatic. We don’t live below the surface, but
we do live on a medley of them.

Mind and body may well be one substance, but it is through their felt duality that we take hold of
the world.
METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY

2 Pitfalls of understanding the emotions

When we try to guess what has led people to act as they have, we first restrict the field of
determinants to motives, and then search for one that appertains to us and that casts us in a
bright light. We bring to bear first our general human self-obsession and then our own private
self-obsession. We take it that they do things because they desire us or envy us, when they are
not thinking of us at all.

Freud was not a bad scientist, but just a bad literary critic. He conceded that ‘wherever I go I
find that a poet has been there before me.’ He thought that he could stitch together a rigorous
science of the mind by reducing a few foundational tales to crude formulas. As a theory
psychoanalysis arrays in a mythological frame not psychological facts but our trite notions of
them. As a therapy it is psychic blood-letting, and the analyst clings like a tenacious leech.
Freud was a scientific quack, but at rare moments a genuine old-fashioned sage.

Psychotherapy is a means that some people use to misunderstand themselves in a more

colourful way.

3 Emotions
Emotions narrow us, and so we conclude that they make us whole.

Our emotions are the body heat of our egoism.

We get most of our emotions third-hand from the way others evaluate the appearance of things.

Some people use distressing emotions, such as anger or self-reproach, to syphon off their
thoughts from the real source of their distress. They work up a sham mood to switch their own
or others’ gaze from the real one that they do feel. They weep for a deep loss, to steer their
thoughts clear of the shallower ones which touch them so much more deeply.

The deepest feelings can be turned on to a quite new track by some slight impediment laid on
the rails.

4 The fragmentary self

Our souls writhe with perversities and incongruities. So how could an incisive analysis of
motives, such as Dostoyevsky’s, be anything but a thicket of paradoxes? ‘All contradictions can
be found in me,’ wrote Montaigne, ‘depending on some twist or attribute.’
Our being is sewn up from offcuts and oddments, ‘fragments from books and newspapers,
scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothes, pieced together as is the human soul,’ as
Strindberg put it. Yet we still dream of a wholeness which we will never reach.

Our disposition is all things but uniform and indivisible. ‘We are entirely patched up from bits and
pieces,’ the amorphous Montaigne says, ‘so diversely and so shapelessly, that each one of
them pulls its own way at each moment.’ Live in consonance with human nature, the stoics urge
us. That is, be unalterable and variable, unbalanced and moderate, prying and listless, soppy
and hard-hearted, cocksure and diffident, spendthrift and mean, circumspect and foolhardy,
spirited and cold, pliant and unappeasable, all colours by turns but not one of them for long.

Each of us is made up of a whole army of selves. But our general self-interest keeps us under
tight control so that we can act like a single unit.

5 To psychologize is to despise
The human sciences are bound to set too high a value on their object of study, since it is the
same as their audience. As Twain says, ‘etiquette requires us to admire the human race.’

The most profound explorer can’t fathom the turbid shallowness of the heart.

Only the unhappy few who sound their souls to their marrow have heard how hollow they are.

Scan the will and motive, and you won’t think much of life or of your fellow beings. ‘Tout
comprendre, c’est tout mépriser.’ To psychologize is to despise. To become expert in it, you
must wield the knives of empathy, apathy and revenge. Some dispositions are penned in an
invisible ink, and you have to hold them up to the flame of your ill-will to read them. And some
are so well secured by their self-regard, that suspicion is the one tool precise enough to pick
their lock.

No one is a hero to their psychologist. Psychology is the science that proves to us that we are
far more facile, predictable, venal, dishonest and unself-knowing than we assumed.

MATTER OF PSYCHOLOGY

6 The unsurprising self

Some people strike you as more vivid than you thought they would be before you met them. But
you soon find that they are more vapid than they seem when you have just met them. They
harbour odd and astounding longings, but for flat and dull reasons. Their fingerprints are more
distinct and inimitable than their minds. They are like journals, worth skimming through, but not
worth rereading, diverting and informative, but mass-produced and disposable. Most of us are
more thin and spectral than our solid presence makes us seem at first glance.

I fail to foresee so much of what happens to me, because it’s so banal that it falls below my
theatrical expectations. And yet I’m so used to events upending my most confident predictions,
that it shocks me when they fall out just as I envisaged. ‘We are,’ as Hoffer wrote, ‘more
surprised when something we expected comes to pass than when we stumble on the
unexpected.’ I’m caught off guard by the very crises that I saw coming.

The most surprising thing about us is how predictably we behave.

7 The complexity of the self

People feel from one minute to the next more wayward moods, memories, intimations, wounds
and wants than they could find words for or than you could conjecture. Their transitory
emotions, recollections, intuitions, pinings and impressions pierce deeper than their conscious
thoughts. Their inner lives may be as rich as a novel, but their views are as thin and meagre as
a dusty exegete’s exposition of it. ‘People,’ as Valéry says, ‘are unutterably more complex than
their ideas,’ though that’s not saying much. Thinkers are those rare people whose ideas are
more complex and interesting than they are themselves.

8 The banality of the self

We are such shallow beings, that the shallowest explanations of our acts are the ones most
likely to hit the mark.

The deepest part of us is our ego. And there’s nothing more shallow than that.

Our compulsions are convoluted but not complex. And our schemes are ingenious but not wise.

To say that a person is larger than life is no doubt an exaggeration. But it’s still not saying much.

The personal soul is a social figment forged by our symbolic codes.

It is only our bodies and all their stupid running round that give a touch of variety to the
monotony of our souls.

We meet both the most momentous and the most routine events with the same dull lack of
thought.

9 Empty on the inside

If they didn’t wear clothes, would people be so sure that they have souls? It is in part their
exterior coverings and complications that make them feel that they have such rich interior lives.
It might not matter that we are so empty on the inside, if we at least had some substance on the
outside.

Even when we try to turn our gaze inwards, all we see is the grand figure that we think we make
in the eyes of the world. And we use up most of our so-called empathy in imagining what others
think and feel about us. Yet we still fail to see that they don’t think or feel much about us at all.

It might be good to fix my thoughts on my inner wealth. But all I would see is how poor I really
am.

Like all prisons, most of our self is empty space.

10 The shallow unconscious

Our unconscious is the shallowest part of us. And we live most of our life unconsciously.

We are shoved on by a ruck of conscious aims of which we are nevertheless unaware, and by a
crew that lurk beneath the surface but which are still quite superficial. The unconscious is
submerged and murky but not deep. Our compulsions seem profound because they surge up
from an unsearchable though shallow font. And our latent drives master us because their shoals
measure the same as our squalid heart’s compass.

We are so shallow, that we feel sure that the unconscious must be deep, and that we think
searchingly when we don’t think deliberately. Most of us, who are moved by facile promptings of
which we are not aware, scorn thoughts and words for being merely conscious.

Most of what we call thinking takes place in the unconscious. And there’s nothing more glib,
crafty or self-seeking than that.

People who have such shallow ideas are proud of the deep source from which they spring.

11 The human machine

An animal’s nature is far more simple than its organs, just as the soul is far simpler than the
body. And the brain is far more complex than any thoughts it may think.

Whether or not we look on the animals as automata, it’s probable that this is how they look on
us.

We are most fully human only on the surface. Deep down we are animals. Deeper still we are
machines. We may have a nature, but it is not a human nature. Most of what is natural in us is
not human, and most of what is human is not natural.
Technology does not rob us of our deep humanness. It lays bare how shallow our humanness
is.

From now on most of our deepest, most lasting and most constant relations will be with
machines. And nothing that takes place in the real world will engross us as do the images that
flash on our screens.

12 Diagnosis is not cure

‘Once we know our infirmities,’ Lichtenberg maintained, ‘they cease to do us harm.’ But you no
more bring to heel your preconscious drives by becoming conscious of them than you heal a
disorder by diagnosing it. ‘Recognizing idols for what they are,’ as Auden points out, ‘does not
break their enchantment.’ To be aware of your bondage does not free you from it. It may well
make you more its slave, since it shows you that you are too weak to break loose. Your mad
cravings may grip you all the more forcibly when you wake to what they are, since then you feel
constrained to reinforce them with reasons. Our very consciousness of them may harden us in
our worst habits. And by the time that we spot our errors, they are so much part of our self, that
we are loath to give them up.

You may slip into a fault just because you eye it so warily and take such pains to shun it.

13 In your dreams
My sleeping dreams are as egocentric as my waking ones. I play the lead in all of them. Even in
the sea of sleep I don’t cast off from the blighted island of self.

Dreams are proof that the unconscious is yet more banal, trivial and shallow than the conscious
mind.

Dreaming is as needful to the mind as defecating is to the body, and its products are of the
same value. As Halifax said, ‘The inquiry into a dream is another dream.’

Your dreams won’t teach you a thing. But you may learn a great deal from sleeplessness. You
can get a day’s work done in one insomniac hour. ‘A wakeful night will yield as much thought as
a long journey,’ wrote Thoreau.

14 Character eaten by anecdote

Who would not rather reel off all the details of what they’re up to than search out the truth of
what they are?

May your years have the tang of racy tales.

We live by anecdotes, which pulse with incident and variety, but lack form and meaning. Some
of us add up to no more than the sum of the stories that we tell of our doings. And some are
what is left when all our tales have been told. ‘Who could conceive a biography of the sun?’
Baudelaire asked. ‘It is a tale replete with monotony, light and grandeur.’ But most of us turn out
to be like cheap potboilers, with more plot than character, thought or style.

We judge people by their fluctuating fortunes, and from these we attribute to them permanent
traits.

Don’t we decide what those near us are like partly for dramatic effect? We want to people our
life’s stage with a large troupe of striking types.

Life must be lived forwards, but it must be misunderstood backwards.

15 All mad
Some of us seem sane because we have learnt how to rein in one breed of lunacy that
threatens to buck us by riding some other which looks less wild and out of control. So we try to
bring to heel our indecent addictions by indulging one that seems more respectable.

We are all mad, and so we have to humour one another as if we were sane. We have to learn to
speak to each other as if we were grown up and could bear to be told the truth.

You don’t spot how cracked some people are because they are so conventional. And you don’t
spot how conventional others are because they are so crazy.

Insanity is a set of maladaptive illusions, sanity is a set of adaptive ones. ‘Sanity,’ Santayana
wrote, ‘is a madness put to good uses.’ Madness is an inflation of self in ways that harm the self
and others. And sanity is an inflation of self in ways that help them. Sickness of any kind, as
Lamb wrote, ‘enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself.’ And yet it does not so much
enlarge our self to our self, it shrinks our self to it and to all its petty symptoms and hopes for a
cure.

16 The haywire clockwork

An animal is an ingenious piece of clockwork. But in us consciousness has sent the mechanism
haywire.

Mad people unnerve us, because they are so patently the puppets of their compulsions. And
that is what we all fear we might be. It is just where the mechanism breaks down in the most
bizarre ways that we see that it is no more than a badly wound-up piece of clockwork. And
suicides scare us, because they show us how easy it would be to cut our strings and stop
dallying.

It is the rational animal, human kind, that brings a germ of chaotic irrationality into the world.

GRIEF

17 Grief
The deaths of those I don’t care for seem to accord with nature. The deaths of those I love
outrage it.

When those who are dear to you die, they glow all the more luminously for you. It’s you who live
on that fade to a wraith, to loiter behind in this limbo of low goings-on, which looks grey and
bleached of meaning now that they have ceased to light it up. Who knows whether the saved
are those who lived on or those who went under? It is the living who, as Shelley wrote, ‘lost in
stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.’ And yet we don’t doubt that merely to
be alive is a proof of success.

Are those who mourn harrowed more by what they can’t remember or by what they can’t forget?

I feel that I have a right to find comfort when I lose the priceless things that I took for granted
and the worthless ones that I craved too much. We can think of nothing worse than to be
deprived of the cheap garbage that we have toiled so sedulously to shovel up.

18 The shallowness of grief

In grief, diversion is better than cure. We are so shallow, that we alleviate a grief more
efficaciously by deflecting our mind from it than by getting to the bottom of it. The way to stanch
its bleeding is to give it no thought. It’s best to dodge blows, not parry them, as Montaigne says.
We are too weak to fight fortune. Just run.

We entomb our sorrows deep in our hearts, since that’s the district we least frequent. ‘The only
thing grief has taught me,’ Emerson wrote, ‘is to know how shallow it is.’ Our grief flows deeper
than we say, but shallower than we think.

It takes most people no time to recover from deep shocks to their soul. If you want to harrow
them, you have to strike at their material interest or their social standing. The dark night of the
soul is bright sunshine compared to the eclipse of our social regard.

I grieve because others change. And I cease to grieve because I change.

The soul-stirring gestures of our grief help to put the dead out of mind.
Any grief that can be assuaged by the rites of mourning can’t have pierced too deep. We have
worked them up to pretend to allay the griefs that we pretend to feel. Mourning is meant more to
display our grief than to dispel it.

Grief may be strongest when its object is a false image, since then we can shape it to our own
needs.

19 The selfishness of grief

How deftly self finds its way into the most self-forgetful grief. When I mourn for my dead, I sigh
for what I have lost, not for what they have lost. Pity me, I miss my friend. I feel sorry for myself
for the brief pang that their eternal loss costs me. True grief gives them a peaceful home till we
die, where they can live out their loss, unmolested by our showy tears.

Our mourning is selfish because our love is selfish. When I grieve, I am crushed by the desolate
selfishness of loss, from which I am delivered by the fierce selfishness of returning desire. Our
greed for life eats up our grief for the dead. The passing of the one you loved may eclipse the
sun of your egoism for a brief hour, but it won’t blot it out for long.

Grief, like love, can be jealous, possessive and self-deluding.

People are consoled for what they lose by the outlet it gives them to flaunt their bruised
sensibility.

We build sepulchres to blazon how affectingly and glamorously we mourn. ‘Funerary pomp,’ as
La Rochefoucauld says, ‘has more to do with the vanity of the living than with the
commemoration of the dead.’ A funeral is a celebration of human self-importance.

20 The grief of love

Grief is love’s dark similar. It has its fervid romance and its long fractious marriage. All love ends
in mourning, which casts you back to the first ardour of your love.

Grief, like sex, floods your flesh with an irresistible inundation. They both work by a kind of
imagination, mingling dream and memory, guilt and desire.

Loss, like love or poetry, imbues the most exiguous details with meaning, and inspires a
rhapsody of superabundant suggestion.

We have three sovereign balms, truth, love and death. And when knowledge hurts and love
goes, death is all we have to do the work.
One comfort for the thought of your dying is that at least you won’t be reunited with the people
you knew on earth. ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all,’ as Butler joked.

21 Cheap comforts of the emotions

The highest things might lift our heavy hearts, but most times it’s the lowest ones that do.
Commonplaces are our most effective consolations, since they best tally with the smallness of
our minds. ‘A trifle consoles us,’ says Pascal, ‘because a trifle upsets us,’ though a trifle will rub
us raw where a blow will barely bruise us. When we claim that art has saved us, we mean that it
has amused us and kept our minds from brooding on the real torments from which we need
saving and which are so much more trivial.

When we lose what is most dear to us, we seek a haven in false condolences, ceremonials,
emollient nostrums, sugary tunes and bad verse. These tactfully disguise from us the baser
schemes that are even now thronging in to take its place. I use my anodynes to prove how
sorely life has gored me, while I press on to the next shallow enterprise which will soon fill my
whole heart. But I spurn the facile succour held out by my comforters, which I soon won’t need
since I’ll be so swept up in my facile schemes and pleasures. The scars have long since healed
of the lacerations that I was sure would send me to the grave.

22 The consolations of untruth

We are solaced by the lie that we are solaced by the truth.

At times I grope for some gaudy consolation to hide how soon I was consoled by a mere toy.
And at times I need it to make sense of a great sorrow that I don’t quite feel.

You have to find a way to lose yourself, as a ruse to keep your thoughts off your crushing
losses.

How smartly I find ease for troubles of which I’m not even aware. I’m cheered less by the
consolation than I am by my erroneous view of what I required to be consoled for.

We can bear the lack of love, riches, success or liberty, so long as we lack self-reflectiveness as
well.

Our delicate deceits show how hard our plight is.

Necessity will eventually force on you the remedies which your good sense was too hesitant or
too steadfast to provide.
23 The consolations of conceit
You may allay a light loss by lessening it, but you allay a large one by magnifying it. ‘What
sorrow is like unto my sorrow?’ is the cry that marks the egoist.

Even in my most gruelling hardships I want to be flattered as much as I want to be relieved. In

our ordeals and degradations we still hope to be the cynosure of all eyes. Conceit plays the
fraudulent comforter, and so it is the sole thing that you can count on to console you. Any lie will
dim your pain in time of trouble, and the lie of your significance will do so best of all. I lull to
sleep my griefs by thinking less of them and more of my own importance.

24 Failed consolations
I treasure my consolations, but they crumble like porcelain as soon as I start to handle them. I
keep them for show and not for use. They invariably fail me, but it may be I need them just so
that I can say that they fail me. When I’ve turned my back on all the more creditable things, I like
to feel that there is one thing at least that has turned its back on me.

Art and philosophy help you to bear only those woes that you need no help in bearing.

The consolations that you take up to ease your pain will end by crippling you unless you could
get on just as well without them. Like subtle parasites, they keep alive the gloominess that they
batten on. They act on us like sweet poisons and toxic medicines, palliating the symptoms of
our bereavement, while prolonging the disease. Look for solace, and you will meet it at every
turn. But if you need it, you will find how insidiously it will sap your strength.

You blunt your pain not just by the sort of illusions that you hold but by the way in which you
hold them. Treat a consolation as more than a holiday, and you’ve lumbered on your back one
more office and obligation, which will bow you as low as the sorrow that you want to crawl out
from under.

HABIT

25 Our shallow habits usurp our deep self

We mistake our shallow habits for our deep self. And then we allow our adopted habits to usurp
who we are. What I do is more definite and stable and colourful than what I am. And when I
detail myself by my routines, I cadge some of this stability and definition and colouring for my
self.

Personality is an indolent friction. It’s a clutter of habits which retards your march but is not so
hard as having to choose the right way at each stride.
Custom is an impotent autocrat whose sway would topple on the spot if I once refused to bow to
its directives.

It is not so much the desire that breeds the habit, but the habit that breeds the desire. People
don’t so much do things because they like doing them. Rather they like to do them because they
are in the habit of doing them. And anyway, they always have to be doing something.

26 The vanity of habit

We take up our habits to push our self-interest, and we hold on to them to keep up our self-
regard. Some rigid people are less intent on succeeding than they are to cling to the customs
that hamper them from doing so. They would rather give up a chance for gain than a fixed idea.
They force their ampler designs to bend to their crabbed routines. And then they stick to these
for years after they’ve ceased to subserve the objective for which they took them up. ‘Our habits
cling to us, even when they do us no good,’ as Proust points out.

‘Even the most adept egotist,’ Nietzsche says, ‘regards his set ways as more salient than his
advantage.’ My egoism costumes itself in the everyday wear of my habits. I could change them
in a trice, if I were not so vain of them.

Some people have to be stubborn, because they are too weak-willed to change their course.

You might not find it so hard to change your habits if you were less aware of them.

Time wears down good habits. But stupid habits accrete new stupidities as time goes on.

HOPE AND DESPAIR

27 The oxygen of hope

How could you work in the absence of hope? Hope makes you work, or work will make you
hope. Hence action is, as Conrad words it, ‘the friend of flattering illusions.’ So long as we act,
we can’t but feel that we are the centre of the world. Action and fiction fill up our lives.
Contemplation and truth would scoop out their pith and leave them dry and desolate.

Hope is the lungs of our delight. And if it gives out we drown in a hideous deep black water.

Hope divided by anxiety totals happiness. A tally short of one, and your life goes dark.

Hope toys with you like a kitten with a mouse, mercilessly deferring your reprieve.

Hope is winged, but it can’t fly. It is like Icarus, not like a bird. It draws us out of the present, but
it can’t lift us above life’s banality.
28 The happy dupes of hope
You need a few void and buoyant hopes to ferry you across the boiling sea of life.

We are the happy dupes of hope. Hope is our worst flatterer and our best friend.

Our hopes make such fools of us, that we have to fool ourselves with yet more hopes. It is the
source of half our ills and the sole comfort we can count on to quiet them. The most tenuous
hope is a more secure possession than the most solid success. Hope, which hourly misguides
us, is yet the one real joy that we can call our own, ‘the chief happiness which this world
affords,’ as Johnson puts it.

Hope is such a jovial companion, that I don’t mind if it leads me down the wrong path. And
despair is such a hangdog, that I don’t want to go along with it, though it may lead me to the
right one.

If we had any real grounds for hope, we would have no need to take refuge in it.

The more hope cheats you, the more you are lured to trust in its promises. And the more misery
your superstitious fears let loose on you, the more you yield to their intimidation.

It’s no great victory for hope to get the better of despair. Illusion always has the start on truth.

29 Hope defers our life

Our hearts are haunted by shadows of lost sunshine and forebodings of looming darkness. And
our hope is our current and real self-satisfaction promising us fabulous satisfactions to come.

After a while all you hear in hope’s blandishments is the ominous overture to some new
discouragement. And you dread joyfulness as if it were an intruder come to break in on your
settled gloom.

To hope is to put off life and put on illusion. And since our optimism will make the world so much
better than it is now, why would anyone want to live in the present?

30 The house of desolation

When the tide of hope goes out, you’re left plastered with a slime of despair, which no future
fulfilment can rinse off. ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’

Not even a dread despair will harden you to the million pinpricks of frustration that come your
way. Desperation won’t save you from disappointment, and disappointment won’t save you from
being duped by hope, as polar regions, forsaken by the sun, are lit up by gaudy northern lights.
Despair is the last fatal stage of a cancer which grows out of many metastasized
disappointments.

The Lord of hosts fed the chosen seed with the thin sustenance of despair, while he led them
hopelessly astray in the wilderness.

31 The hunger of despair

Our affirmations flag our hopelessness. Try to proclaim your faith, and you will let show how
deeply you despond.

Overactive expectations breed tumours of despair.

Despair is not a placid resignation. It is the rage of a wild beast which has been balked of its
prey, but which is still gnawed by its appetites, and so eats its own heart. And it is the drop of
hope that gives despair its venom.

On the far side of despair a still more sinister despair lies in wait to devour you.

32 Too noisy to despair

Life schools us to despair, but all we learn is to hope. We have no lack of reasons to despair. So
it’s just as well that we don’t live by reason. I learn so tardily to despond, and I forget so soon.
The spinning years unravel all my dreams. But following all my failures, I fail at last to despair.

Most of us don’t lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau claimed. And he might have lost all
heart if he knew how few of us do. On the contrary we lead lives of noisy and hectic self-
satisfaction. Who these days has the leisure to despond? We are all in too great a hurry to get
and spend. Hope stinks eternal on the human breath.

No one feels that life has passed them by. We are all hurtling so fast that life can barely keep up
with the pace we set. And certainly other people’s lives cannot.

Let go of all your ampler hopes, and a hundred sucking tentacles of desire will still keep you
stuck to life. Having staked all on a single venture, how gaily you go on struggling when that has
miscarried. You find that what you live for you can easily live without. You will, as Austen said,
‘live to exert, and frequently to enjoy’ yourself.

33 We fail to despair
My hopes betray me, and I betray my despair. I am rarely worthy of my desperation, and in the
end I prove unfaithful to it. And the despair that I feel is unworthy of the despair that I think I feel.
And yet there are times when I have to put on a fake despondence to navigate my thoughts
away from my real one.

We don’t have enough faith to be capable of much despair. And in this life, which thwarts us at
every turn, don’t we need to seek refuge in hope’s sweet perfidy? Only a fallen angel would
have the fortitude to bear real hopelessness. To hope is human, to despair divine.

When all your prospects have gone black, your anxiety lives on to tell you how strongly you are
still bound to the world.

34 Those who have no hope cannot afford to despair

‘Hope,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘is a subtle glutton.’ Faith is bloated by the hunger of despondency,
which is, as George Eliot said, ‘often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.’ Are any so
eaten up by hope as those who have lost all grounds for it? The ghouls of hope haunt them, and
plunge them in a gloom yet more menacing. Its toadstools sprout in the damp shade of
desolation.

When you have nothing to hope for, you also have nothing but hope. ‘The miserable,’ as
Shakespeare wrote, ‘have no other medicine.’ However threadbare our coats may be, we keep
their pockets stuffed with hopes.

Life makes liars of those who boast that they have abandoned hope. And then hope makes
fools of them by abandoning them for real.

Who hopes so incorrigibly as an invalid who trusts that this latest cure will work, for no better
reason than that all the foregoing ones have failed? And now we are all in this sick state.

Hope is a blossom which smells no worse to us for being dunged with a thousand
disappointments.

35 In the lucid pit of despair

To despair is to be both burningly awake to life and worse than dead. It is to know that in order
to go on, you must have hope, and yet that there is no hope.

Despair is an experiment to test if we have the strength to live without the staff of lies and
illusions. In the lucid pit of despair you at last come to believe what you have long known to be
true. World-weariness is the nausea which comes over you when you have evacuated all the
lies that help you to digest the truth. Lose the hang of deceiving yourself, and you are no longer
fit to live in this world. To lay bare the false trappings of life would be to shred life without
making a rent in its false trappings. ‘Don’t part with your illusions,’ Twain cautioned. ‘When they
are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.’ When they give way beneath you,
death is the one thing left to cushion your fall.

36 Falling into truth

To despair is to find the one deep gulf of truth in this world of shallows, and fall into it, and never
climb out.

You know you’re getting near the heart of life, the closer you come to the black hole of despair.
But to get near the heart of life is to arrive at the farthest remove from the lives of most people.

Those who have been dying their life long don’t go out in peace but in terror and despair, their
minds nettled by their paralysis, like poisoned rats in a hole.

LOVE AND HATE

37 Hate
Few of us are important enough to have enemies, though most of us make it a point of pride
that we do. It’s lucky for us that so few people care enough about us to wish to do us harm. And
it may even be lucky that so few care to try to do us good.

Those who appear to hate themselves in fact want to mark themselves off from the people
whom they look down on but fear they might be lumped with. What better way to prove that you
are not bourgeois than by running down the rest of the bourgeoisie? ‘The middle class,’ as
Renard notes, ‘is other people.’

Misanthropes think they don’t need anything so much that they have to accommodate the
world’s benign hypocrisy to get it.

People’s loathing is stronger than their love. And it is their hate that makes them strong in the
world.

Hatred, far more than love, does not count the cost, and is willing to work for no pay.

The devil need only lob a stone into their swamp, and the saints will devour each other like
crocodiles to snatch the prize.

We start to hate people on account of a few things that they do. And soon the least thing that
they do makes us hate them more, because it is they who do it.
38 Love
You have to go on treating those who are dear to you as if you adored them, for fear of how you
might feel about them if you stopped.

Love is of all things the one most subject to chance, and so we have to speak as if it were the
work of destiny. It settles in the nearest place that our vagabond attention comes to rest. The
need to love is essential. The object of love is accidental. And in the same way, our need to
hate and fight is as imperative as the pretexts we find for doing so are petty.

To be adored is a common enough fate. How intoxicating to win a person’s love, but how
sobering to keep it. And how it chills the heart to see what you are cherished for.

You can hate a person steadily and without ever seeing them. But love is not so fine a passion.
It needs to have a body in front of it.

We are proud to show off our love and hate, but we try to conceal their real causes, which is not
so hard, since we don’t know them ourselves.

39 The daily miracle of love

Love knows no drudgery. A labour of love is no labour at all. ‘And Jacob served seven years for
Rachel, and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.’

Malice sees the parts, love sees the whole.

I demean myself in front of those who love me, in order to feel secure that I need not prove that
I’ve earned the right to their love.

Romance, like jealousy, is a wild curiosity. But love sports in a tranquil knowledge. It works its
daily miracle when it consummates your curiosity without diminishing your astonishment or
destroying your illusions.

Perfection compels you to admire, but blemishes kindle dry admiration to a blaze of love. The
flaws of the one you’re fond of form gullies which you level by flooding them with more
fondness. So they come to be some of the traits that most endear them to you.

Love is a mundane passion which makes the whole world seem miraculous.

40 Egoism for two

Those who love for their own ends love no more than themselves. But those who love without
an end of their own in view most likely don’t love at all.
Our egoism is such a burden to us, that we try to force others to bear it with us by making them
the object of our love or hate.

Our complacent self-love makes our love too blind to spot the flaws of the one whom it has
marked out for its own.

Some of the happiest marriages are those in which both parties are in love with the same one of
them.

Two selfish people may form a most loving partnership, provided they can join to work for some
shared selfish goal. And the shared goal may be the welfare and success of just one of them.

41 The selfishness of love

Love and friendship prune your selfishness into more acceptable shapes, but they don’t weed it
out. ‘Our true passions,’ as Stendhal said, ‘are selfish.’ I cherish what I own or what I hope to
make my own. Egoism is the pull of gravity that keeps us in orbit round one another.

The world is such a cold place, that we each have to find some frail heart to warm us, while we
add our own chill to make it colder.

A capitalist society that values nothing but money has to make a show of valuing nothing more
highly than love.

Love is the most picturesque form that our selfishness can take, and the most generous form
that our self-delusion can take.

We have it fixed in our skulls that love moves the stars, since we are sure that all things must
love us.

If love were selfless, it would be a far feebler passion than it is.

42 Need not love

Love is the victory of need over good taste.

Some people think that they love anyone who might be of use to them, and some are willing to
love anyone to whom they think they might be of use.

In love the slave longs for the exclusive possession of the master more than the master wants
the slave’s.
Defoe said that ‘all men would be tyrants if they could.’ But if they can’t be tyrants, they’re happy
to be slaves. And need and love are tyrants which make the most tyrannous people their slaves,
who therefore feel that they have a right to enslave others to their cause.

A heart that needs to love something won’t scruple to give its love to the worst thing. And by
loving what is unworthy of its love, it makes itself unworthy of being loved.

Those who need to love are just as ruthless in gaining and keeping their object as those who
are in thrall to any other need.

We are willing to see the good in the worst people, if we hope that they might do good to us.

Most people are sure that they have a right to unconditional love. But if they need it, then they
have no right to it. And if they have earned the right to it, then they have no need of it. ‘Most
people,’ Ebner-Eschenbach says, ‘need more love than they merit.’

43 Jealousy
Love is mere selfishness, if it’s heated by jealousy. And yet if it were not capable of flaming into
jealousy, it would be a very pale fire.

It is not love that is the prime social tie, but jealousy and the lust for possession. Stern moralists
may claim that gossip is an evil. But it is only such evils that bind us to our tribe.

We would be glad to lay down our lives for the ones we love, whom we would be glad to see
dead if they ceased to love us. Selfless love asks for no more than undying and exclusive
ownership of its beloved. Our sacrifices are self-forgetful and yet calculating.

44 The cruelty of love

Those who are sure that they are adored grow casually cruel, but so do those who adore them.
Idols and their worshippers are both made of stone.

Love or fellowship can turn to hate in the blink of an eye. It’s only in books that hate can turn to
tenderness. And yet our quarrels and animosities are so thin, that they may well switch back to
camaraderie.

The fire of love must die down to a thin flame, or else it will blaze back up as a red hot
resentment.

People are so affectionate, that they need to find something to love. But they don’t hesitate to
throw this over, if they come across something more to their taste.
People who need to love will put up with all wounds from those who they think love them, so
long as they don’t wound their self-love by disvaluing their love.

No one dies of a broken heart, but some may be willing to kill in order to soothe the pain it has
caused them.

45 The damage of love

What greater wrong could you do some people than to fall in love with them?

How much harm people do by trying to win the love of those who are not worth loving.

Love doesn’t care what damage it does when it succeeds. And when it fails and turns to hate, it
cares still less. And then each resents the wrong that they have suffered by loving too much, yet
neither repents the harm that they have caused.

Love what is false, and it will betray you, and show you that your love was treachery to the true
things that you should have loved.

Some people waste their lives turning themselves into ugly replicas of the ones they think they
love, till they find out too late how much they hate them. Yet they never cease to love
themselves more than all the world.

If God is love, that may explain why the world is in such a mess.

It is love that will destroy the world by cramming it with its own progeny.

All that will survive of us will be the mess that our love has made of the world. If you want to
make havoc, all you need is love.

Love makes more innocent victims than hate.

The one truth in Dante’s lying poem is that hell was built by love supreme.

46 Expressing emotions
Some of us talk least and maybe think least of those whom we love most. ‘If I loved you less,’
says Austen’s Mr Knightley, ‘I might be able to talk about it more.’ Passion loosens some
tongues and stops others. And yet it’s only those couples who cheerfully tell each other all they
think and do who can cheerfully stay still and silent together.

People warp their feelings when they vent them. But don’t they do the same when they try to
hold them in, since they never cease to talk to their own hearts, which demand to be told
sugared lies?
47 Marriage
Some of the sturdiest marriages are founded on mutual fallibility. ‘And that support is
wonderfully sure,’ as Pascal says, ‘since there is nothing more certain than that people shall be
weak.’ Many dote on their mate for years for faults that they wouldn’t put up with in anyone else
for five minutes. How few couples could stand each other if they weren’t bound to live under the
one roof.

Marriage is a machine for converting a passing mutual flattery to a durable joint self-interest. It is
an offensive and defensive treaty made by two egos for the better promoting of their joint
selfishness. They start by gazing dreamily into each other’s eyes, but are soon ogling all the
things that have caught their eye.

A spouse is not an object of desire, but a partner in desiring other things.

Most people are bitten by love when they’re young, and can be cured only by marrying.

The one clever thing that some fools do is to find a mate dumb enough to put up with all their
dumb antics. And the least loving thing that some loving people do is to find a mate who can’t
return affection and lavish on them all their love.

48 Fidelity
A loyal husband or wife won’t forgive anyone else who dares to speak of their mate as they
think of them.

Every couple must be made up of a more loving and a more loved one. And the one who is
more loved will be the more selfish and less deserving of love. And the more loving one may
grow less loveable, by being at the mercy of such a cold monster.

The more loving are sure that they are loved, and the less loving are sure that they are martyrs
to love. Yet the first take pride in loving more than they are loved, as if it proved the one they
love to be so much more worthy of their love. And the second are proud of being so loved, since
it shows how much they are worth.

The trials that a couple must brave together may tear them asunder. The death of a child may
sound the knell of a marriage.

We condemn those who are inconstant in love, but why should love be constant, when its object
never stops changing?

An impulsive adultery may harm a marriage less than a chilled fidelity.

If you’ve married a tyrant, your faithfulness is no virtue. It is collaboration.

49 The family curse
Your family, like the army, is a brutal school. It throws you in with people that you wouldn’t wish
to know in civilian life.

A family is half freezer and half hothouse. There’s no climate like it for fermenting lush strains of
mental and emotional derangement. It mingles the fetid stench of intimacy with the cold sterility
of alienation.

A happy family is maintained by its smiling lies, an unhappy one by its venomous lies.

If hell is the absence of love, is that not what many parents make when they start a family?

Each of us is doomed to take on the same propensities that we found most repellent in our
parents. ‘After a certain age,’ Proust wrote, ‘the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious
one’s family traits become.’

Your character may be the way that the family curse works itself out in your own life.

A healthy family spawns far more lies and diseases than it does love or offspring. And even in
the most loveless family there is still less truth than love.

The family curse keeps going by making its most pitiable victims its most vicious agents.

Many a child’s attitude to its parents starts out as reverence and ends in resentment.

50 No escape
Once the sugar of childhood has been boiled off, all that’s left to hold a family together is a hard,
sticky mass of spite and recriminations.

The ties that bind a family are the mutual loathing, jealousy and contempt of its members.

Being brought up in a family fouls you up so badly, that you can’t wait to get out of it and make
one of your own to foul up.

A family is a rat-king. The harder you try to pull free of it, the more entangled you get in the foul
knot of its spittle and faeces and bile.

Your parents hand on to you all their diseases through their genes, and then prevent you from
finding a cure by the warped way they bring you up.

Some parents are little better than viruses. They are neither alive nor dead. All they know is to
reproduce themselves.

No noose is so deadly as a close-knit family.

Each of the children in a large family is still an only child.

In some families feelings run so deep that they are not even superficial. And what does go deep
is malice, jealousy and resentment.

Some people are so damaged by their parents because they find out at last how worthless they
were, and some because they never do.

51 Dishonour thy father

Dishonour thy father and thy mother, that your days may be short in the land. In this way you
will pay them back for what they have done to you, atone for their sin, warn others not to repeat
it, lighten the earth of its load, and free yourself from the curse they laid on you.

What more fitting way to show how much you have learnt from your parents than to loathe them
as much as they loathed one another?

You may be an utter nonentity, but you can still sow a lush crop of wretchedness and insanity
just by having children.

Parents are responsible for all the evil in the world, yet the defining feature of a parent is lack of
all feeling of responsibility.

The best that can be said for most parents is that they know not what they do. But that doesn’t
make them any the less bent on doing it.

Your parents load you with neuroses, launch you on the sea of life, and then watch with
unconcern as you start to sink.

Most parents are just bright enough to brainwash small children.

Your parents give you life, and then poison all its springs.

You spend your life paying for the free gift of life which your parents gave you.

52 Sins of the fathers

It takes an institution as stupid and brutal as the family for anyone to feel awe at a thing as
stupid, smug and brutal as a father.

Fathers have no excuse but their own fathers.

Parents must feel that there isn’t enough misery in the world, but they have a duty to spawn
their own grisly little strain of it. We all yell about the right to life. No one pays the least heed to
the prior right of the unborn to stay that way and not be dragged in to this world of pain.
God loves the family, because it is the scourge by which he visits the sins of the fathers on the
children.

Our parents were such plaster saints, God no doubt wants them at his right hand. But so long
as they are together, it doesn’t much matter where they are, since they’re still in hell, where they
belong.

No matter how emotionally constipated two people may be, they can still manage to excrete a
family.

Many people have children because it’s easier to give birth to lumps of flesh than to become
human beings themselves.

53 We love by misunderstanding
Cruel people want to understand others as they are. When you love, you seek to misunderstand
them as they misunderstand themselves. And when you do, they feel that you must understand
them as no one else does. And misunderstanding them helps you to keep on misunderstanding
yourself. That is how we love ourselves so much.

Lovers are each in love with a false image of the other, who they think must love their true self.

When we say that we understand others, we mean that we see through them. But when we
demand that they understand us, we mean that they should see all things from our point of view.

The truth does not want our love. No more does our love want the truth.

Only those who see themselves as they are have earned the right to be loved. But they will not
be very lovable.

54 Love, truth and flattery

How could you speak with bluff straightforwardness to one whom you lust for or one whom you
love? You can tell the truth only to those that you don’t care for or to those that you don’t need.
‘Nobody speaks the truth,’ wrote Bowen, ‘when there is something they must have.’ So how
could we be frank with ourselves or with God, from both of which we hope to gain such a deal of
bliss?

Our affection makes our fawning sincere. It luxuriates in an uninterrupted mutual truckling which
it rarely needs to put in words. ‘Lovers never tire of each other’s proximity,’ La Rochefoucauld
says, ‘because they are talking of themselves all the time.’ And would we not be bad friends to
ourselves, if we weren’t continually commending to ourselves what we do?
55 The sexes
Each sex both dotes on and in some degree disdains the other like a darling child. And each
half of a loving couple acts as both parent and child to the other, in their different ways.

We rarely admire those whom we love. Still less do we love those whom we admire. We need
someone to love and someone to look down on. And it may well be the same person.

Women hope that their husbands will grow up, but they never do. And men hope that their wives
won’t change, but they always do.

Men see things in isolation, women see how they are related to people.

Males and females differ in the sorts of things that they are willing to be slaves to, females to
what is human, males to what is inhuman. Men maintain their fidelity to their loved ones by
lavishing their real passion on some other object.

There may be more Miss Havishams entombed in their dusty bitterness because their
bridegrooms did not leave them on their wedding day.

To hold that sex is a mystical or transcendent rite is not the instinct of a healthy animal. It is the
figment of a brainsick fantasist. Sex is not a jet of savage rapture. It is a tame pastime for
farmyard fowl.

56 Unrequited love
No love is unrequited. It will be paid in full, though it may be in a coin that you have no use for.
‘The pay is always certain,’ as Whitman says.

An unconsummated passion may impregnate the soul, and so beget a breathing work. Poets
waste nothing, not even the men and women that they hold most dear. Dante got from Beatrice
all that he had need of, but what did she get from him but unwanted adoration?

Some lovers share a mutual unreturned passion, which furnishes them with all that they want
from one another.

57 Defeated by desire
Passion may lose each round in its bout with reason, and yet still win the tournament. We fight a
doomed contest with desire. Frustration enrages us, and satiety cloys. But both beguile us to
play the game once more. Dumb lust swindles us, and always disappoints us. Yet it still
continues to charm and cheat us. We are slaves to passion, just because it pays us such a low
wage.
You can’t kill lust by inanition. It grows fat if fed, and bloated and malformed if starved.

58 No satisfaction
We let slip our bliss in our hungry rush to seize hold of it. We chase it with such breathless
celerity that we plough on past it. Brief as our pleasures are, they go on for a little longer than
we feel them. By the time they reach us, we have left them behind, and are gone after some
new sport.

I inflate my desires with my fantasies, till they burst in frustration.

Since we can’t curb our urges, we have to pretend that they meet our needs. We are suspended
between desires which we can’t quench, and death which we can’t escape from. Even if we
could succeed in satisfying our passions, they would still fail to satisfy us. And when we at last
get hold of the wares that we have craved for so long, they burn us up or leave us cold.

Since we all crave our bliss in this world, we are manifestly not made for a better. But since
none of us finds it, how could we be made for this one?

We are puppets, and our cravings are the wires that yank us from one zany contortion to the
next.

59 Love and lust

Lust is greed, love is gratitude.

Lust soon palls, but love makes its contented bed in custom. ‘Familiar acts,’ says Shelley, ‘are
beautiful through love.’ Sweating lust prowls for ceaselessly changing objects on which to renew
its unchanging desires. It craves variety, but finds stale monotony. Love grows strong by its
routines, which cast their spell by their uncanny predictability.

Lust reminds us of the heat of our past passions, but makes us forget the parched desert they
led us to.

We are liable to mistake our lusts for our affections. And we may end up mistaking others’ lusts
for our own affections. We are imitators even in our passions.

Our affections are so light and unfixed, that they would blow away if they weren’t anchored in
habit and familiarity. And our desires are so boisterous, that they would drive us off course if we
weren’t ballasted by our hulking self-interest.

Our lusts make us at once crafty and incautious. They are keen-scented enough to smell out the
least chance of bliss. And yet they crash through all the barriers that would block their path.
A dash of repressive puritanism adds spice to our licentious pleasures.

60 False dreams of pleasure

Our twitching desires stimulate but stun our imagination, and electrify but don’t illuminate it.

If swallowing and swilling are as pleasurable as people claim, why is it that they always do
something else at the same time, as if they couldn’t have sex without leafing through a
newspaper while they were at it? They pay so little attention to their food that they don’t
perceive how little enjoyment it gives them.

Those who seek transcendence through transgression and ecstasy in degradation find that such
satanic pleasures are just as vapid and unreal as all the rest. Burst headfirst and sweating into
the blazing attic of rapture, and you find it just as empty as if you had trudged step by step to the
freezing summit of wisdom.

A human being can no more find transcendence in extremity and excess than it can save itself
by moderation.

Your false dreams doom you to chase fictitious pleasures, but won’t take your mind off your real
pains.

It may be that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, as Johnson claimed, but we are all self-
deceivers. We have to fool ourselves that we enjoy them as much as they promise.

Half the pleasure that we get from a pastime comes from the herd comfort we take in how many
people share it or from the snobbish pride at how few do.

61 The fantasy of pleasure

The coarsest sensualists are more in thrall to their brainish fantasies than to their carnal
cravings. And since they take most of their notions from others, it’s not even their own fantasies
that they are in thrall to. We are actors even in our pleasures. We try to play up to roles that we
have seen others playing. And even when serving the most worldly desires, we are serving the
whims of an unreal world which exists only in our minds.

Our imagination is so thin, that we have to flesh it out with real pleasures. And our pleasures
taste so bland, that we have to flavour them with hot fantasies. Our pleasures are more than
half in our mind, which shows how unsatisfying they are and how low our mind must be. ‘To
strip our pleasures of imagination,’ as Proust wrote, ‘is to dock them to their own size, that is to
say to nothing.’ Real joys are too insipid to overpower us, but we are dazed by our gaudy
dreams of them. They keep us spellbound just because they are phantoms.
Wild fancy makes one half of our desires and aversions, and dull habit makes the other half.
And the fancy is not even our own.

FRIENDSHIP

62 Friendship
We have a gaggle of discrepant categories of friends. Some are duties, our patrons and clients.
Some are a reuters service, which you maintain like cables to relay the bulletins. Others glow
like candles, bright erotic sparkles that soon sputter. And some are recreations, which refresh
you by diverging from you in cast of mind, occupation, bent and bias. A few may act as your
accomplices, though how many do you find that are worthy or able? Most who might be choose
to work on their own. You’re in luck if you meet with one good collaborator in life.

We are small, frail and imperfect creatures. And we are joined to those we love by small, frail
and imperfect bonds. But when these crack, it feels like the breaking of worlds.

The strongest ties are laced from the most tenuous fibres.

Your friends are the people whom you have to forgive, even when you have done them wrong.

You must either love someone dearly or not care for them in the least, if you can forgive them
for the wrongs that you do them or for forgiving you.

You mend a rift with more grace by suing for a favour than by doing one.

63 Friendship is a habit not a feeling

Isn’t most friendship less a form of love than a mere means of joint amusement? ‘Almost all
people,’ as Emerson says, ‘descend to meet.’ It’s not so much our friends that we are fond of as
the fun things that we do with them. We cluster in groups to share our mutual delusions and
featherbrained recreations. We want to snatch the most fun for the least sweat. And if we fall out
of the habit of having fun with them, we will soon cease to be friends. And what we miss when
we lose our friends is not so much who they were but what we used to do with them.

Friendships are like routines. Most last so long because friends don’t think them worth
changing.

Poverty makes solitude dreadful and society dreary.

Why do we have to be slightly inebriated to bear the slight inebriation of company?

Friends don’t try to stop you doing all the harm you would do to yourself if you were left on your
own. They just give you better things to do.

A loving family teaches you that you’re a lot safer with people who don’t care about you. And
that’s why friends are such a tonic.

64 We descend to meet
‘Man,’ as Delacroix wrote, ‘is a social animal who dislikes his fellow men.’ They need to feel that
they have their own slot in a pack, though they don’t care for most of its members. ‘Although the
ox has little affection for his fellows,’ says William James, ‘he cannot endure even a momentary
separation from his herd.’

Friends don’t grow close because they like each other, they learn to like each other once they
have grown close. Many people wouldn’t much like their friends if they were not friends with
them. And some fall out over a trifle, since it shows them what faint fondness they have for one
another. Some people owe the sway they hold over us to the brittleness of the bonds that splice
us to them. These are so frail, that we dare not tug at them, since they would snap at once.

We find the doings of the people we know so fascinating because they are the people we know.

We need all the accomplices we can get in our lifelong felony of killing time.

65 Friendship and flattery

A friend differs from a flatterer, not in telling more of the truth, but by telling lies that are more
unfeigned and that we feel bound to reciprocate. We rely on our friends to abet us in our lifelong
career of self-deception. In this at least they are like our second selves.

A friend is willing to misunderstand you as you misunderstand yourself. Sycophants just pretend
to do so for their own ends. And enemies misunderstand each other almost as much as friends.

A flatterer knows you too well to be a true friend. And a friend knows you just well enough to
guess how you want to be flattered. But a friend who dared to tell us the unflattering truth would
not stay our friend for long.

Many friends fall out not because they fail to understand one another, but because they no
longer feel it worth their while to misunderstand one another.

Don’t spare me the truth, I say to those who I know I can trust to tell only those truths that suit
me.

Our friends are too complaisant to try to save us from ruining ourselves.
66 Friendship and enmity
Some people endure the presence of their friends just so that they can abuse them in their
absence. They love to hear others slander those whom they dare not treat as outright foes. If
you have a knack for friendship, you guess just how far a friend wants to run down the rest of
their friends. ‘The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetener
and cement of friendship,’ as Hazlitt wrote.

What a history of unspoken enmity lies between some of the best of friends.

Who is not appalled by the sentiments of their enemies and by the antics of their allies?

Few of us can tolerate a fool whose foolishness differs a shade from our own. And we curse as
a fool anyone who serves our own interests with less than optimum efficiency.

There are some people whom you can’t help disliking when you’re in their company, and others
when they’re out of sight. Their tics rasp you when you’re with them, and their faults offend you
when you’re not. You have to stay close to certain people, so you won’t find out how little you
like them. ‘We think well of them while we are with them,’ Hazlitt says, ‘and in their absence
recollect the ill we durst not hint at or acknowledge to ourselves in their presence.’

67 The rules of the game

The sole kind of conversation that most of us find decent consists in swapping anecdotes about
how well we’re getting on and how much fun we’re having.

In polite conversation people defer to some person who is old or august or staid, and they vie to
sound as respectable and prim. But in nimble-witted repartee they strive to outdo one another in
ridicule and wit, and strain to show that they have mastered the catchphrases of the hour.

We are too dull and imperceptive to find new things to say. But we are so desperate to say
something witty, that we can’t keep to the plain truth.

The rules of conversation force you to say a lot of things that you don’t mean, and prevent you
from saying a lot of things that you do mean. We think that we don’t want people to lie to us, so
we need to train them not to tell the truths that we don’t want to hear.

We have agreed on the codes of conversing so that we can speak amiably to one another
without saying a thing. Most small-talk, like dentistry, just fills inconvenient gaps.

I feel sure that I talk much less than I do, but say much more than others do, and that they store
up my few clipped and polished words like pearls.

Nine laughs in ten are cued by the occasion and not by the joke.
We are so ready to laugh because we want to please others, or because we are so pleased with
ourselves.

Why do we pine for intimacies and confidences, and then cravenly deflect them when they
come?

68 Fools talk
When the wise talk to a fool, they feel like fools. And when a fool talks to the wise, he has no
doubt that they must be fools.

Fools are told nothing but foolishness. And even when told something wiser, that is all that they
hear.

Who would not rather talk to a dunce than listen to a sage?

On any matter of common concern the views of the wise are apt to be as silly as those of a fool.

A sage knows nothing that a fool wants to hear.

Why do some people, who scintillate in their urbane talk and pastimes, shrink and turn niggling
in the vocations that they give their lives to? How can they be so sparkling at the periphery, and
so dull at the core?

What a mercy, that no one cares to call to mind all the crass and stupid things that I’ve said.

Most people have to talk to others all the time, since they don’t have much of interest to say to
themselves.

People are like birds. The worst songsters make the most noise.

69 The feast of solitude

You must be exceptional, if you can win and keep your joy in retirement or your truth in the
crowd. Your solitude should be as replete and well-tempered as society, apt to tease and
shame you into good humour.

Some people are too dense to shine in society, and some are too thin to fill up their solitude.

Most people can’t bear to be alone, because when they are, there’s no one there. They find that
time spent in their own company is wasted.

You have to flee into company once in a while so as to stop thinking about other people.
Loneliness is boredom imprisoned by embarrassment and protracted into despair. But true
solitude is a buoyant pride consecrated to some worthy endeavour. Loneliness is a draining
fast, solitude is a rich feast. Insularity is a waterless desert, but seclusion freshens you like an
oasis in life’s populous wilderness. You feel lonesome when you fall in with the wrong company,
though the wrong company may be your own soul. And you are most friendless when you have
no more to say to yourself.

The grand house of solitude soon sinks to a slum of lonesomeness, if not maintained in good
trim. Like friendship, it must be kept in constant repair. It must be repeopled from time to time
with new selves.

MEMORY

70 The hollowness of memory

We recall events with our eyes, nose and pores. But we don’t remember with our ears, which
may be all to the good, since they don’t give us much that is worth remembering. Memory
allures us so long as it stays mute. If it could speak, would we not find what poor stuff it had to
tell us?

How few hours in such a long life are worth recalling.

Aren’t our memories all as egoistic as our dreams? What I recall is not the scenes which I saw,
felt, underwent, but myself seeing, feeling, undergoing them.

Change exists because of time, yet time exists because of change.

Why do ten years in the long roll of history seem so much lengthier than ten years in our own
life, which is so brief?

You are not what you remember, as Augustine argued, nor are you what you forget or what you
have repressed. Are you not much more than each of these, but all of the things that you think,
dream, hope, love, desire, own or aspire to? If we are what we remember, we are no more than
a few scraps, trivia, details and banality. And in that case what we are would better be forgotten.

Year by year our recollections are clarified by our illusions. The eyewitnesses of the resurrection
incised it on their hearts in sharp but incredible and conflicting details.

71 The haunting
We each die a second death, first the death of the flesh, and then of the world’s remembrance
of us.
The death of those you loved may seem like yesterday, but their life an age ago. Their going
stays with you, their life is what you’ve lost. Do we injure them more by our forgetting or by
commemorating them so pretentiously?

The dead come to form the north of all our memories, which they attract as they failed to do
when they were with us. Too shadowy now to dominate our waking hours, they colonize our
sleep and become the usurpers of our dreams.

The children write the stories that their parents lived. A book is dunged by the flesh and bone of
a file of generations, and watered with the blood of a host of lives. The towering dead come
back as the native characters of fiction. They haunt what we read and what we write.

72 Bitter memories
Memory is not the key that unlocks the prison of self. It is one of its inmost cells.

Our memories may pester us like fleas, but we do enjoy a good scratch.

For some people, their past is a jungle, which they have to napalm, in their campaign to clear it
of the sinister recollections which they fear lurk in ambush in the shade.

Life loads you with a freight of leaden memories, from which you have to hope death will
disencumber you.

An obedient memory is one of the most reliable helps to happiness.

Forgetting is a blessing. Memory is a curse.

When you are happy, all your memories, both sweet and bitter, sweeten your happiness. But
when you are sad, they all make your sadness more bitter. Their darkness deepens your dark,
their brightness lights up what you’ve lost.

And the happiest memories are the most lacerating. They remind you how far you have fallen.

Relays of reverie keep arriving as envoys from the past, to tell you that you are outcast from it
for the rest of time. Don’t we all have enough blissful memories to bruise our hearts? Paradise
would still be hell, if you had to leave your memories on earth, or if you had to cart them with
you. Memory is our heaven or our hell.

73 Fragmentary memory
Even the events that I recall vibrantly I do so in mere fragments and scatterings. ‘We do not
remember days,’ says Pavese, ‘we remember moments.’ My memories, so fugitive yet so
persistent, are as stranded and patched as I am myself. They lack the flow of a film, the
articulacy of a book, or the distinctness of a photograph. And yet they subdue me as none of
these can. Memories are not stories, and stories are not like memories. And we distort and
degrade both when we speak as if they were.

Your memories seem as clear-cut as crystal, till you peer at them more closely, and they melt
and lose their shape.

People assume that they can call back a scene inerrantly because they call it back vividly, and
that they call it back vividly because they call back what they felt when it happened. But you can
be sure that the events you recollect intensely did not take place as you think. You think that
you remember experiences distinctly because you experience the recall of them so distinctly.

74 The magic lantern of nostalgia

Memories fall from the sky like rain, and all kinds of weather precipitate squalls of reverie. I can
call to mind momentous days, but what I can’t forget are a few stray inconsequential ones, still
winter hours when filaments of the past hang like dust in sunlight. It’s not what you can recall,
but what you cannot help recalling, that rends your heart.

You rediscover in your yesterdays the flat banalities of today, in exotic provinces the greyness
of your own, in dreams the cheap confabulations of waking life. Nostalgia breaks the magical
spell of the past. It shows you that its charm is little more than a trick of the light.

Nostalgia is a malaise of time which time will soon mend. It fastens on those who have too few
memories. The young are susceptible to it, as they have such short storms of sorrow to call
back to mind so lovingly.

Those who are prone to nostalgia waste their lives trying to recapture the thrill of a moment that
they scarcely felt the first time.

Our nostalgia is a form of narcissism. The past serves as one of our mirrors.

Life is all the time rewriting the radiant poem of the past as the dull prose of the present.

75 The manufactured meaning of nostalgia

Memory, like art, manufactures meaning rather than representing it. But the meaning that
memory makes is purely personal. Reverie wraps dross in gilding. Why else would it rouse our
tears so dependably? It’s a crazy miser and a crazy wastrel. It makes treasures of trifles, while
fecklessly frittering away millions. As Twain says, ‘It is always throwing away gold and hoarding
rubbish.’ It salvages splinters of cheap glass, which its alchemy makes glister like diamonds.
Like the rest of what we own, our memories would lose most of their value if they weren’t ours.
No one can wrest from me my memories, and so I toss them away.

76 Nostalgia for nostalgia

Nostalgia is a yearning for a home which you never had.

Nostalgists go abroad so that they can come back and pine for regions where they don’t belong.
They yearn not for home but for their homesickness. And when they come home they grow still
more homesick. They are stirred to the core by emotions that they have ceased to feel. Like
Pessoa, they learn to miss their memories of the past more than the past itself, and to feel a
‘nostalgia for what never was.’ And at last, like Basho, they long for home most touchingly when
they have not even left it.

The one alienation more bitter than being a stranger in a strange land is to feel like a stranger in
your own land.

In order to feel nostalgic for a thing, you don’t need to have lost it. And there’s no need to have
had a thing to yearn to get it back.

Our nostalgia is the fantasy that we could live in a future in which we would be able to call back
a past which was never real.

77 The sadness of time

The brightest and gladdest day of your life bleached from your mind long ago. Your most joyful
recollections are not recollections of joy. Reverie makes an art of chiaroscuro. It needs broad
swathes of blackness to paint its shimmering pictures. Wistful people don’t pine for the past
because they feel sad now, they pine for it because they felt sad then.

If you repine that your past didn’t go more slowly, you probably wish that your present would go
more swiftly.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, each has its own special pathos. Yesterday’s tears of pining
and regret, today’s for the dear things that leave us so soon, and tomorrow’s for all our vain
longings. These are the three tenses of our sadness.

YOUTH AND AGE

78 Youth and age

You have not lived long enough, if you would choose to be one day younger. Youth is the best
time of life. So why is it the time that we would least like to go back to?
The self-satisfaction of the young brims over as a bubbling delight in life. And then when they
are old, this stiffens into a stodge that they hope to munch on to the last mouthful.

The young strut and prance like vain players, and the elderly sit and judge like smug critics.

The one thing that grows no more infirm with age is egoism. It shrinks its scope, but is as
ferocious as ever.

Youth allures us with the mirage of life’s beauty, and we are fooled by it. Old age lands us in the
midst of its ugliness, and we refuse to see it.

79 Squandered youth
Why do the young spend the best part of their lives searching for authorities to guide them how
to rebel against authority?

Many who waste their bright youth waiting for their life to take wing waste the remainder of their
years in a vain bid to get back their youth.

Why squander your golden youth drudging to buy a luxurious pillow for your grizzled age, which
will be too sleepy to feel how soft it is?

80 Too young or too old to learn

No matter how old or how young we are, we count those younger than us callow, and those
much older than us dull. ‘Each generation,’ as Orwell said, ‘imagines itself to be more intelligent
than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’

As I age, I don’t see that my gifts are decaying, since my judgment is decaying at the same
pace. However old we may be, we don’t doubt that we are just entering our prime and that our
latest work must be our best.

No matter how old we are, life seems to be just beginning. And most of us learn so little from it,
that it always is, till it comes to an end. ‘We arrive,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘as thoroughgoing
tyros at the sundry phases of life.’

Our youth and seedtime oozed and stormed like bad verse, which the drab prose of our maturity
had to temper and emend. And yet most people’s maturity is no better than the torpid and self-
congratulatory prose that a scribbling versifier would write.
81 Senile heads on young shoulders
Only a soppy and doddering age such as ours could maintain that children are geniuses.
Genius is not the recovery of childhood at will, as Baudelaire claimed. It is the abandonment of
all the habits of childhood. Children are no more imaginative than their elders are wise.

We all now say that girls and boys are miraculous prodigies. But where are the master works
that they have made?

An artist may seem like a child, but a child is not in the least like an artist.

The famed imagination of childhood is one of the figments of the sentimental lack of imagination
of adults.

Where children are deemed to be as smart as adults, adults will soon be as silly as children.

The young live as freshly and lustily as they think stiffly, stalely and drily. And it takes a lifetime
for their flesh to grow as heavy and wrinkled as their minds. ‘The soul,’ as Wilde says, ‘is born
old but grows young.’ The body decays by changing, the mind by remaining the same.

82 Mere prodigies
‘If lads and lasses grew up consonant with early indications,’ Goethe wrote, ‘we should have
nothing but geniuses,’ but we have so few, because they cling to their unripe habits rather than
make them grow. Yet some people are sure that they must have been precocious children,
since they have still not outgrown their first fledgling opinions.

We all start out as prodigies. A fresh mind alone matures into something deeper and more
capacious. It’s dullards that hang on to the traits of youth, its mindless legalism, pettiness,
flippancy, cribbed hair-splitting, iterations and impatience. Only a pioneer busts their hold, and
keeps mutating and evolving. ‘It takes a long time,’ as Picasso said, ‘to grow young.’

83 Juvenile heads on old shoulders

Most people’s mental growth ends with the onset of puberty. If it did not, how could they deal
with the childishness of the big world?

Our flesh shows at sixty what our mind has been since sixteen. As Proust wrote, ‘It is from
adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old people.’

Some old people’s brains are so active and unimpaired, that they still have all the same claptrap
rattling round in them as they did when they were young.

Gravity and sloth age the mind as they do the body.

We have at last found the elixir of eternal immaturity. In the past the young had to give way to
the old. Now the old rave to keep up with the hectic fatuity of the young. They fear that they are
vegetating, if they’re not roaring round like teenagers. So long as they can move, they can’t bear
to keep still. And when they can no longer move, they still can’t bear to let go.

Our society dotes on youth, but is not up to making anything fresh. And it coddles the old, but it
has no use for the past.

It wouldn’t matter that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, if you could break it of its ingrained
ones.

84 The golden age

When you are young, the world seems magic. But when you grow up, you find that it was all just
a trick.

In childhood every familiar object is a fetish. The mystery is at first material.

How unhappy a happy childhood may have been. How could you believe in an age of gold,
when you have lived through one in your youth, and know how tarnished it was?

Children incarnate all the cruel partiality and cold glee of life. They are the evergreen world
being reborn the same, merciless, inquisitive, ardent. ‘Every child,’ Thoreau says, ‘begins the
world again.’ How sad to look into their eyes and think of all that they will see to dry up their
hearts, and how soon they’ll be drawn in to desiring it all. Their unthinking innocence will soon
have grown up to be an unthinking viciousness.

How short is the interval from beholding the world with wonder to eying it with lust.

Children these days don’t see through the emperor’s new clothes. They are prodigies of
amenable duplicity, who know that they have more to gain from admiring how finely he is
dressed.

85 Haunted by the past

The young feel the burning, the old taste the ashes, and neither can get their fill of them. When
you’re young, each sting wounds you more than it should. And when you grow up, what should
gash you won’t so much as graze your skin. Was childhood frightful, because such small slurs
rubbed you so raw, or because you were rubbed so raw by what was so flat and nugatory?
Doubtless it’s all changed now that we are grown up.

What murky shapes loom out of the dark of childhood to harry us through life.
How small we were when we were children. And how much smaller life has got since then.

86 Children of a larger growth

I want to gain my big adult triumphs just to sate a few infantile yearnings. The world is so topsy-
turvy because we are all still schoolgirls or boys squabbling to come off best in a game which is
not worth the winning.

Even as children our desires are oversized and ravenous. And even as adults they remain trivial
and juvenile.

As we go on in life, we collect a large wardrobe of grownup costumes to overlay our childish

desires, till age strips us back once more to stark childishness. ‘Men,’ as Dryden wrote, ‘are but
children of a larger growth.’

Girls and boys don’t play aimlessly, but spend all their time copying, competing and elaborating
convoluted rules. There is no such thing as pure play. Always there is some goal, desire,
cruelty, rivalry and vainglory. ‘Games are not games for children,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘but are the
most serious thing they do.’ Play initiates us into the solemn ways of the world.

Children charm us, not because they are so natural, but because they are so mannered, ‘as if
their whole vocation,’ in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘were endless imitation.’ They are still conning
their parts, and they play them more awkwardly than us, since we have been rehearsing ours all
our lives.

Children are the most captious conformists, always on the watch to jump on the least deviation
from the rules.

87 Time to leave
We are all sure that we will be ready to die some tomorrow, so long as it is not this tomorrow.
However late it gets, we don’t see that it’s time to go. As Nietzsche said, our last duty is to learn
to die at the right time. But we can’t bring ourselves to leave till it’s too late. Why wait to droop?
Jump instead. ‘When your work is done,’ Lao Tzu advised, ‘then withdraw.’

We defer life till it’s no longer worth living, and then all we want to do is hang on to it.

I feel sure that I could face death bravely, if only it were not this kind of death I had to face.

We lack the decency to die in good time. So we need to have the stolid self-possession to put
up with the day-to-day indignities that our greed for life heaps on us.
The sole kind of natural death these days is likely to be an early one. Or else it’s one that
technology has dragged out to such a point of debility that there’s no need to call in technology
to end it.

Old people have nothing to teach the young, except to take care not to grow as old as they
have. And that’s the lesson that no one wants to learn, and that they don’t know they’re
teaching.

88 Refusing to go
We all look on long life as one of our chief goods, but most of us now live too long for our own
good.

Life at its best tastes so foul, yet we all hope to live to an age where we will get down to its
sourest dregs of ill-health and imbecility. Old age is the most appropriate punishment for those
who have had the temerity to live too long. But we might soon bring an even worse fate on
ourselves when we find out the secret of eternal life.

Most of us claim that we would rather die than live to be too old. Yet none of us think that we are
too old. Those who lead such unlovely lives can think of nothing more beautiful than that they
should draw breath for one more day. Like us, life gets uglier as it grows older. And yet it still
seems to us as beautiful as it ever was.

Old people fight to keep their shrivelled grip on what they made no use of in their green time.
Like children asked to give up a toy that they had never played with, they find that they feel a
sudden commitment to a skill or subject that for fifty years has held no interest for them.

89 Death be not proud

Death be not proud. You don’t bag a soul these days till it’s shrunk to a clapped-out dribbler.
They go from not knowing they’re alive to not knowing that they’re dead.

What a disgusting victory over death we all now win, to live so long that we don’t see that it got
the better of us long ago.

Old people spend half their time bemoaning the natural aches and pains of age, and the rest
trying unnaturally to prolong them.

Some people will go to any length to stay alive, short of changing the habits that are killing
them. And some old people are distressed to lose a tooth, when soon they’ll be losing it all.

Death grimaces most frighteningly just when life seems least worth living. I clasp life more wildly
as its value melts. And I cleave to it almost as stubbornly as I do to all that threatens to scuttle it.
Even those who have nothing to live for will go to great lengths just to stay alive. And even when
we would rather be rid of life, we still can’t bring ourselves to let it go.

The soul dies with the body. But by a miracle of medicine many bodies now live on through the
death of their souls.

Medicine is the unnatural means that panders to our natural will to prolong life long past its
natural limit.
RELIGION

Contents

Gods

Creation

Care and cruelty

Messiah

Faith

Creed and church

Holy books

Salvation

All pagans

GODS

1 Types of religion
Revealed religion is empirical religion. Hence the knowledge that it gives is at best probable and
not conclusive. And the god that it reveals is contingent and not necessary.

The proofs that there is a god are not necessary for the believer, and not sufficient for the
unbeliever.

If the essence of a being implies its existence, then it must be a figment of our own brains. And
a being whose existence is logically necessary is not even possible.

Theology is the science of imaginary causes. And so till recently it has had more real effects in
this world of illusions than the rest of the fields of thought.
Natural religion gives fanciful causes for real effects, such as the existence of an orderly
universe. But in the revealed religion of miracles and messiahs not even the effects are real.

Mysticism is a genre of rhetoric. And like all rhetoric it begins with the pretence of rejecting
rhetoric and all mere words. Yet even for the most god-intoxicated mystics the point of their
intercourse with the divine seems to be to blather about it at great length to their fellow mortals.

Mysticism is not the first fresh morning of a religion. It is a late, florid, fantastic outgrowth of
scholasticism.

Why does the Lord delegate rich minds like Pascal to act as his apologists, and then fit them out
with such fatuous arguments?

The oldest religion and the newest science are the best. ‘The best wine is the oldest, the best
water the newest,’ as Blake wrote.

2 Types of gods
In an expanding universe God is receding farther and farther from us.

We call God transcendent as a polite way of ushering him out of existence. It’s a halfway house
on the road from being all in all to being nothing at all.

The gods are local and mortal emanations of our ubiquitous and perennial need of illusion.

Cursed by his omniscience and omnipotence, God lacks the two enviable powers which we are
blessed with, the power to forget and the power to die. Will he have his redress by rendering us
sharers in his detestable gifts?

A personal god would be too paltry to be worth our adoration. And an impersonal god would be
too detached to have any use for it.

Theologians tell us that God’s essence is unknowable. In that case we can’t know what it is that
we believe in when we say that we believe in God. And when we talk about God, we have no
idea what we’re talking about. So what is the worth of our belief and words?

The one great God of monotheism is narrower than each one of the gods in a vast polytheistic
pantheon.

A monotheist has a single idea, and it is a bad one.

In the beginning was the lie, and the lie was with God, and the lie was God.
You can’t escape from God, because he is everywhere. But you can’t find him, because he is
nowhere.

3 The hierarchy of religion

The most wholesome creeds, like hinduism, biblical judaism or paganism, are strong and
mentally fresh. Islam is an abstract, otherworldly and sand-blasted judaism, universalized and
purged of its local history and ethnic roots. It is vital, energetic and healthful, but arid and
straitened. Buddhism is languid but clean and rigorous. But christianity stinks of decay and the
soiled fever bed, dank, fetid, leprous and subterranean. It was the noisome and degenerate
netherworld of rabbinism, apocalyptic, spiteful, sectarian, perfervid, poisoned by maleficent
spirits, shoddily theatrical, overwrought, and corrupted by its idolatrous cult of personality.

From its birth the christian religion was prey to a rancid excess, too many gods, too many
testaments, too many gospels, canons, covenants, mountain tops, priestly peoples, apostles,
demons, councils, schisms, sects, sacraments, relics, and too much history. It was an anti-
semitic monotheism which set up a jewish man as one of its three gods, and claimed that it was
fulfilling the law when it was founded on a flagrant breach of its first commandment. It sprouted
as a rotten offshoot of judaism, to be grafted on a worm-eaten imperial roman stem, and then
transplanted to celtic and germanic soils.

The God of the israelites is the paramount deity of singleness, order and uniformity. The hindu
gods are unequalled emanations of creative fire and multiplicity. They are the perfect
reconciliation of the local and the pagan with the universal and transcendental.

4 Religion and idolatry

Mortals can’t touch a god without reducing it to an idol. Our greedy creeds taint its transcendent
purity. Belief turns truth itself to a lie. A god enters the brain, and comes out an idol. A truth goes
in, and comes out a lie. The heart is a furnace that casts an unwaning file of fetishes. And the
mind is a lush equatorial wild, in which fabulous superstitions bloom and fester. Many venerate
the Lord with their lips, but all enshrine shibboleths in their soul.

A culture that has smashed its idols of stone and wood will be all the more in bondage to its
idols of the mind.

It doesn’t matter much what god you kneel down to, since this is not the real god you adore.
That is the idol you shape for your own use.

God is what I worship, idols are what the rest of the world bows down to. And yet I know that my
God is the true one only because others worship him too.
5 Gods of language, idols of stone
The kind of gods that we create is determined by the form in which they are conceived. An idol
is an image which lives in stone or wood. A god is a character who lives in words. God made
the heavens and the earth by an act of speech, and we made him in the same way. Idols are
carved with hands. Gods are conceived in hearts.

Idols are the works of peoples whose gift is for the plastic arts. Gods are the works of literate
ones. If mortals had not learnt to write, there would be no gods. Idols don’t last long in the poetic
ether of a lettered age. And gods don’t last long in the dry air of a scientific one.

6 The gods are part of culture

The gods are part of culture not of nature. And like all works of culture the idea of God needs to
be drilled into us. No child is born with it. And it’s plain to all that they have a body, but they
need to learn from others that they have a soul.

The gods evolve more rapidly than animals, but not so fast as machines.

Religion is a blend of customs which we use to commune with our fellow mortals, not with God.
So its flock don’t much care whether there is a god or not. But they won’t put up with people
denying it.

Pious people warn us not to put our trust in human contrivances. But what is God, if not the
most human of all contrivances?

When custom used to ordain the gods, the gods were of course assumed to have ordained
custom.

7 The social circuit of religion

People love God as they do the rest of their friends, not so much for what he is, but for the
things they do in the company of their fellow-believers.

A private religion is no more possible than a private language.

God is a social illusion, not a metaphysical one. He is a product of social interactions, not of
abstract speculations. Though he may be a metaphysical mistake, he is a worldly fact. And they
are the only kind that we care about.

Faith is more a social practice than a personal conviction.

If people had souls of their own, they would not put up with religion, which is all authority,
custom and conformity.
Creeds last so long, because most people can’t be budged from their customary allegiance by
an inward movement of the spirit.

A true faith would be all astonishment, but religion is numbed routine and repetition. Our creeds
are an affront to faith, and our faith is an affront to God.

If you have faith because others have faith, then it is not real faith that you have. But if no one
else shares your faith, you will have no faith at all.

Each time we pronounce the formulas of our creed, it enters further into reality and becomes a
social fact. And social facts are the sole kind that have any sway with us.

God helps us to feel at home, not in the immeasurable void of space, but in our own small social
world.

8 The afterlife of the immortals

Like the rest of our productions, the gods are hopelessly mortal. We launch them on the broad
sea of eternity. But they sink shipwrecked and forgotten a short way through their everlasting
voyage.

To be a god is to be pulled this way and that by the fiends on earth who want to use you as a
screen for their devilry.

The afterlife of the gods is more tranquil and dignified than their first life. No longer fawned on or
fought over by mortals, they can take their ease in the empyrean of myth and art. Their lives are
not immortal, but posthumous.

CREATION

9 So free we seem, so fettered fast we are

Free will is so precious, that God gave it to us, though we might damn ourselves by its use. And
yet if we are to be saved, we must give up our free will, and merge it in his divine will.

If God lets a few of us in to heaven, he will have to strip us of our free will and share with us his
own will not to do evil. So why did he not bless us with this in the first place, so that none of us
would have had to go to hell?

10 The horror of creation

The Book of Genesis tells the story of God’s aghast evacuation from the horror that he had
made. He left it like a man in flight from an inferno. ‘Allah has created nothing more repugnant to
himself than the world,’ according to the muslim holy man. ‘And from the day he made it, he has
not glanced at it again, so much does he loathe it.’ What gruesome memories of it must turn his
paradise to a hell. Is he more indignant with us for the mess that we have made of his earth? Or
is he more ashamed of himself for having made it?

The world is a mirror, in which God can see his true self, and into which he therefore does not
care to look.

When the most high made mortals in his likeness, how horror-struck he must have been by
what he saw. It was a fit reward for his narcissism. If we are made in the image of God, is that
not the strongest of all reasons not to worship him? Would it not be beneath our dignity to bow
down to such a sorry being?

We have not killed the deathless gods. They have turned their backs on this doomed and
degraded globe.

God was the first utopian. He hoped to set the world to rights by killing off nine-tenths of its
occupants in the flood.

11 God’s original sin

Who will absolve God from the sin of having besmirched the timeless silence by engendering
this blaring world? He trespassed when he made it. So he had to raise up Satan as a patsy to
blame for his own bungling. But Satan’s sin was to humble God by tempting his pride to make a
display of his might by creating the world. And then as an atonement God had to send his son to
be put to death by the victims on whom he had unleashed it. God is our model of how
conscience works.

All sins are attempts to fill voids, Weil said. So what of God’s attempt to fill the void by his
creation of the cosmos? Was not this the mother of all sins?

When Adam ate of the tree of knowledge, he learnt that it was the Lord who lied and the snake
that told the truth. God is truth, but as soon as he began to speak to us, he had no choice but to
deal in lies. And when we draw near to him, we must do the same.

12 The red religion of blood

Only a cannibal god, red-fanged and ghastly, could have laid it down that life would flourish by
feeding on life. It exacts from its creation the homage of blood. The smell of nature is the smell
of death. Plants and trees alone make life without killing it. All the rest of life lives by
cannibalism. If the leopard were to lie down with the lamb, the whole world would starve.
God must have the sensibility of a crook who starts cock-fights. He flings a bone into a pack of
slavering dogs, and gets his fun from watching them tear each other limb from limb.

God made this world of scarcity, in which your gain is my loss so that we can’t help hating our
fellow beings, and then he told us to love one another.

The world that God made proves him to be monstrous or criminal. And his apologists defend
him by arguing that he is merely incompetent, and that he did the best he could do. They claim
that he is not fit to plead.

13 Fatuous creation
Did the Lord set this world spinning to amuse himself, and then lose interest in the show? It’s as
if he formed us to be his clowns and zanies, and then found that he had no sense of humour. Or
did our murderous high jinks strike him as too disgusting to be funny?

How perverse or incompetent of God, to have made a world all the features of which are so out
of joint with his own.

God made the world by withholding from his creatures his own supernal attributes. The creation
was his act of self-negation. He set his hyperactive creation running, and then retired to rest.

14 It means nothing to God

If we are to read God’s disposition in the book of the world, he must be like a schoolboy with a
chemistry set. He loves spectacular effects, flares and explosions, but has not figured out what
to do with most of it. The universe is proof of what mischief a bored deity will get up to when left
on his own for an eternity.

God is all-knowing, but like most polymaths, he does not think much, and he has few ideas, and
most of these are the same as the crowd’s.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, because God cares only for form
and quantity. Its moral significance is lost on him. In his eyes all events are no more than
statistics.

God knows all things. And so all things mean intensely to him, but none of it interests him.

We are the futile fools of time, and God is the futile fool of eternity. And God, who is tormented
by everlastingness, took his petty revenge by making creatures who are tormented by time.
15 The needy and all-sufficient deity
What pathetic need drove God, a perfect and self-sufficing being, to make a world so much
inferior to himself?

God, we say, does nothing in vain. And yet we don’t doubt that his most purposeful act was to
make this vain world and beings like us to live in it whose every deed is vanity.

Whether or not God’s existence gives a meaning to our life, our existence proves that God does
not suffice to give a meaning to his own. He exposed his inner poverty when he made this
world.

It’s easy to believe that there is a god who made the world. But it’s hard to see why he would
have wished to do so. Since he has the power to do everything, he has no reason to do
anything.

‘The universe is a flaw in the perfection of non-being,’ as Valéry said. God is a flawless being.
To exist is a glaring flaw. Hence God does not exist. He is a necessary entity who in
consequence has no place in this contingent world.

For a perfect being, to act at all is a sign of some lack which needs to be filled. All the acts of a
necessary being would have to be quite unnecessary. God is a necessary being all of whose
acts have been quite unnecessary.

Why did God make this life to test whether we merit a place in the next one, when he already
knew the answer?

16 The imperfections of a perfect being

God must have more power than knowledge, and more knowledge than wisdom.

For an all-powerful being, God seems baffled at every turn by his own impotence. For an all-
observing one, he seems to be ignorant of most of what goes on in the world. And for an all-
wise one, his designs seem to border on madness. It’s clear that the world is his handiwork,
since it is so imperfect, contingent and supererogatory.

If God is all-good and all-powerful, he must be so lazy that he might as well be impotent and
indifferent.

How could such a botched and aborted world have been brought forth by a perfect begetter?
And how could a loving father have sired such a detestable lump? The world is a wound in
God’s perfection.
You needs must forgive God, since he so conspicuously knows not what he does. If he knew
what his creation of this world would lead to, how could he have dared to do it? And if he were
all-powerful, he would have contrived some means to unmake it.

A perfect being would have to be boundlessly evil as well as boundlessly good, or else it would
be deficient in some respect.

17 God the celebrity

‘Man,’ according to Ignatius of Loyola, ‘was created to praise.’ How human of the creator, to
make a world so that he might wallow in its worship. He must be like a celebrity whose aim is to
recruit as many fans as he can to adore him. Is he so insecure that he needs us to prop up his
sense of himself?

God is a reclusive celebrity. He made a world to bask in its adulation, and then went into hiding
to keep out of the public eye.

God is vain rather than proud. He does not suffice for his own regard. And so he had to lower
himself to put on a show so as to win the applause of beings who are not worth impressing.

How could a deity that craves our reverence be worthy of it? What man or woman would be
gratified by the veneration of a slug or a fly? How could you have faith in a god who cares
whether or not you have faith in him? And yet this is the sole kind of god that you can care for.

18 Hungry for love

What pitiful hunger drove the Lord to create beings so unworthy of his love in the vain hope that
they would love him? And if he knows our hearts, how could he want or expect to win our
adoration? Is his faith in himself so fragile, that he needs such motes of dust as we are to have
faith in him? He too testifies that to act is not worth a pin on its own, if you lack the notice of
worthless witnesses. Like everyone else, he cares about none of your opinions save the one
that you hold of him.

God gives us unconditional love on condition that we love him to the exclusion of all else. And
yet no one really loves him at all. What they love is at best an idea that affirms them.

God puts up with the fellowship of the dreariest souls, so they at least claim, on condition that
they sing him loud hosannas. Does he too get the adorers that he deserves?

The Lord must be down and out indeed, if he needs to seek out the cramped habitation of a
human soul to squat in.
CARE AND CRUELTY

19 We cannot love God

In order to love God, people need to misunderstand him. They do, and yet they still don’t love
him. People may believe in God, but they can’t love him. And though they have ceased to
believe in the devil, they still do love him.

There can be no love of an infinite being for a finite one, nor of a finite being for an infinite one.
Take the gap that divides us from an amoeba, and multiply that by infinity. That is infinitely less
than the gulf between God and us. So ask yourself, how could he love us? And the broadest
crevasse that we can bridge with our love is the tiny one that sets us apart from a dog. Is it more
presumptuous to believe that God loves us or that we could love God? We are too selfish and
limited to love him, and he is too transcendent to care for us.

The prophets tell us that God’s ways are not our ways. But if that is so, what dealings can we
have with him?

We can’t love God, because he is not real to us. And we can’t love our neighbours, because
they are all too real.

Do pious people show more effrontery in presuming that God loves them or that they love him?

20 The religion of the father

Are there any three things more loathsome than a father, a fatherland and God?

If God is a father, that is good reason to hate him.

God acts most like a father in his lack of care for his offspring.

We are God’s children, and the world is a sadistic boarding school to which he sends us, to get
us out of his way and to toughen us up for the rigours of the next life.

Is God so obnoxious because he is a father? Or are fathers so obnoxious because they act like
gods?

A god of love is one of the more patent projections of our own voracious self-love. And we had
to conjure up a being as vast as the cosmos to love us as we deserve.

God loves us so much, that he gave us the free will to love him or not. And then in his mercy he
made hell for those who fail to.
21 The religion of hate
A religion is cherished not for the light that it gives but for its heat. And hatred and acrimony give
more heat than love. ‘Men hate more steadily than they love,’ as Johnson points out. A religion
of love won’t last long, if it fails to provide its flock with some foe to loathe. It wins them by
preaching charity while inflaming them to practise hate. But the lambs no longer have sufficient
faith to excommunicate each other, or burn schismatics, or put infidels to the sword, or plan
ingenious torments for their enemies in the world to come.

They can’t love the world which God has made. So they profess to love a God which they have
made.

The gods used to do what the state does now, that is, unite us with those of the same tribe as
us and divide us from foreign ones.

God may be a god of love, but we love him on account of his frightening power and to bribe him
to use it on our behalf.

Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, but they showed that it was not in them even to
love their friends.

22 The divine despot

The god of the cosmologists is too vast to be of use to us. And so we can have dealings only
with the petty tyrant who might help or harm us. As Muhammad asked, ‘How can you worship
what can neither benefit nor harm you?’

God is a king, and heaven is his court. The saints are his courtiers, and the one question that
fills their minds is that of precedence. Shall my seat be in the front row or the back, at his right
hand or at his left? Will it be a throne or a stool?

Christ is king, and we know that a king outranks all gods.

A god is any being strong enough to make hell for those beneath it.

We truckle to God by ascribing to him the qualities of the type that we find most enviable, that is
to say, the despot. Where a governor is flattered for his mercy, you know that he must be a
tyrant. Mercy is the virtue of an arbitrary autocrat, not of a lawful sovereign.

Mercy is in the realm of the moral life what miracles are in the realm of nature. God lays down
rigid laws, and then demonstrates his goodness or power by disobeying them.

God is an all-controlling but distant autocrat, and we are like those peasants who at each new
enormity would cry out, ‘If only Stalin knew of this.’
23 Divine malevolence
God must be as innocent as a child, who still takes pleasure in torturing kittens and demolishing
ants’ nests.

God’s blessedness, like that of a tyrant, would not be complete if he lacked the simpering of the
saints and the sight of the damned gnashing their teeth.

It seems that gods and mortals rile one another like a mismatched couple, and bring out each
other’s genocidal tendencies.

The Lord had no choice but to wipe us from the face of the earth, once he found that we share
his own incurable bent for violence and righteous deceit.

We claim to be made in the image of God. If this is a lie, how will he chastise us for libelling
him? But if it is true, what barbarous cruelty might we not have to fear at his hands? He serves
us as the mirror of our self-satisfaction, and we serve him as the mortification of his pride.

God couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive us for eating his apples till we had splayed his son on a
cross. Such is the ineffable logic of divine charity, which looks much like a crazed mortal cruelty.

24 The cannibal god

Our vitality feasts on all the death that we make. We dance on the roof of the shambles. The
deaths of others make us feel more alive. We count our own lot richer for their loss. I love life as
it has not yet seen fit to butcher me.

God built this slaughterhouse to teach us to be as kind to our fellow creatures as he was.

Saint Francis did well to preach to the birds. They have as much need of his teaching as we do,
since they hate one another just as sourly, and they are just as apt to heed it.

It would be easier to believe that this madhouse of cramming, copulating and killing is the work
of a crazy satyr than of a serene spirit. Could the God of love not have thought of a gentler way
for life to thrive than by devouring its fellow forms of life?

If life were not such a cannibalistic feast, we would never have got it into our heads that a good
God made it, or that we had to go to great lengths to appease his wrath. We would have lived at
our ease on the bounty of nature, at peace with all our fellow creatures.

25 Religion and the fiend

Heaven is the perfect totalitarian state. There the saved have no will to resist, and no one cares
for the recalcitrants who are racked in the concentration camp below.
The difference between God and the devil was in origin one of relative power. God is a king,
and so his privilege is to rule. Satan was a subject, and so his duty was to obey.

God is a fiend’s notion of a supremely felicitous being, who has the unchecked power to do his
will with impunity. And it may be that God is a name we give to the devil to flatter him, so that he
will favour us. God is the devil with more power, worse taste, less honesty, and a clear
conscience. The gods are masks that the devil has worn to do his work in this world.

26 The unhappiness of God

God’s state is indeed kingly. No one loves him, his entourage of lackeys curry favour with him to
get what they want, and no one tells him the truth.

We taunt a defunct god like a cashiered dictator, who has lost the power to hurt us.

If God is all-knowing, then he must be all-pitiful too. Omniscience is the curse of a being who is
condemned to know so much that is trivial and disgusting. But he is clearly not all-pitying. Like
any powerful person, he has no doubt used up all his pity on his own case.

Many things are not worth knowing, as Aristotle said, and most of what God knows must be of
this kind.

Was the Lord corrupted, first by his elation at his own omnipotence and success, and then by
his despair at how we wrecked what he had made? Whatever he feels for us and this sad world,
it can’t be love, or his heart would break a million times a minute. Was he dumbfounded more
by the resilience of human kind or by its depravity? Having failed to drown it in the flood, he then
failed to redeem it on the cross. He found that it cost less bother to make a world than to save it,
at least when he had made it so hastily.

God did not know remorse, till he made this world. But since that evil hour, he has known
nothing else.

27 Jehovah and son

The God of the Old Testament slaughters his foes, and we derogate him as a vindictive tyrant.
The God of the New Testament tortures them till the end of time, and we dote on him as a
merciful father. They form a cruel dynasty. ‘My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will
chastise you with scorpions.’ Who could love such a God? ‘Fear him, which after he hath killed
hath power to cast into hell.’ People look on Jesus as a god of love because they believe that he
didn’t mean the anathemas that he spewed forth or that he meant them only for their enemies.
God seems to have been an absent-minded father, unsuspecting for most of time that he had a
son. Could it be that he was so disappointed in the milksop, that he gave him no thought till he
had the chance to dispatch him to this world to have him lynched? Having seen how he dealt
with his own firstborn, we might pause before claiming to be his children.

28 Imperial religion
How the devil must smirk, to see how the sects have spread their smudge over the clean earth.
The gods were shipped round the globe like germs, decimating whole populations that had not
yet been inoculated against them. Jesus came as a scourge to the first americans to chastise
them for their incorrigible innocence. He let loose his fiends on them, to show them how much
need they had of his saving grace.

God loves the cruel and self-righteous, and helps them to torment the weak.

How the Lord must hate the sinlessness of indigenes and animals, and prefer us and our
rapacity, duplicity and machinery. So he has called us up as his death squads to hunt them from
his earth. What loathing he must have for his creation, to put its fate in our hands.

29 Luck trumps providence

God’s providence may rule your life, but dumb luck must choose which god’s providence it will
be your lot to be ruled by. Cross the river, and you must worship a strange god. ‘We are
christians by the same title that we are périgordians or germans,’ as Montaigne wrote. If we had
faith as big as a grain of mustard, we might remove mountains. But since we do not, mountains
and rivers change the course of faith. On this side of the hill we have one God, on that side
dwell the devils.

In the old principalities religion was a tool of statecraft. Now it is an outdated name for the
caprices of demography. Faith cometh by breeding. In matters of religion God proposes but
man disposes. Divine grace is no match for the least chance of birth.

A religion proves its truth not by advancing rational arguments but by its adherents breeding like
rabbits.

Most people are no more responsible for their religion than they are for the colour of their skin.

The cosy creed of providence is a doggerel in which the creator rhymes too readily with his
creation.

30 The incompetence of providence

The cosmos is testimony to God’s surpassing power and deficient wisdom.
The world is such a mess, one could well believe that there’s a god presiding over it. And his
existence is such an appalling possibility, that one could well fear it might be real. We must
hope that he will show his mercy for us by not existing.

God helps those who don’t need his help. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he
shall have abundance.’

If the cosmos is a contraption designed to rescue castaway souls, why is it so ill-fitted to its
task? What a world of blood, waste and wonders God has made for us to ply the starved
christian virtues in. ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Why so broad a stage for so paltry
a play? Why fourteen billion years of starburst and carnage for a few dingy centuries of
salvation?

God help any cause that needs God’s help to succeed.

31 The favourites of religion

God manifests his compassionate grace when he plucks his favourites from a cataclysm in
which he dooms multitudes to die. ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy
right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’ When predestination sets its mind to put the world to
rights, you know there will be slaughter.

Providence is not general good salvaged from particular evil. It is our own partial good
purchased at the expense of general evil.

God is a maudlin soul, who weeps for the fall of a sparrow but winks at mass extinctions. And
the sparrows keep falling nonetheless.

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.

32 The egoism of religion

The job of providence is not to make everyone happy, but to make me and mine happier than
everyone else. I would know only half of God’s love for me, if I didn’t see him persecuting those
whom I hate. It’s as clear that it is at work when it rains blows on others as when it heaps
blessings on me. A god that fails to take our part would be no god at all.

The more mayhem we witness in the world, the more just we think the providence that shields
us from it.

We love God because we know he hates our enemies. His job is to deal out an indulgent mercy
to us and a harsh justice to our foes.
What would be sin in us is virtue in God. Such is his jealousy, pride, wrath and vengeance. And
we want him to practise on our behalf the sins that are forbidden to us.

Providence is the power that preserves my life. God knows what preserves the lives of others.

33 The brutality of providence

If all is in God’s hands, he must have a lot of blood on them.

We know that the geological record is the history of God’s intervention in the world, because it is
littered with carnage and mass death.

We would do well not to trust the good will of any deity that would let loose our murderous kind
on the rest of his creation.

The god who keeps this world turning must be numb to our sufferings and an accessory in our
sins. He acts as the stern warden of our prison-house, superintending all the energy and
violence that keeps this pandemonium in a roar.

It is a proof of God’s wisdom, that he knows how to use the foolish, the wicked and the false to
serve his plan.

God alone, the theologians say, has the true freedom not to do wrong. But he has kept it back
from us, in order to prove how right he is to damn us.

All things forward the devil’s work, not least the labour of the saints.

34 God loves the rich and the great

Providence 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.

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.

God visits the sins of the rich and powerful on the poor and helpless. And he punishes the
strong for their sins, but not till the world has stripped them of their strength, and set up stronger
ones in their place. And he puts down the guilty, but not till he has made the innocent pay the
price for their guilt.

God loves the rich so much, that he sent his creeds to tell the poor that it is they that he loves,
so that they won’t rise up and kill the rich.
If the guilty never prosper, then all the great ones of the earth must be innocent.

Monsters of selfishness are sure that God is on their side. And all that goes on in the world
shows that they are right.

MESSIAH

35 False messiah, false religion

Anyone who sets out to save the souls of others is lost. A saviour must try to save the world,
since he is too attached to it to let it go. Jesus, unlike Buddha, never laughs.

A messiah is a heretic and blasphemer come to unshackle the elect from the old sire’s tough
edicts. He brings the glad tidings that by his merciful intercession his father has damned no
more than nine tenths of us to burn in ever-living flames.

In two thousand years there has not been a single born christian, not even the one who died on
the cross. He was too drunk on his messianic errand to be a sober pilgrim. He was both the
most influential and the most impotent man who has ever lived. So he may have been God after
all.

Jesus seldom communed with seraphim, but he was fretted by legions of devils. Like all who
claim to show us the way to heaven, he seems to have had more fun fantasizing about the lurid
torments of hell.

36 Bound to the world for eternity

The quest for the life everlasting has been one of the desultory pastimes of desperate mortals.

Was it such a good thing for Lazarus to be brought back from the dead? Must he not have felt
that fiends were snatching at his soul, and dragging him to hell? He seems to have been caught
up as an unwitting accessory in a magic trick. Isn’t it odd that a religion whose sight is so fixed
on the next world should prove its miraculous power by returning a man to this one?

We would desist from hankering for heaven, if we could get our fill of our worldly desires, or if
we could let go our grip on them. Craving is craving, whether it’s for earthly trash or for heavenly
tinsel. And even the search for nirvana serves as one more excuse for clinging to life.

A sage like the Buddha must have an uncommonly strong will to live, to have seen through the
world and how worthless it is, and still to go on living.

This world so fills our hearts, that it brims over as a belief that there must be an even better one
which will cater to all our worldly wants, in which we will live for all time. But eternal life in the
true sense would be to cease to exist as an individual, and to let go of one’s self, and to be
absorbed in God. And to most believers that would be worse than being dead.

37 The imitation Christ

Perhaps the true Jesus of self-forgetting wisdom was left in the tomb, when the false egoist was
raised up by Paul and the evangelists.

We ought to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt, and not blame him for instituting the cult of his
personality.

It’s clear Jesus was a fraud from how eagerly he touted for followers and how fiercely he
insisted that we must have faith in him. His personality type was not that of a self-effacing sage
but of a manipulative and self-aggrandizing cult-leader. As Kierkegaard wrote, ‘A man who
could not seduce men cannot save them either.’

Jesus has all the marks of a parochial charlatan, the narrow horizons of thought, the fierce
invectives against his competitors, the tight band of mesmerized dupes, the claim to miraculous
gifts, the contempt for forms and customs that don’t suit his own needs, the myth of the stab in
the back, the dividing of the world into those who are for me and those who stand against me.

38 The narcissist Jesus

Jesus is each one of us, a frustrated solipsist, God’s loveless and forlorn child, sure that he
could heal the multitude if they would have faith in him, and that the cosmos could be saved if it
would love him to the exclusion of all else, a self-believer who needs us all to believe in him,
one who would curse a fig tree if it failed to yield him fruit out of season, a bad actor, fanatical
yet evasive, all the while playing to the gallery and permitting the momentary effect to trump the
truths of eternity. He is touched by people only when he can cast them as pathetic extras in the
melodrama of salvation in which he stars. If you aimed to follow his lead, you would take up
faith-healing, exorcism and millenarian ranting.

A messiah lives in the eyes of others, and can’t bear to be alone. The question that means most
to him is ‘Whom do men say that I am?’ And since his kingdom was not of this world, it could not
have been within him. It must have been out there, in the hearts of his sheep, who shored up his
faith that he was the son of God.

Jesus calls on you to submerge your egoism in his. But unlike a sage such as the Buddha, he
does not mean to give up his own.
39 The despairing redeemer
A redeemer must have sounded the soul to a lower depth than a mephistophelean tempter. So
how could he grant that it has any right to find grace? ‘O faithless and perverse generation, how
long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?’ Hell hath no fury like a saviour scorned.

God and the devil fight over human souls, on which neither of them could set any value.

What small fry Jesus must have deemed the human soul, to have dubbed his apostles fishers of
men.

‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Jesus died in lucid despair, and was raised by
his disciples’ hopeful delusion. And when in this world does greedy mortal gullibility fail to win
out over divine despair? From then he was doomed to live on as the false fetish of all that his
soul abhorred and that the world loves, a triumphant usurper who stole God’s place in the
hearts of his flock. The cost of his success was to have the gold of his message melted down to
forge one of the most brazen of the world’s idols. He had to lose his soul to gain the world.

God lost his faith when he made the world, and his son lost his faith when he tried to save it.

When God took on man’s flesh, the sum of all he learnt was that his divine father had left him in
the lurch.

40 The spiritual demagogue

A saviour is a spiritual demagogue. A true sage is a spiritual aristocrat. But there may not be
much to tell them apart once their followers have finished with them.

Sermon-mongers trust that they heal others by the homilies that they preach. But it is their own
sick souls that they cure by their play-acting. They gorge their own egoism by admonishing you
to starve yours. The sole salvation that they crave is an adoring crowd. They hope to be
redeemed by the ears of their hearers and to be rescued from despair by the faith that others
show in them. They are borne up not by their own faith, but by the faith of their fellow mortals.
‘No siren did ever so charm the ear of the listener,’ Henry Taylor wrote, ‘as the listening ear has
charmed the soul of the siren.’

41 Shepherds and butchers

Beware of those who set up as shepherds of a flock. The sheep are sure to end up fleeced or
butchered.
Saints don’t aim to save one soul but multitudes, since they know that no soul is worth saving
but their own. They want to do their salvation business wholesale, not retail. And they hope to
make it big in their career of meekness.

If we are to believe his prophets, God is as narrow-minded, self-righteous and vengeful as

themselves.

FAITH

42 Faith and religion

All the creeds have at least served to hide from us our lack of faith.

True faith would be the one great scandal and stumbling-block to our worldly hearts. So God
makes sure that the one scandal pious people never put in our way is that of true faith.

We have a deep propensity for superstition, but next to no gift for real faith. Religion is the crust,
superstition is the core. Our hopes and fears are so sharp, that they stick even into unreal things
if they promise to help or harm them.

Superstition is an abject fear of things that are out of our control, which prompts us to a mad
presumption that we are able to control them.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen. All the things that we can see cast doubt on there being
a God. And since God sees all the things that we get up to, how could he have faith in us?

43 Faith and knowledge

A religion will soon die out once its believers start to care whether or not it is true.

Any prejudice that needs to be fortified by reason will in the end be felled by it. ‘To give a reason
for anything,’ Hazlitt says, ‘is to breed a doubt of it.’ A faith that could be brought down by
countervailing evidence would scarcely be faith at all. All healthy faith is immune to reason.

The two sources of faith are scripture and tradition, but if you made a study of these, you would
lose all grounds for faith.

Faith alone can be certain, since it knows nothing. If you lack faith, you cannot be sure. And if
you have faith, you cannot be honest or wise.

The just may live by faith, but the honest must live by doubt, irony and despair.

Knowledge can no more dissolve faith than light can counteract gravity.
44 The foolishness of faith
‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.’ He loves the fools so
much, that he has made this life as a test which they are best qualified to pass. And he has
made heaven as a reward which they will be best equipped to enjoy.

Solomon taught that in much wisdom is much grief. Jesus solved this problem by replacing
wisdom with the foolishness of faith.

Religion does not train people to think in a certain way. It makes the most of the fact that they
don’t think at all. Its shepherds relieve their sheep of the burden of thinking, which can’t have
weighed very heavily on them anyway.

45 Religion hates religion

Even more than reason, faith hates rival faiths, and the faith next to it most of all. A religion is a
thing baseless, pernicious, primitive and oppressive, unless it is one’s own. In that case it is
common sense, consoling, useful and liberating.

All believers are of the same view, that the one real choice is between their own religion and no
religion at all. They could see themselves being frank atheists, but how could they swallow the
impious hogwash of a rival religion?

Converts assent with such fire and zeal not so much from love of their new creed as out of hate
for their old one. The persecutor’s cold fury mutates into the convert’s crusading fanaticism. No
views strike us as so baneful or preposterous as those that we once held as our own. And in
order to prove that we are now in the right, we have to excoriate them for causing us to go so
wrong.

Credulous believers mock the credulity of those whose superstitions differ from their own.

46 The proof of numbers

A sect proves that it is the true one by how many minds it convinces or conquers and by how
long it lasts. Its success in this world is the test of its divine favour. We don’t have faith in the
Lord. We have faith in certain mortals who declare that they have faith in the Lord. It’s not ideas
that we believe or disbelieve. It is people that we trust or distrust. But who now could muster
enough trust in the human race to credit its puerile forgeries of the godhead? Belief in God calls
for too much faith in man.

Many people believe things whose absurdity would be clear to all, were it not that so many
people believe them. A faith is a sacred Ponzi scheme, which rests on the mutual credulity of its
dupes.
We believe that we believe in our religion, because we believe that others believe in it.

47 The survival of the fittest religion

Wilde notes that ‘truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.’ The gods,
like all living things, are subject to the laws of natural selection. An extinct religion must be a
false religion. We take it that a living god must have a living flock, since it is not God but his
believers that we believe in. Who these days could do homage to the deities of Egypt or the
aztecs? It’s useless to try to bring a dead god back to life, as Julian the apostate found when he
tried to resuscitate the divinities of Rome.

A religion proves its truth by surviving. But the ideas that are fittest to survive amongst our
incorrigibly deceived and deceiving species are bound to be lies.

48 The proof of zeal

The chief appeal of a creed is the zeal of its flock. But when you know what coarse and silly
chaff feeds their fervency, you’re apt to be made sick by it.

Zeal is not one of the gifts of the spirit. It is an aggressive assertion of self which proves the
absence of them. Faith ought to teach a wise detachment, not least from the zeal of faith. True
religion would negate the ego. Zeal inflames it. What a pity that both of the creeds that have
conquered the world have nothing but zeal. Their adherents don’t know how to be devout
without being fanatical, and they can’t be wise without becoming infidels.

It is your faith and zeal that win people over, not your reasons. And you get your faith and zeal
from others. It is more common to have the courage of other people’s convictions. Faith, like life,
is imitation, not conviction. ‘Every man is a borrower and a mimic,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘life is
theatrical and literature a quotation.’

49 The proof of blood

Martyrs die for their creed, which they love more than life, as they lived for their creed, which
they loved more than truth. Laodiceans love the world more than their faith. Zealots love their
own zealotry more than their faith. And the god-fearing love their faith more than they love their
god.

A sect that begins by revering martyrs will soon be revelling in carnage. If truth is proved by
blood, it can be proved as well by the slaughter of its opponents as by the sacrifice of its
acolytes.
The most spiritual faith grows fat not on the belief of its devotees but on the blood of its
adversaries.

Martyrs seduce believers, not by the light of their faith, but by the lurid violence of their tortures
and by the lust for revenge that they rouse. And they are loved, not so much because they offer
up their own blood, but because they give their fellow believers a licence to shed the blood of
their foes.

Why do those who claim to put their trust in the spirit hold that the best confirmation of truth is
the shedding of blood?

50 The religion of the man-god

The gravest sin against God is to set up a man in his place. And yet many people know no other
way to worship him.

The incarnation is a more ridiculous miracle than the resurrection. Is it not more ludicrous that
the great God should be born and die as a mere man, than that he should be able to come back
to life? But we find it more marvellous that he should do what no mortal could do than that he
should have done what no deity would deign to do.

First the one God killed the rest of the gods, and then the son of man usurped the place of his
father. When God took on human form, it was inevitable that humanity would one day
appropriate the role of God.

The notion that a god would take on man’s shape is so flattering to our human vanity, that it
never occurs to us how degrading it is to his divine dignity. But this seems to us the most
godlike thing he ever did.

51 The worldly grounds of religion

Mortals have faith in the godhead on such weak grounds, that when they cease to have faith,
it’s on grounds just as weak. And those who cling to their creed do so because they don’t care
enough to doubt. They trust in supernatural things from mundane causes, and they trust in
rational things from irrational ones. And the mundane and irrational causes are the same,
usage, inheritance, expedience, conformity, slothfulness and self-interest. As Swift said, ‘It is
useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.’

Where their mere ever-living soul is at stake, people will sink their trust in the laziest absurdities,
which they would spurn out of hand if it concerned their welfare in this world. And it seems worth
a flutter, since the stakes are so low.
A religion spreads, not when it converts the world to its holiness, but when the world converts it
to its worldliness.

The pious know that the world is a den of lies. So why do they take it that their faith proves its
truth when it wins over the world?

Our mouths gape to praise God, but then gulp down the world. Our hearts are so empty, that
they can swallow this world at one swig and have room for the next one as well.

It is the things of this world that we have faith in, though we may call them God.

52 The sterility of religion

If people had real faith, they would have no need of religion. And if there were a god, they would
have no need of faith.

Faith is a stock of self-serving fantasies which mocks the world. And the world is a stock of self-
serving fantasies which mocks faith.

The soul soaks up faith as a dry rock soaks up rain, but won’t soften or breed a thing from it.
Faith is sterile, till it has been fertilized by hypocrisy.

‘Act as if you had faith,’ said Augustine, ‘and faith will be given unto you.’ That is to say, act as
you see those acting who have been at it for so long that they have come to assume that they
believe for real. What devious unbeliever could have set out so glaringly the all too fleshly
origins of faith? Faith is one of those roles that we play with more feeling the longer we have
been playing it.

We don’t doubt, because we don’t really believe.

53 Faith in this world

It’s not the incredulous but the elect who show by their frigidity and negligence where their real
treasure lies.

Our worldly hearts take refuge in faith because our mundane troubles weigh a great deal more
with us than the religious remedies which we unthinkingly take up to lighten their pain. We
bandage a sham spiritual sore with belief, so that by curing this we might bear our real
workaday ones with more ease. God served as one of our worldliest fabrications. And the most
unworldly faith is for use in this world and not in the next. Pious people fix their gaze on
paradise to help them get through the trials of this life, not to score a place in the next one.
Those who feel that they are at work in the vineyard of the Lord have got their pay in advance
here on earth.

We never come to the end of our worldly credulousness. But we quickly wear out our capacity
for true conviction.

Did God lend us faith as a blindfold, so that his shining would not sear our weak eyes?

Most of us don’t lose our faith. We just find how little of it we had in the first place.

54 The futility of faith

Salvation is by faith, that is, an imaginary reward for an imaginary virtue.

Faith is the fake satisfaction of a shallow need.

Faith is the flag of God’s withdrawal. We have had to call on its aid, since the hidden God has
turned in disgust from the earth and ceased to speak to us face to face.

If faith is a mere wager, and God a gamble, then the soul is not worth playing for.

We don’t really believe the dogmas that form our creed, and we don’t practise the precepts that
form our moral code. By a strange reversal we act out our creed through its rituals of assent,
and assent to its moral code as a theory fit only for some other world.

‘Religion,’ as Pavese wrote, ‘consists in believing that all that happens is very important,’ though
we don’t need religion to tell us that. But religion is at a loss to make us take the great truths of
life seriously. The best it can do is to make us take its own frivolous fables seriously.

It’s clear which are the core doctrines of a creed. They are the ones that its flock fails to believe
in or understand, much less practise.

55 Religion of the unredeemed

Believers pin their hopes on a saviour, so that they won’t have to give any thought to their own
salvation. If they could be saved, they would have no need of a saviour. And if they could win
deliverance, they would have no need of creeds or sects. They need to keep on finding
deliverers, so that they can go on doing the things from which they need to be delivered.

We can’t save ourselves and don’t want to. So there must be a saviour who will do it for us.

If we are so far gone from the right path that only a god could save us, how could we be worth
saving, or what god would want to?
The preachers of the good news proclaim the kingdom, and then put a hundred obstacles in our
path to prevent us from getting to it.

If people’s depravity didn’t prevent them from practising the ideals of their religion, the
institutions of their religion would have been sure to.

Why do we keep on seeking our salvation from the cackling messiahs who fool us so
outrageously and the ingenious machines which will ruin us so lucratively? We are as crafty as
gods, and stupider than parasites, which have more sense than to wear out their host.

56 The cares of this life

The most trivial worldly desire or distraction is enough to drive from our hearts the love of God
or the fear of hell. ‘Each day,’ wrote Maistre, ‘even the most submissive religionist risks the
torments of the afterworld for the sake of the paltriest pleasures.’ The fiend’s best bluff was not,
as Baudelaire claimed, to make you believe that he does not exist, but to assure you that you
sincerely believe that God exists.

Our fears for how we will fare in the next world are proportioned to our cares in this one. The
dread of damnation for all time costs us less anguish than the loss of a job.

We need a gospel according to Lazarus, to bring to the daylight what he found out in his shroud.
But no one seems to have cared to ask him its mysteries, and they may have slipped from his
mind too by the time he came to sleep his second sleep.

Most people spend far more care on their clothes than on their soul.

57 Heaven can wait

If you believed that you were headed for heaven, would you not curse each day that you had to
stay in suspense here on this low earth? ‘Were the happiness of the next world as closely
apprehended as the felicities of this,’ Browne wrote, ‘it were a martyrdom to live.’ But we are by
no means keen to loose our grip on the cheap toys of this life in order to claim our fabulous
birthright of bliss in the next. Most believers would be content to put off their eternity for an
eternity. And they would give up their hope of paradise for one more day in this purgatory.

People long for a second life, since they can’t break free from their attachment to this one.

58 Religion of the body

Religion keeps our bodies busy with prayers and litanies and pilgrimages and fasts and vigils
and penances, so that it won’t have to deal with our unredeemed hearts. It proves that our souls
are too dull to rise above earthly things.
The state makes use of religion to regulate the body by pretending that we have souls.

The priest transubstantiates wafers of bread into the body of Christ, so that we don’t have to do
a thing to change our souls.

59 An inward and spiritual vacancy

Believers think that they take part in the rites of their creed because they believe it. But in fact
they believe it because they take part in the rites, and they take part in them because others
take part in them too.

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual void.

Ritual turns miracle into mundane routine. Faith is wonder, religion is custom.

We recite our creeds, to keep from noticing that we don’t believe a word of them.

We need to take part in rituals, because we have no faith. And we need to cling to our faith,
because our rituals are vain and inefficacious.

Religious feast days give rise to a lot more masticating than meditating.

We mark the feast days of our religion to congratulate ourselves for not practising its precepts
on all the rest.

Worshippers don’t see that their rituals are hocus-pocus, since they don’t see any magic in them
at all. Each Sunday millions of catholics take part in the most stupendous miracle, and it seems
to them as routine as chomping on a cracker. Once it is established, a religion can work its
miracles to order. How could Hume say that no miracle was ever witnessed? Few things are
more commonly attested.

If God were here with you, why would you need to set out on pilgrimage? And each step on your
path lands you farther from God.

60 Religion is first hallucination, then hearsay

A faith begins in hallucination, but soon fades into hearsay.

After the first divine visitation a revelation is mere hearsay. Faith without words would be dead.

‘Faith cometh by hearing.’ People believe, not because they see, but because they hear the
professions of those who do believe. And then they begin to see once they believe. ‘Ghosts,’
says Scott, ‘are only seen where they are believed.’ Faith is a derangement of the senses.
Believing is seeing. The saved don’t have faith because they have seen miracles. They see
miracles once they have got faith. And if they don’t see miracles, then they have no real faith.
‘And he did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.’

Thomas is the patron saint not of toughminded sceptics but of the hysterically credulous, who
have learnt how to work themselves up into hallucinating the chimeras which their creed has
told them are real.

61 Miraculous stupidity
Miracles used to confirm faith, now they confound it. Believers have to explain them away, in
order to prove that their beliefs are plausible.

Why have the omniscient gods stultified mortals with miracles, instead of enlightening us with
their insight? Do they know us so well, that they have gauged what shoddy dodges we deserve
to be deceived by? ‘God’s contempt for human minds,’ wrote Valéry, ‘is proved by miracles.’
Marvels are an index of how gullible we are, not of how powerful God is. They don’t show his
supernatural power, but our all too natural stupidity. They stun our reason but don’t stir our
wonder. If they were real, they would prove God’s lack of wisdom. But since they are not, they
prove our lack of brains.

To what depths of crassness will God not stoop to impress his crass mortal flock?

Miracles give themselves away as fictions by their use of suspiciously exact numbers and
piquant but irrelevant details.

62 The mystery
Magic tricks need a high degree of skill and sleight of hand. Miracles have no need of that. They
are all the work of their audience.

Conjurors can’t believe how credulous their audience is. But a messiah is shrewd enough to let
his own disciples deceive him. He is a sorcerer who is cozened by his own tricks. And the one
fault of his followers in his eyes is that they are not credulous enough. Faith and credulity are
the first of the virtues.

Each sect is sure that it alone holds the key to life and truth, since it alone is able to elucidate
the inane mysteries that it has trumped up.

Were it not for all its ridiculous mysteries, a religion would seem to most people to be not worth
believing.

Any madman can get it lodged in his brain that he is Jesus, but it takes seven years of
methodical formation to learn how to turn bread into his body.
63 Against the law
A miracle is not a promise of our salvation, but a parable of its impossibility. There’s more
chance that the order of nature will be turned on its head than that our soul could be saved.

God made the world through his immutable laws, and mortals believe in him for his trivial
transgressions of them.

God needs to work miracles, because he lacked the foresight to plan for all eventualities.
Miracles are the addenda and corrigenda of the divine script.

A true genius is at least half charlatan, and judging by the accounts of his miracles, so is God.

God providently sends each age and place the type of miracles that it is prepared to be taken in
by. We have eyes only for those signs and wonders that our faith has told us we will see.
Pagans used to see capering fauns or the god Apollo, catholics see the virgin Mary.

Would the true messiah stoop to fool us with the sort of shabby stunts that would lure the
gullible to greet him as the messiah? It might not be so hard to believe that Jesus was the son
of God, were it not for the all-too-human miracles that prove it.

64 The end of an illusion

The sole proof of the Gospels is the miracles, and the sole proof of the miracles is the Gospels.

Jesus held in his palm the power to cast out devils, but lacked the plain sense to grasp that they
are not real. Anyone now who set up to cure the insane by exorcising evil spirits would be
judged insane or else a cunning quack. If Jesus was not God, then he must have been mad, or
he may have been both, or not quite one or the other. If he and his disciples were not insincere,
then they must have been insane.

Christianity was a hysterical apocalyptic cult. Its first and last miracle was to live on through the
world not ending in the way that its founder had foretold. ‘This generation shall not pass, till all
these things be fulfilled.’ But one mark of the decline of faith is the decrease in the number of
times that Jesus fails to come back to earth.

Jesus could afford to preach such an impractical ethic, because he was sure the world would
end so soon that no one would be practising it for long.

CREED AND CHURCH

65 Creeds and religion
Either God gave us religion to mock us and to add to our sins, or the devil gave us religion as a
mockery of God.

A religion is a set of precepts for morally and intellectually straining at gnats and swallowing
camels. It makes its devotees harmless as serpents and wise as doves.

Of course the faithful fight over the trivial details of their religion. Trivial details are all their
religion is made up of. And since the fate of souls rests on just such small points of doctrine,
pedantry must be one of the chief theological virtues.

We can only hope that God will forgive us all our blasphemous creeds. We will have to give an
account at the judgment of all the palaver that we have yammered in his name.

Heresies are the diseases of a religion. Some come in its springtime, and some in its
senescence and will lead to its death.

66 Changing gods
A nation that won’t periodically change its gods will find that it has to change the grounds on
which it believes in them. God is a measurelessly elastic illusion, a single name for a succession
of fantasies. Words and names last longer than things or people or even gods. ‘You can change
your faith without changing gods, and vice versa,’ Lec wrote. Jews and christians pray to a
divinity whom father Abraham and the patriarchs would not recognize.

A god, like a nation, retains the same name for centuries, though its whole nature and
constituents have changed.

Jehovah unrolled his law to polygamists and slave-holders, and seemed to see nothing amiss in
polygamy and slavery. And though we take his laws to be the most exalted code, we now count
these as the most abominable sins.

67 The banality of belief

The godhead is a vast poetry which we shrink to the meagre parlance of a creed.

A religious tradition smothers the fire of its founding revelation in the foul rags and blankets of
dogmatic pedantism, as vain interpreters do the text of Shakespeare.

The world takes its revenge on God by setting up religions. A sect is the desolation of the
sacred. A faith needs a church to pervert it into longevity.
God can work miracles, but not even he can inspire a pastor with a ten minute sermon that is
more than banal. ‘The most tedious of all discourses,’ Emerson wrote, ‘are on the subject of the
supreme being.’

68 Church, faith and religion

The church is God’s cage, where his keepers feed him milk and clover and see to all his needs.
A timid flock needs a tame god.

The pious keep God pinned like a butterfly in the inlaid cabinet of the church.

The christian state was the leopard that lay down with the kid and devoured it. The prince of
peace has ruled over a realm of mayhem and death. What a victory for the world. What a
humbling of the spirit.

To punish us for presuming to build the tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues.
And to punish us for expecting the kingdom, he sent us the church.

Jesus’ teaching is so shifting and inconsistent, that all kinds of cult might be true to some aspect
of it, except for his established churches.

The church spent the first half of the twentieth century vainly traducing the modern world, and
the second half vainly truckling to it.

69 Crucified by religion
Divine grace falls on the soul like a bolt of lightning. It chars it but can’t change it. Believers
would go mad, if they held for real what their religion tells them is true. Real saints are martyred
by their faith. Plaster saints are canonized by credulous sheep. Faith comforts a tepid disciple,
but would crucify a true one. And false disciples use it to crucify their foes. It is the good news
only for smug half-believers.

The Lord is not a lamb. He is a prowling tiger. And if you loved him, you would be torn limb from
limb.

70 Heretics and laodiceans

A saint is a lunatic inflamed by fanaticism and stupefied by orthodoxy.

A church lives not by the zeal of its flock but by their cold compliance. It is founded by fanatics,
administered by careerists, and populated by laodiceans.
A real believer would have no choice but to be a heretic. The place of a true christian would be
outside the church. But most christians stick to their religion so that they can stay inside a
church.

The godly brand as heretics those who can dream of a bigger god than their own.

Religion has three foes, indifference, false fanaticism, and true faith. But it has one prop which
is stronger than all these, self-serving conformity.

The church can put up with a few holy fools in its ranks, since their foolishness will prevent their
holiness from causing too much harm. And it could even bear one or two saintly popes, though
not even it is sufficiently robust to survive any more than that.

71 The needful disciples of religion

A religion is betrayed by its most devoted evangels. Would a true prophet be more appalled to
be crucified by his foes or to be deified by his flock? It is a fearful thing for a living god to fall into
the hands of his or her most loyal devotees.

We take the precepts of the most self-denying sages, such as Buddha, and turn them into a cult
of their personality and a cause to fight for.

Jesus could have made shift without the rest of his disciples, but he did need one to betray him
and one to betray his message by publicizing a false version of it. Even Socrates had need of
both Plato and his accusers.

Even a messiah needs a promoter to popularize and distort his glad tidings. Jesus mediates
between us and his father, but we still need a mediator between us and him. We take things at
second-hand if we must, but we prefer to take them at third-hand.

72 The religion of Judas

The Lord left a lot to chance when he sent his son into the world to be crucified. If Judas was
free to act or not to act, then the salvation of the world was no more than a chance event that
might just as well not have come to pass. But if his course was foreordained, then God was
complicit in the most monstrous deed in history. Judas was pivotal to God’s plan, and yet he
was set on by the prompting of Satan.

To save mankind, Jesus had only to lay down his life. Judas had to lose his soul and be
damned for all time, so that we Judases might have eternal life. ‘Since by man came death, by
man came also the resurrection of the dead.’ So if like can be saved only by the sacrifice of like,
then we could be saved only by the death of a traitor like ourselves.
73 Second-hand religion
Humans are a credulous but faithless breed. They boast that they have won through to their
faith by a bold lunge into the unexplored. But they have just relapsed into the pusillanimous
assumptions of their flock. Even most converts reach for the religion that lies closest to hand.

We hold that faith should be a free personal relationship with God. But a faith can be transmitted
only by precluding a free personal relationship with God. What preserves a communal religion
paralyses a personal faith.

Religion can now speak only to the individual soul. And all the conditions that make for
individual souls will be the death of religion.

Religion is a heritable disease. It spreads by contagion, and then is passed on by inheritance.

‘When a religion has become an orthodoxy,’ says William James, ‘its day of inwardness is over.
The faithful live at second hand exclusively.’

Faith is passed on by parents, whose love for each other will soon prove to be as much of a lie
as their love of God.

We think that there are creeds and churches because individuals have faith. But individuals
have faith only because there are creeds and churches.

74 The illusions of religion

A culture is bound by hoops of illusion, and would be blown apart if it got hold of the truth. An
individual may thrive with no help from a real faith. But a state can’t last if it lacks an established
clergy and communion, with its seasonal feasts and yearly calendar of ceremonies, its network
of shrines and holy places and its canonical rites and liturgies.

Faith will fall off, not because the spread of knowledge has shown it to be false, but because the
economic system that required the spread of knowledge has no more need of it.

The story of the manger forecasts the whole course of the christian religion. It is only kings and
donkeys who have had much use for it.

75 God is ordained by the powers that be

The existence and nature of God have not been discovered by thinkers, but decreed by rulers.
The gods are ordained by the powers that be. Their faith is one of the things that people used to
render unto Caesar.

Subjects have faith because rulers have found how useful religion can be.
God ordained the powers that be and all the laws and customs that they set up. No doubt. But in
that case, he must change his mind a lot.

States made use of religion to unify themselves till they gained the strength to replace it. They
went from having a national religion to making a religion of the nation.

In epochs of strong faith people were keen to fight and kill for their beliefs, which they were
willing to change a year later at the behest of their prince.

The pious trust in the authority of their god solely because they see it on show in mortal
institutions, edifices and customs. They are led to have faith in him by the pomp and prestige of
his worldly assets, his lands and monasteries, his processions and regalia, domes and cupolas
and robes and mitres.

The first holy books were manuals of hygiene and eugenics which entrenched the power of the
caste or tribe that made them.

76 Religion and the cult of power

The one proof that persuades us is the proof of power, because we know that power is the one
thing that might help or harm us. And we are so in love with power that we worship it even when
it takes unreal forms.

The gods are at their root might, not truth or goodness. They are the creations of our impotence
and of our lust for dominion. We bowed down to them, not because we believed that they were
good, but because we hoped that they would prove good for something, to give us wealth or
victory. We propitiated them because we feared them or hoped to gain some benefit from them,
not because we loved them. No matter what gods we may pray to, it is brute power that we
covet and our own selves that we adore.

Because the creeds have been male, the chief passion they appeal to is the lust for power.

Religion is authority, and faith is obedience, not to God but to his deputies on earth.

77 Religion, an obsolete technology

The gods are one of our obsolete technologies. Having made them to get what we desired, we
have now unmade them, and have become as gods. They are worn-out tools which we have
sold to fund our shiny new ones. When our machines can remove mountains, why would we put
our faith in anything else?

Religion is not primitive science. It is primitive technology, an attempt to bend natural forces to
our own will.
Why do we always look to powers outside of ourselves to save us? First it was the gods, then
kings and great men, and now our machines.

The faithful may claim that God is infinite, yet the god that they have business with seems a
sadly circumscribed being. He needs constant reminders of how he ought to act. And even then
he plays his part with scant competence.

We employ the Lord as an otherworldly Jeeves, astute and dependable but subservient, whose
job is to do our bidding and get us out of our mortal scrapes. He serves as a handy adjunct to
our faith in our own self-worth.

HOLY BOOKS

78 Religion is a misuse of literature

Religion is a misuse and distortion of literature.

A religion begins as law and ends as literature.

One precondition of faith is the common inability to draw the line between literature and life.

No one would have thought that they could feel love for God, if it had not been written about in
books, and told them by others.

When they die, the gods go back to being what they were in the beginning, that is, to mere
literature.

Is the Lord, like a prickly author, vexed that his first book garners so much less praise than his
far worse second one? Or is he like all writers past their prime, who are sure that their best work
must be their latest?

Like all authors, God put his best into his books, and would no doubt be quite unpleasant to
meet face to face.

A rich sacred text, such as the book of Isaiah, is a revelation not of the power of God but of the
power of the word. The style of a strong prophet is fierce, urgent, original and bizarre. A priestly
style is leisurely, conventional, smarmy and oily.

Religious writers, such as Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor, who want to prove to us that there
is a loving God, warn us that this world would be hell if there were not. And then they show us
that this world is hell.
79 Faith is a misreading
Where a religion is inscribed in a book, how could faith be more than a misreading?

The Lord has ceased to hand down new scriptures, since he has seen how the faithful keep
garbling them, and how they distort what they read to mean what they want. Like all fastidious
authors, he found that his books were wasted on those who read them.

Christian theologians act like callow critics, who treat God, who is a character in a book, as if he
were a real being, and a real man as if he were a god, that is, a character in a book. Since
Jesus did in fact exist, how could he be God?

A lutheran must first of all be a literary critic. Grace springs from an act of interpretation. And
since all such acts are partial and provisional, our salvation must be singularly precarious. ‘Thou
read’st black where I read white,’ as Blake warned.

Fundamentalists insist that every word in holy writ must be read literally, and so they have to
ignore two thirds of it.

80 Old and new tables

The New Testament can’t be true unless the Old Testament is true. But if the Old Testament is
true, then the New Testament must be false. The new covenant boasts that it fulfils the old one,
but the old one gives the lie to the new. If Jesus is referred to in the Hebrew Bible, it is as one of
the strange gods or false prophets which the one Lord warns the children of Israel not to trust.
His cult was one chapter in the long history of misreading. The evangelists had to twist what the
Old Testament meant so as to make it seem a christian book. And then christians had to twist
what the New Testament meant so that they might keep on their false path which they had
mistaken for christianity.

The Hebrew Bible is a grand and savage myth of a great people. The Christian Testament is the
parochial fraud of a small sect. It is a transcript of the pathology of a few fanatics and their
febrile time. Like all sequels, it lost a lot in force and freshness. And the best things in the New
Testament are the quotes from the Old. But it is in such bad taste, that it was sure to touch the
heart’s deepest strings.

81 Sacred fictions
Myths are sacred fictions which tell deep human truths. And we drain them of their wisdom,
when we read them as if they were reports of dry fact. Myth is a form fit for the gods. Parables
and harangues are for smallminded moralists.
The gods are essential fictions, which help to quicken our imaginations and curtail our
boisterous appetites. They are poetically fruitful and politically useful. The best were the work of
a broad wisdom and vision, the worst of a narrow fanaticism.

A creed is priceless not for the pedantic and delusional catechism which it promulgates, but for
the terrific and stark myths which it presents.

All the faiths are true as fictions, and all are false as fact.

The gods are lesser works of art. But like many such lesser works, they have inspired a lot of far
greater ones.

The creeds may not have saved anyone, but they have fired a wealth of infernal art.

Like poetry, the gods spring from the soil, and then ascend to the pale firmament.

Gods were begotten by imagination, but are kept alive by the dearth of it.

82 The hammer of the gods

The gods are the hammers that have forged the souls of their peoples on the anvil of vision and
woe. Their job is not the trivial and vain one of saving souls, but the great one of helping to
make and hand on culture.

Religion is one of the codes that people have used to make themselves more human, that is,
less like an animal, more like a devil, nothing like a god, and more mortal than ever.

The gods were the first masters of style.

God is as parsimonious in his writing as he is prodigal in nature. So wasteful in his creation, he

does not waste words.

God is like all great authors. His book lives on long after he has died.

God, like all the great anonymous artists, is the name for a tradition, which is a far more
precious thing than a mere living being.

SALVATION

83 End of my days
Most of us trust that we will live for all time, since we must outlast the world, or else that the
world will soon be consumed by fire from heaven, since it must not outlast us. And we don’t
believe in the wrath to come if we don’t expect to be saved from it.
An apocalypse that’s timed to swallow the earth a second after I’m gone is of no concern to me.
And if the world does end a short time after I leave it, it will be one last proof that it was made for
me. When we have to depart the world, we will take comfort in the thought that it will be losing
more than we are.

Those who are sure that the world will finish in their lifetime don’t seem at all shocked when they
come to an end and it has not.

84 The worldly world to come

Our hearts are so full of the world, that they can take in what does not belong to it only by
converting it to their own worldliness. They forge their rarefied paradise out of their gross earthy
desires. And they remake their great inventor, so that their faith won’t remake them. How could
a kingdom which is not of this world find a place in it, if it weren’t usurped by one that is?

We deem Jesus unworldly, because he said that his kingdom is not of this world. But from what
world if not this one did he get the idea that the next world must be a kingdom?

The next world must be still worse than this one, since it is made to answer our sordid desires.
Heaven must be furnished in the worst taste.

85 The kingdom of God is not within you

The kingdom of God may be within us, but faith and hope draw us out, and goad us to make hell
for ourselves and others.

If the kingdom of God is within us, it must be a dark and seedy neighbourhood, never at peace
but enviously eying the spoils of foreign domains. The dirty human soul is of all things the least
deserving of everlasting life.

We would have no use for the true heaven. So it may be that God will reward us with the false
one of our desires, which is the same as hell. ‘So I gave them up to their own hearts’ lusts, and
let them follow their own imaginations.’

Which of the many selves that make up your self do you expect God to reward? No doubt the
most sneaking, calculating, self-serving and self-deceiving one, the one that told you that you
love him and your neighbour. Our ego is the one thing that we want to take with us to the next
world, which is why we will never get there.

The kingdom of God is within us, like all that is cheap, grasping, false and base.
86 The stratagems of salvation
Jesus taught that the self is vile, but that you must efface your own self for your neighbour’s
equally vile one so as to gain your reward in the hereafter. ‘For if ye love them which love you,
what reward have ye?’ God, who sees the secrets of your heart, commands you to try to dupe
him. He wants you to act as if you were selflessly labouring for the sake of your fellows and not
coveting an eternal prize. And that’s how you win an eternal prize. ‘When thou doest alms, let
not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret, and thy
father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.’

It is no more possible to love your neighbour than it is to hate yourself.

The entrance to heaven will be an unbecoming crush, with the saints shoving aside their
brethren in their lust to come first in the kingdom, by claiming to have been the last here on
earth.

Godly people don’t much care how many souls the devil may snatch, so long as their own is not
one of them. In the struggle for salvation it’s every soul for itself. And yet they can think of no
better way to save themselves than by meddling with the souls of others.

87 Outfoxing God
The faithful trust that they will win the Lord over by the mean tricks that they have used to thrive
in this world. When they strive to draw near the loftiest, they still have to call on the same
shabby manoeuvres by which they’ve snapped up the lowest. They use on him the same bribes,
legal trickery, self-deceiving righteousness, formulas and excuses that have worked in their
dealings with the world. The most high is their affable stooge, easier to outfox than the wary
world and readier to grant them all that they want. They hope to cheat him with the same
beaming self-belief by which they hook their customers.

In order to find grace, both you and God need to pretend to bluff each other. You feign to hold
that you have not earned your place in paradise, and the celestial paymaster feigns not to note
that you are feigning. We act out our salvation in this life and the next as a farce of mutual
deception. And that might be the closest we can get to loving God.

God cannot love us, and he knows that we cannot love him. And yet he who does nothing in
vain made us so that we would love him, and we hope to win his grace by pretending to.

We auction our souls to the highest bidder. Most of us hock them to gain the world. But the god-
fearing get paradise as a bonus. ‘All this, and heaven too.’
88 The meek have inherited heaven
The meek are sure that they are due an eternity of bliss with God and his seraphic choir,
enjoying the pageantry as each foe who has triumphed over them fries in inextinguishable fire.

The most demure theists don’t doubt that the almighty is there to justify them, assist them, uplift
them. Faith is a belief in an entity greater than our own small self whose function is to aid and
affirm our own small self.

Does the Lord feel more disgust at the obsequious truckling of his attendants or at their
impudent familiarity? Those who abase themselves in his sight are sure that they know what his
wishes are or what they ought to be.

Atheists feel sure that they can get on without God. And the faithful feel sure that God can’t get
on without them. They know that they are nothing without God, and they don’t doubt that God is
nothing without them. ‘My business is to think of God,’ Weil said, ‘it is for God to think of me.’

89 Cosmic egoism
How enormous we seem in our own eyes, when we prevision our souls in the presence of an
infinite deity. Faith is a flattering perspective. Our religiosity was a vast cosmic conceit. Now we
make do with our vast earth-bound conceit.

There’s no limit to the tasteless presumption of the humble soul that does not doubt it is due a
seat at the right hand of God.

Our faith in our own feeble self is as boundless as our reliance on an all-powerful divinity is pale
and half-hearted. And our adherence to our fickle and flighty selves stands as firm as our faith in
a changeless deity wavers.

Religion takes such hold of our minds because it is as trivial and as pretentious as we are.

We frame our faith out of what we don’t know but believe. For how could we bear to frame it out
of what we know but don’t dare hold to, our utter inconsequence and the certainty of our
extinction and the vastness of the cosmos with its billions of cold galaxies which care nothing for
us?

90 Commanding God
Pray in hope, and your prayers are as good as answered, since the continuation of your
illusions is then assured.

Why when the faithful talk to God do they use the imperative mood? ‘The Lord knows the
thoughts of the wise.’ And every fool knows the thoughts of the Lord. We speak to God as if we
were cheeky but irresistibly charming children and he had no choice but to wink at our
endearing monkey tricks and naughtiness. Our prayers are abject yet presumptuous. We flatter
God in the most servile fashion, yet we don’t doubt that he is at our beck.

Our prayers and petitions fail to sway God, but they serve to harden us in our godless schemes.
They are not a surrender to his will, but a means of stiffening our own will.

The meek love to talk to their infinite designer, as they can be sure that he is the one person
who won’t interrupt them. A prelate would cry out in fury, if you claimed that God spoke back to
you when you prayed.

How could God answer our prayers, when it is not him that we are praying to?

The congregation chants hymns more to glorify and fortify its own faith than to praise the
goodness of God.

How meanly believers must think of their God, if they deem that their crabbed acts can add to
his glory.

91 The divine accountant

What a job for a supreme being, to keep a bill of all our snivelling sins and grudging good works.

The best we can hope is that the gods will care no more about our sins than they do for our
sorrows. What deity would deign to take thought for our dirty little souls? If they stoop to that,
what petty spitefulness might we not have to fear from them? God can’t forgive us. So we had
better pray that he will forget us. ‘O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, until thy wrath be
past.’

God’s failure to ensure that justice is done in this world is held to be an indisputable proof that
he must exist, in order to see that it will be done in the next. We take it that he must have made
a heaven above, since he has let loose such a mad anarchy down here. But how rash would it
be to trust him to get things right in the world to come, when he has made such a bad job of this
one?

We are told to hate the sin but love the sinner, yet God seems to do the reverse. He whips the
sinner through the vast tracts of the next world and leaves the sin to flower in the foul marsh of
this one.
92 We live as if we were immortal
No one believes that they are going to live for evermore, if they don’t behave as if they were
ready to die and be weighed in the scale today. But if they don’t expect to die this very day, then
they take it that they will go on indefinitely here on earth.

Each of us is a little town besieged by death. But inside life goes on as if it had never heard of
the threat.

People doze through time, and dream that they will wake for eternity. They die like beasts, and
hope to live on like gods.

The belief in the immortality of the soul has no grounds other than human presumption. No
wonder it is the most widely held belief in the world.

93 Immortality as lack of imagination

It is not our faith but our failure of imagination that makes us feel that we must be immortal. We
think that our life will go on for ever, because we can’t see it coming to an end.

We don’t honestly believe that our souls will live for an eternity after death, because we don’t
feel in our hearts that we are going to die. The foremost wonder, as Yudishtira says, is that each
day death comes, and yet we live as if it could not touch us.

How many days till this one have there been on which I have not died. And so how likely is it
that I will die today? Each day adds to the sum of days on which I have not died, and so makes
me more sure that I will live for ever. ‘The older a man gets,’ George Eliot said, ‘the more
difficult it is for him to retain a believing conception in his own death.’

94 Faith, hope and charity do not abide in heaven

God has arranged heaven so neatly, that the elect have no need to do good works there. These
bought them the ticket of admittance, which they paid so dear for on earth, but which they can
throw away once they’ve gone to glory. The watchword of the saints, according to Emerson,
taunts the reprobate ‘You sin now, we shall sin by and by.’

Most of the godly, as Spinoza showed, look on devoutness as an irksome burden, which they
hope to shuck off when they’re dead and be rewarded for shunting through life. They deem that
they ought to be refunded for painfully upholding faith, hope and charity in this world by not
needing to in the next. The banner above heaven’s gate will tell them to abandon not only hope,
since they will have all that they want, but faith and charity as well, since they will see their God
face to face, and there will be no call for their world-redeeming kindness.
95 Paradise and pandemonium
We strut and suffer like players in this world, so that we can sit at our ease as an audience of
angels in the next.

The celestial city will need to have many mansions. How else could the just put up with the
insufferable virtues of their fellow saints?

With heaven so crammed full of saints, if God were not love, there would be no love in it at all.

How could we presume to sully eternity with our shabby paradise? God is the great
exterminator, who won’t want any mortal vermin infesting his immaculate abode. Having seen
what a shambles we have made of the spotless earth, why would he let us in to his resplendent
dwelling? He would do well to take out insurance, lock up his supernal silver, and nail down his
movables. An hour after we get there, we will have turned paradise to pandemonium.

We know nothing of heaven, save that it was made for us.

96 Death does not change us

If death fails to change us, then we surely won’t have earned a home in God’s high heaven.
‘Where there is anything of mine, there is not one thing divine,’ as Montaigne wrote. And yet if it
does change us, how could it be we who have earned it? Our souls could not be saved without
an influx of grace. But if there’s one thing that this life shows us, it’s that there is no grace.

The damned in hell are accorded the privilege of remaining their cursed selves. The saints must
give up their souls in order to gain the kingdom.

97 The immortal blasphemy of religion

To believe that we are immortal is the great blasphemy, since we thereby lay claim to the same
status as the divine. When we dared to assert that we would live for all time, we arrogated to
ourselves the prerogative of God. We stretched forth our impudent hand, and took also of the
fruit of the tree of life, and ventured to swallow eternity. We flatter ourselves that death will be
swallowed up in victory, because we are eaten up with pride.

In the beginning the iron gods laid it down that we must die and return to dust. ‘When the gods
made man,’ Gilgamesh was told, ‘they allotted to him death, but life they held fast in their own
keeping.’ But now we maintain them as rickety automata to ensure that we live for ever. God
used to be the withholder of eternal life. But now, as William James wrote, he is its producer.
We have dreamt up an inhuman and immoral hell, and an irreverent and sacrilegious heaven.
We don’t doubt that each of our paltry doings on this ball of mud will reverberate through the
whole of time.

Our idea of heaven shows the insipidity of our imaginations. And our idea of hell shows the
ferocity of our hatreds.

If heaven is the terminus, earth is a queer place to start from.

98 The sickness of the soul

The body is our Eden. But then the body fell from grace, and became a living soul. The soul has
learnt to know good and evil, and so has corrupted it. It is through the soul that Satan enters the
body. The body was made to live in the moment. But the soul dreams that it was made to live
for all time. And when it wakes from this dream, it will be dead.

The soul is the body’s torment, and the body is the soul’s recreation.

Having brought forth this corrupt world of matter, the demiurge compounded his sin by breathing
into it a yet more corrupt soul.

The soul is one of the imaginary diseases of the body.

The body lives by its delusive greeds, and the soul lives by its greedy delusions. An ascetic
diets the sinless hankerings of the loins, to glut the sinister lusts of the soul.

The soul conceives its deeds of darkness. The mind plans the crime. And then the body has to
pay for their guilt.

There won’t be much soul left worth saving, once life has done with it.

Few things come cheaper than human souls. They are made in an instant, killed with ease, sold
for a pittance, and bought in a job lot by those who want only the use of their bodies.

The body is a car prone to break down, and the soul is a crazy driver.

99 The nothingness of the soul

If the next world is proportioned to the breadth and depth of our souls, it won’t be a heavenly
manor but a shabby suburban bungalow.

God wished to hide the kingdom in the one place where we would never find it. And so he put it
within our own hearts. And it gets farther from us day by day.
What deity would be so rash as to leave the jewel of a deathless soul in the trust of a being as
careless as a mortal? What a leaky tub to stow an ambrosial cargo in.

The nothingness of death seems a reward well matched to our own nothingness. How could our
tepid souls be worth rehabilitation or hellfire?

100 Our less than mortal souls

Far from enduring through the whole of time, our souls linger barely till we draw our last breath.
Living will use up our souls as it does our flesh. And at the expiration of seventy years the best
they’ll be ripe for will be dissolution. ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to
stop?’ asked Browning.

Senility is a bad augury for immortal life. If we enter the kingdom in the same state as we leave
this world, heaven must be full of dribbling half-wits. Life which has a beginning is bound to
come to an end. And a life that ends in such foul decay is not likely to start up again in the pure
beyond.

The soul dies and is good for nothing. The flesh dies and is at least food for turf and trees. Yet
the miasma that a soul leaves in its wake may poison the air for years.

We come from nothing. So how likely is it that we are bound for eternity?

101 Insipid bliss

Won’t the sweets of paradise be too fine for our coarse stomachs and too narrow for our roving
minds? It has no room for sex or for science. None but an imbecile angel could bear its insipid
bliss.

It is only because we have bodies that we think we care whether our souls will live on after
death.

How could we merit or endure a state of grace or damnation? We won’t win redemption for the
same reason that we are not worth relegating to hell. And what should such creatures of an
hour do in eternity? Would our littleness not be lost in its immensity?

Salvation ought to be for all, yet who could believe in a salvation that claims to be for all, when
most of us are so mundanely irredeemable and so unmindful of our soul’s fate? We have to be
herded like geese to a deliverance which we don’t much care for or desire. ‘The fewness of the
elect,’ as Baudelaire wrote, ‘is what makes paradise.’

The angels have to sing the whole time, since how could their heavenly sire stand their inanity if
they paused to speak?
All that effort, just to get rid of such an ephemeral speck, and to bring to nothing what is already
so near to nothing and will so soon be gone.

ALL PAGANS

102 Profane redemption

Why did Nietzsche, who denounced the nazarene faith for its baseness and rottenness, not
applaud the dark history which its oversensitive defenders now wince at, its unholy annals of a
proud feudal coterie exercising its unpitying sovereignty in the name of a God of mercy and
love? Should he not have seen a profane providence in the barren cross blossoming into
ferocious violence and unmatched fecundity?

Christianity gave us a few eunuchs, eremites, masochists, fantasists and fanatics. The church
gave us Giotto and Montaigne, Raphael and Piero della Francesca. The sole fruitful thing in
christianity has been its crookedness, perversity and idolatry. It peevishly damned the world, but
the world indulgently forgave and redeemed it. The church has served as the most trustworthy
prophylactic to counter the contagion of faith. It kept the west safe from the gospel of the pale
galilean. The Lord showed his care for his fold by sending his church to neuter the christian
faith. Then Luther uprooted the prodigal hypocrisy of Rome, and tried to resow the parochial
and arid deceits of Nazareth.

One of the worst sins of christianity was to found the church. And one of the best deeds of the
church was to put down christianity.

When the one Lord decamped into petulant transcendence, what was left to enchant the world
but sin?

103 The paganism of every religion

Even the most unearthly and austere religion is perpetuated by its paganism, which pays due
homage to the multitude of divinities by its multitude of rites. It lives by its dark or gaudy
carnality and by its profane superstitions, which are fleshly, local, tribal and enchanted.

People are such born pagans, that in order to become good pagans, all they need do is follow
nature, obey authority, revere the old ways, and take part in the rites. But the christian faith is so
at war with our unspoiled instincts, that the most it could do was bind its believers to capitulate
to an attenuated paganism, and follow nature, obey authority, revere the old ways, and take part
in the rites. But it has now grown so virtuously modern, that it has ceased to be vigorously
heathen. We are, as Baudelaire said, ‘too worthless even to be idolaters.’ It is no longer its
paganism that gives a religion life. They all now turn into a kind of protestantism, which is
individualistic, westernizing and on-the-make. Their paganism was as natural as the earth, their
protestantism is as ugly as the world.

104 Waning religion

‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ What vitality could we hope for from a sect whose sole
sacred tree was a dead plank on which a man bled out his life?

Our fallen nature could never soar to the angelic ethic of any of the creeds. And so all the
creeds have had to sink to suit our nature.

The bright gods were all the things that we don’t dare to be, mercurial, uncaring, caustic,
exigent, partial, irresponsible, playful, mischievous. The primordial divinities, more fortunate
than Tithonus or the sibyl, were blessed with unfading youth, but spared everlasting life. They
were too strong to be of help to our feebleness, and so we let them expire. Good gods die
young, before they have time to grow old and bitter and putrid.

105 Religion and the end of enchantment

Art and paganism enchant the world but don’t claim to transcend it. The christian faith sought to
transcend it, and so profaned its sacred awe and magic. It hewed down the groves, banished
the nymphs and the great god Pan, threw down the altars and upturned the hearths, sealed the
temples, and dispersed the household spirits. With its maudlin man-god it was predestined from
the first to sink into a decrepit and self-applauding humanism. And when Jesus told us that the
sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, it was goodbye to all true piety.

The gods helped to demystify the green world by emptying it of the old spirits. They were
indispensable aides in our enlightenment and disenchantment. They were one of the illusions
that human kind used to grope its way to the truth. It was they that trained us to trace effects
back to unseen causes, to credit imaginary entities, and to see through to the universal laws at
work behind the chaos of appearance. Religion is one of the forces which orders and trains the
human mind to the point where it can no longer put up with religion. Even superstition got us
used to a prudent putting-off of present satisfaction in the hope of controlling the future.

106 Sacred kitsch outlasts religion

We have done our best to drive the savage and the sacred from the earth, and to cram it with
the tame and profane. We have domesticated the terrifying angels as chubby dimpled cherubs
to sell chocolate.

Spectator sports, pop music and religion are made for teenagers. And so each of us is
entranced by at least one of them.
The cult of Jesus was the kitsch of judaism. And the church was a plaster paganism, and now it
has become a plastic one. They embalmed a crude version of creeds and forms whose
meaning and majesty they had long lost. And now they have dwindled to be the kitsch of
themselves. Religion used to provide the poetry of ordinary people’s lives. Now it makes their
doggerel. If Bach’s music was a strong proof that there is a God, then contemporary liturgy is a
strong clue that he must be dead.

Living rites freeze sentimentality, but moribund ones reheat it and dish it up as a spongy
nostalgia. The superannuated gods are doomed to spend their twilight years not in a glorious
Valhalla, but as pantomime extras in a tasteless Disneyland. Paradise is the attic in which we
stash our christmas trinkets and the rest of the kitsch of brotherly love and the rewards we hope
to get for it.
HAPPINESS

Contents

Unhappiness

Happiness and self-importance

Happy or not

Triviality of happiness

Optimism and pessimism

UNHAPPINESS

1 Spoilt happiness
How much untold woe we bring on our heads by our schemes to make ourselves happy one
day. We paddle madly to reach happiness. But all we do is churn the river of our misery to a
more turbid froth and surge. We live in a frenzy, and die unconsoled.

What a long conglomeration of small sorrows our short lives have space for.

Happiness tastes so bland, that I keep ladling into it the spice of expectant desire, till I at last
spoil it. Though I stock all the ingredients to make a rich happiness, I brew up a foul stew of
misery.

We are thrust on by an unquenchable thirst for joy and by an ineradicable propensity for
reducing plain gladness to seething grimness. And our desire to find happiness rides us almost
as hard as our drive to make life insupportable.

2 Life against happiness

Even fools have the brains to make their lives simply wretched.

We are fools for improvement. There seems no point to life if it’s not getting better day by day. I
have to race so frantically to make life better, how could I find the time simply to live well?
Earth’s air must contain some impalpable element, so favourable to life, so hostile to happiness.
‘Who would have thought that life could be so sad?’ asked Van Gogh out of the depths.

What life wants is not bare self-preservation. It craves the unlimited growth of life. And that
entails the propagation of the direst states of distress.

3 The habit of unhappiness

If there are things that people could easily do to benefit themselves which they aren’t doing now,
you can be sure that they never will do them, since they have no wish to. It would be easy for
them to change their bad habits, which is why it’s clear they never will.

Some people need the courage to combat unrelenting sorrow, since they lack the resolve to
retreat from the routines that have caused them such woe. We are addicted to misery, but we
soon lose the frail habit of happiness.

For the denizens of hell each day is the same, and yet every morning they wake to a fresh
horror.

Each day life finds some new way to torment you, and it’s not even trying. Hell may be the place
where it starts trying.

Novices of despair fear that there is nothing new that will ever come for them. Its veterans dread
that there still might be.

4 The plurality of hells

We build the grubby hut of our happiness on pilings sunk deep in others’ pain, and we feel no
guilt since they’re so far out of sight.

We judge no day wasted on which the rest of creation has had to suffer more than us.

There must be a countless number of cells in the underworld to house the countless states of
torment that we have laid up for ourselves.

We have no wish to cause pain in order to make our own lot comfortable, but we are quite
happy for such pain to continue.

When others suffer from the same cause as me, I take heart that there was no way I could have
dodged such blows. And when they suffer from a divergent one, I brag how dexterously I have
kept clear of their blunders.

You never know in what hell people might be burning, but often neither do they.
Life makes us hate all the things that we started out by loving. It dries up our hearts, but fails to
quench our thirst.

5 On the brink of happiness

Just when you trust that you have tamed life, it bares its fangs, and snarls, and shows you once
more that it is a wolf and not a fawning cur. It’s always poised to play you some nasty trick. It
would be as mad to disdain life as to turn your back on some wild beast. Each can tear you to
shreds as quick as look at you. But it would be just as absurd to prize it as if it had some real
value.

We are near the pinnacle of joy, and we are trembling on the verge of a precipitous crash. It’s all
about to come together at last, and it’s all on the point of falling apart.

Your misery may lurk for years in remission, but it will never be cured. It may break out long
years hence in a violent attack, and kill you in a few weeks. This life ends so soon, and yet, as
Van Gogh wrote, ‘there is no end to anguish.’ But most of us succumb to some timely malady,
before our real sadness gets the chance to do us in.

Life is either just bearable, or not. And it makes all the difference whether you know that you can
bear it for one day more, or that you can’t bear it for so long as that.

Even if we solved all our problems, we would not be much better off, because they are not our
real problems.

6 The tense of happiness

Pleasure seems so bright in anticipation, but so pale in possession. Joy ravishes you in
prospect, dejection molests you in the present. Your expectancy has already sucked the juice
from your pleasures before you reach them. And all it leaves is their dry bones to pick over. You
are far more present for your pains than you are for your pleasures.

Fulfilment eludes us. As Epicurus said of death, where it is, we are not, and where we are, it is
not.

Happiness is racing to a future which it will never reach. And misery is fleeing from a past which
it can’t get clear of.

A moment might make you wretched for the whole of your life, but happiness is the work of each
day.

Joy wants to go on for all time. It longs to be immortal. And that is why it is not joy, and joy is
never here with us.
‘Stay moment,’ is the cry of a creature for whom the moment was never there. And the cry just
wastes one more moment in regret.

7 Deferring life
I waste my days deferring happiness and galloping past pleasure. Happiness is no more than
the promise of happiness. It never gives itself to us as a present possession. ‘Man never is, but
always to be, blessed,’ as Pope wrote.

Our world of instant gratification is by the same token a world of indefinite deferral. We can’t
wait for anything, not even the bliss that we are in the midst of. We’re always charging off after
some new pleasure which we hope will give us all we want. Our desires are self-defeating. They
no sooner transport us to some joy than they drag us out of it to chase some new quarry. We
are too early for the future, and too late for the present. And we deny ourselves nothing, yet we
forget to live.

It’s because we know that everything lasts just for a moment that we see no point in living for
the moment.

How many days on which we dreamt we would at last start to live have we consigned to the
past.

Lord, make me live in the present moment, but not yet.

8 Greed for the future

We have to put off life in our rush to get our hands on the things which we think will make life
worth living one day. We want it all right now, but what we want is the means to enrich or enjoy
ourselves tomorrow.

Greed rides people at such a furious clip, that they postpone life from one hungry instant to the
next, till they have raked up more than they could ever need. One day when they have got hold
of more than anyone could use, they will no doubt find the time to start to live.

9 Present for misery

We are never present in our life to feel its bliss, but we are close enough to it to be pierced by its
shrapnel.

Anguish arrests you in the jangling now. Lust beckons you on to meet the shining future. The
only people who live wholly for the moment are those in the grip of agonizing pangs. If you have
to live in the moment, all you want to do is get out of it. Absorption in the here and now is one of
the luxuries of those who have something more pleasant to do. Nature forbids us to live in the
present. And that may be one of the best gifts that it gives us. Most of us have good reason not
to live for the present hour. Hell is the state in which you are cursed to live in the instant right
here and now.

10 Time and place

When you feel sick at heart, your dear familiar haunts seem smeared with a mildew of stale
misery.

How the changeless returning seasons carelessly lacerate our sad and changing hearts.

You scent the sadness behind the gladdest and shiniest things, you feel it on the most brilliant
and tranquil days, you taste it in the pastness of the past and in the otherness of other people’s
lives.

Happiness looks so enticing because it is always so far away from us. We are in such a whirl
chasing it, that we never have time to sit still and be happy.

The future twinkles with all the tinsel trinkets that I hope to win. It’s there out in front of me
glittering vast and vacant and waiting to be glutted with my tingling lusts.

11 Irresistible life
Life is a book that you can’t bear to put down, no matter how bad it gets. Who would choose to
take it up? Yet who can dare to lay it aside, once they have received the loathsome gift? Life is
a poor thing to gain, but a great thing to lose.

Life is a gamble that is not worth the prize. And though we are so hard to please, we each end
up feeling like born winners. And all that we want is for the game to go on.

Life lures us on like a person whom we have ceased to love but still can’t help lusting after. The
world breaks your heart, but won’t snap the straps of hope and desire that keep you pinioned to
it.

Our love of life is a case of Stockholm syndrome.

Life pays some people such starvation wages, why don’t they just quit? Though churlishly
dissatisfied with the most opulent life, we still hug the most beggarly one. The worse it gets, the
tighter I cling to it. On good days I feel almost strong enough to shuck off the burden of life. On
bad days I’m too discouraged to dare so much as that. ‘Man alone,’ wrote Tocqueville, ‘displays
an inborn contempt of existence yet a boundless rage to exist. He scorns life, but he dreads
annihilation.’
12 To find life so sweet
To have eaten all that dirt, and still find life so sweet. We need to have the heart to go on, since
we lack the nerve to give up. We can’t let go of the cheapest things, but we get rid of the most
precious ones in a twinkling. ‘The dearer a thing is,’ Butler wrote, ‘the cheaper as a general rule
we sell it.’ Death has to prise from our fingers the gimcrack bauble which we clasp as if it were a
priceless heirloom. The most starved of us find life so fresh and delectable, and clutch so
lovingly the barbs that tear our flesh. Is it brave or stupid, to have been so battered by life, and
still to deem it a blessing?

We promenade like great proprietors in a city in which we are paupers. ‘All of us are beggars
here,’ as William James points out.

How sad we find it to leave the world in which all that we loved has long since left us. And how
hard it is to let go of this life which our ills have made so hard to bear.

How I curse the smugness of those who are as happy as I was till yesterday. And how I wish
that I could still afford to be as smug as they. We collaborate with the world to trample our way
to what we want, till the world tramples on us, and we cry out at its unfairness.

13 The great swindle

Life is the great swindle. It gives you nothing that you want, but keeps you hanging on for its
least prize.

Those who have lost all that they had still dread to lose the life that took it from them. Even the
dying are still in love with the world which is killing them. And those who have got nothing are
sure that a year or a day more will bring them all they yearn for. We have no choice but to stay
in the game, the losers in the hope of recouping what they have lost, the victors to win yet more
and to reap the fruits of what they have gained. And those who seem stoical in enduring the
pangs that are sure to end in death may just be too attached to life to let it go.

Life gave us nothing that was worth having. And death will take from us nothing that is worth
keeping.

To live is to play chess blindfold against a grandmaster who has not lost a game, and can
change or break the rules at will, and makes three moves for your one.

14 The tyrant life

Life bludgeons you like a demented tyrant. It levies an onerous impost on happiness, but is too
mean to disburse a cent of it to those who lack it. It’s a bully, which loves to bash those who can
least bear it. Why does it load the most crushing bundles on the most enfeebled shoulders?
As soon as the world starts to maltreat you, you might as well lie down and die. You can bet that
it won’t leave off till it has beaten you to a jelly. Life plasters you with filth, and then berates you
for smelling so foul.

There is no justice in this world. And yet you still have to pay for all that you get and all that you
fail to.

This niggardly world treats some people with malicious charity. It grants them all but the one
thing that they most long for.

You can’t guess what’s in store for you, but you can be sure that it won’t be good. Even while
you sleep, some indifferent doom is preparing the catastrophe that will lay you low. ‘I was not in
safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet, yet trouble came.’

HAPPINESS AND SELF-IMPORTANCE

15 Too important to be happy

I’m sure that I am too important to be unhappy, and that others are not important enough. What
right have they to be happy, since they lack my high purpose? And yet what reason have they to
be wretched, when they don’t have to bear the weight of my grave responsibilities? My quest is
so vital, that I can’t afford to be hamstrung by such blows. But their troubles count for so little,
that they should be able to bear them with ease. And we are so sure of our own worth, that we
feel we have no right to make such a dire rent in the world by bereaving it of our bright
attendance.

I feel half jealous of others, seeing that, unlike me, none of their loves or schemes matter
enough to be worth breaking their hearts for when they fail. I both envy and disdain them for
their trifling bliss, as I do children or birds, the immortals or the dead.

16 The conceit of happiness

We catch happiness as a lucky symptom of the endemic malady of conceit. We might feel
content with the world and our own lot, if we had a grain less presumption or a grain more, if we
thought a shred better of our merits or didn’t think so well of them.

Happiness is a mild and serene self-intoxication. We are so fuddled with our own self-flattery,
that we don’t feel most of the nettles that life would jab us with.

How could conceited people foresee the misery that they’re in for? They are so full of
themselves, that they don’t see how foolishly they are starving their real good to feed fat their
empty self-approbation.
We burn in the hell of the insignificant. But all we feel is the warmth of our self-importance.

Life is heavy enough to crush us, but it is too light to be worth our care.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. And don’t we all wear the crown of our own self-
consequence as if it were a crown of thorns?

17 The chosen and the cursed

We lapse into habits of unhappiness by inflating our own significance. Those who feel that they
are chosen know what it is to be cursed. Self-importance is a yeast which leavens our
happiness. But add too much, and you make it too acid to digest. Yet we can’t stay buoyantly
joyful, if we are not ballasted by such a freight of it that we might well capsize.

There are those who know that they are chosen, because things that are forbidden to others are
permitted to them. And there are those who know it, because things that are permitted to others
are forbidden to them. To be cursed is one way of being chosen.

We are not important enough to be unhappy. And yet our unimportance, if we could feel it, might
add the last straw to the load of our unhappiness. They are the accursed, who don’t matter
enough to be cursed, but must still suffer as if they did.

18 Competitive happiness
Happiness, which seems to be an end in itself, is in fact a comparative and competitive good.

Happiness seems so fleeting and unsubstantial. So we give up the search for it, and spend all
our time amassing the more solid and lasting acquirements of our greed, so as to prove to our
rivals that we are happier than they are, though they don’t care a rap how happy we may be.
We would rather have less, so long as they have less too, than have more, on the condition that
they should have more than us. And we might be content to despair, if others weren’t so full of
hope.

We don’t want to be happy, we want to be happier than others, as Montesquieu points out. But
not even that is enough for us. We want them to know it. And how wretched we are willing to
make ourselves, to prove to them that we are happier than they. ‘Happiness is nothing if it is not
known,’ Johnson says, ‘and very little if it is not envied.’ How pitiful we are, that one of the
keenest joys we know is the pain that we think we cause our rivals by our success.

Sentimentalists claim that they can’t be happy so long as there is one person in pain. But in
truth most of us would not feel so good, if we did not think that there were at least some others
who felt so much worse.
19 We would rather be envied than happy
Smug people don’t mind being called smug, since they take it as an acknowledgement of how
much they have to be smug about, and how much they’ve got under the skin of their rivals. It’s
the nearest they come to being envied.

How much of their life people are willing to waste to get the wealth they need to keep up a
lifestyle.

A lifestyle is not meant to be enjoyed but envied.

We may sense that we can’t make people envy us. But we can still heap up the solid goods
which we hope will make us enviable.

HAPPY OR NOT

20 The causes of happiness

There are four keys to happiness, live on the surface, think as the world does, care for nothing
but what is your own, and keep in such a hurry that you can’t tell how happy you are. So why,
when each one of us holds these keys in our pocket, are we still so weary-hearted?

Happiness is as shallow as beauty and as wise as truth.

Disciplined insensitivity is one of the gifts that we would need in order to be happy. But we are
not even disciplined.

You don’t need good reasons to go on living if you’re happy. It’s only the hapless who need that.

Happiness, like health, streamlines life for you, so that you can breeze through it with least
resistance.

It is such a simple thing to be happy. But we are far too clever for that.

How little it might take to make us happy. But most of us want a lot more than that.

Happiness is not an emotion but the quiescence of emotion.

21 How to please
Find your peace, and you grow independent from the world but more fit to please and be
pleased by it. A sense of wellbeing may not improve you or set you on to help, but it will make
you more useful and able to help.

In order to please, all you need do is smile and show that you are inclined to be pleased.
Most people are so pleased with themselves, that they are not hard to please. And that’s all they
need to make everyone else pleased with them.

We would be much less pleasing to others, if we were not so pleased with ourselves.

22 Our happiness is in the minds of others

In order to find joy, I try to fool myself that all’s well with me, but I may feel that I need to fool
others even more. Unwilling as I am to give up the lies that I live by, I’m yet more unwilling to let
others know that I’ve seen through how much they have duped me. We don’t only want to seem
good more than be good, we want to seem happy more than we want to be happy.

Our happiness is in large part a creation of how happy we deem others perceive us to be. We
seek the goods that others hoped would make them happy. And then we judge how happy we
are by how happy they judge us to be on the strength of how many of these we have got.

We must try to make the best of our servitude by pretending that we are free.

23 The illusion of happiness

The condition of life is injustice, and the condition of happiness is untruth.

We forge our brief joys out of our vacillating fantasies, and our lasting happiness out of our
lifelong illusions.

We are so wretched because we cling to such fallacious beliefs. And yet if we shook them off
we would lose all chance of happiness, which is, as Swift points out, ‘a perpetual possession of
being well deceived.’ It has manifold recipes, but they all share the one staple constituent of
self-delusion. ‘Take away their saving lie from ordinary people,’ Ibsen says, ‘and you take away
their joy as well.’ Heaven must be that state of perfect self-deception, in which you are sure that
you are loved by an infinite being whom you love in return.

If happiness is our goal, we seem to have hit on the craziest route to reach it. And if we are
hedonists, we seek our pleasures in the strangest places. We seem to take more delight in
tormenting ourselves and others than in simply enjoying ourselves.

Illusion frees us to act and be happy. Truth would freeze the will to act, and strand us in a
stagnant swamp of despair.

If you hope to succeed, you have to lie to others. And if you fail, you have to lie to yourself.
24 Unthinking happiness
You might be more content, if you thought a jot more or a jot less. Those who never think of
anything but their own selves feel sorry for themselves that they think too much.

Some people know themselves so well that they find the key to happiness, and some that they
lose it. The light-hearted could afford to know who they are but have no need to, the downcast
need but can’t bear to.

If you hope to find peace, you have to forswear the knowledge of your own sad heart, which
would steal all the joy that your sottishness and self-infatuation gave you.

The prosperous are sure that their wisdom has earned them their prosperity. And the miserable
are sure that their misery has won them their grim wisdom.

If you are resigned to be unhappy, the surest way is to be clever. And if your aim is to be happy,
learn to be wise. But if you can’t be either of these, it’s enough to be stupid.

25 Distracted happiness
Be sure to reserve a basket of nagging aggravations as decoys against which to explode your
noxious heartsickness. Use the irritants of the day to trap and dispose of your more venomous
discontents. You can’t be happy, if you don’t continue to do a few burdensome things that you
trust you’d be supremely happy if you ceased to do.

Happiness showers sparks of annoyance as it steams on to some ever-receding goal. Dejection

is a foul vapour that issues from the brackish bog of wretchedness.

Distraction is the blight of happiness. Concentration is the curse of misery. You can’t be happy if
you’re not diverted by all the busy duties which deter you from savouring your happiness.

Try to run from your troubles, and you will need to strain all your muscles to lug them with you.

Most people love happiness because they are in love with life, but a few because they have
found that this is the best way to keep life at bay. They scorn life too much to think it worth all
the trouble it costs. So they use cheerfulness to hold life at arm’s length, so that it won’t sink its
teeth in them and savage them. And they seek a placid joy to immunize themselves against
life’s unquiet fever.

26 Busy rather than happy

Most people would rather be busy than happy. They love to be doing, though they may not
much like what it is that they are doing. Their bustling is proof of how much the world needs
them.
We flaunt how happy we are by all the racket that we make.

The wise scorn the vacuous bustle and commotion which the common run of people mistake for
happiness. But they are mistaken to think that there is anything more to happiness than this.

Our dissatisfaction makes us restless, and our restless activity yields us as much happiness as
we will ever get.

27 The speed of happiness

I chase joys, but they fly me. And creeping sorrows catch me, though I fly them.

People feel light and joyous, when their gadding desires jockey them so fast that they don’t
sense the weight of their despair pressing down on them. How miserable they must be, that
they can find their way to happiness only by beetling so giddily that they don’t have the leisure
to feel how happy they are. They bolt life so ravenously, that they scarcely taste it as it goes
down. Yet they’re soon hungering for more. It’s only the careworn who have as much time as
they want. And they wish that they had less.

We rush so madly here and there in the search for pleasure, that we are never at home when it
comes.

Our bliss melts in the heat of our embrace.

Happiness needs to maintain a high velocity so as to stay airborne.

You have to chase happiness at such a breakneck pace because unhappiness is so bent on
chasing you.

It’s not your past years but the years to come that your sadness makes seem long.

28 Happiness and desire

In order to be happy, it’s necessary but not sufficient to be healthy, and it’s sufficient but not
necessary to be loved. And it’s more needful to love than it is to be loved, though it’s more
dreadful not to be loved than not to love.

You won’t be at peace so long as you cling to your desires. But if you once ceased to desire you
might as well be dead. More won’t make you happy. And yet wheresoever joy goes, it goes
hand in hand with the lust for gain. Happiness, like money, won’t meet your needs, but the lack
of it will wrench your soul. And though wealth won’t content you, possessing more of it than
others may almost do so. Life’s a whore that smiles on none but those who can pay.
29 Buying happiness
Money won’t make you happy, but neither will any of the more exalted goods that you might
count on to do it.

Money may not be able to buy love or happiness, but the brutal drive that can heap up money
may be the force best able to seize love and happiness as well, or at least to make others
believe that it can, which is the next best thing.

The poor can now afford the jaunty and hectic greed that the rich have in place of happiness.
Christianity used to fob them off with the counsels of patience. Now capitalism urges them on to
the same avarice as the rich.

30 The gospel of work

Most of us strive for some other goal in the hope that it might lead us to happiness. But the few
seek to reach happiness because they want to be free to strive for some worthier goal. They
treat living like punctuation, an unavoidable but blank pause which divides the words and
sentences. It’s these that are their true work which goes on elsewhere. ‘The only happiness a
brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about,’ Carlyle said, ‘was happiness enough
to get his work done,’ though it’s the work itself that must supply this. Happiness is like a line of
credit that they draw down, so that they can make the best use of their gifts.

TRIVIALITY OF HAPPINESS

31 The trivial reasons for happiness or unhappiness

Our plight is profound and tragic. But its causes are shallow and absurd.

The shallowest people have a sea of deep reasons to make them happy or unhappy. And yet
even the deepest of us is happy or unhappy for reasons that are quite shallow. Our greatest
sadness is for the smallest things.

The sole contentment that you can count on to last is the result of a propitious accident of
parentage and upbringing which is quite out of your control. The least chance of birth or rearing
gives you a better chance at happiness than the most assiduous wisdom could have done. How
happy you are depends more on your chemistry than on your philosophy.

In the next world, between heaven and hell there is a great gulf fixed. But in this one, a paper
wall is all that keeps them apart.
32 Life the blunt instrument
How is life so vacuous, and yet so rife with terrors? And how do its tight confines house such
vast bitterness? How is it that we stay so hollow, while bursting with such swollen griefs? And
how does something as blunt as life hack our souls so frightfully? Why does what counts for so
little hurt us so much? How is it that such a light thing lies on us like lead? And how does what
will end so soon have space for such endless sorrow?

It’s as dreadful to drown in a ditch as in the ocean. ‘The worst trials are visited on us by trivial
things,’ said Multatuli. ‘Moses and the Lord knew what they were doing. They plagued Egypt not
with tigers but with grasshoppers.’

Life doesn’t plunge us in its fathomless depths as it floods in on us. It leaves us high and dry as
it recedes before us.

A deep soul stifles for lack of air in the shoals of this world. ‘Nothing,’ as Johnson says, ‘is too
little for such a little being as man.’

Make your life small in the hope that the world won’t think it worth crushing you, and you make it
all the easier for it to do so. ‘I asked for very little from life,’ Pessoa said, ‘and even this little was
denied me.’ By shrinking your life you may shrink the sum of horror it contains, but this will still
fill the same proportion of your life.

33 The triviality of unhappiness

The mind does not have cliffs of fall, but mole hills from which you plummet as if from the most
dizzying peaks. And you can go on falling for the whole of your life.

Misery makes clear to us what matters, which is nothing at all. Life is a shallow abyss. It is as
low and as sheer as the plunge from the gallows. And once you fall into despair, you never stop
falling.

Live through an earthquake, and a dripping tap may still wear down all your hope. We ache in
proportion to our own paltriness, and not in proportion to the source of our woes.

The lightest load can crush us, if it is brought to bear on a small enough spot. And the smallest
spot in the world is our ego.

The light drizzle of small irritations will in time drench you as thoroughly as a sudden downpour
of woe, though it may feel quite different.
34 Narrowing unhappiness
The heavyhearted have to trudge round in the same ever-decreasing rings of routine, since they
fear the shocks that might knock them down if they stepped out of them. And yet they dread to
be dragged back down memory’s sad avenues of desolation. They have no home on this earth,
but they feel impelled to return day by day to the same stinking haunt which they lack the will to
leave.

We don’t want to be happy. We want to be left free to keep on doing all the things that have
failed to make us happy in the past.

Misery, which is all too wide for this narrow world, hems us in to a more and more constricted
scene. Gaiety thrusts us on and out to chase toys and titillations. Contentment, like a tolerant
commonwealth, gives scope to the whole garden of your gifts to flower. But heartache, like a
vain tyrant, constrains them to turn their face to it.

Life is such a monotonous fiasco, yet it takes so long to snake through all its coiling turns of
woe.

We aim so low, yet we still miss our mark. Like Madame Bovary, we dream such tawdry
dreams, yet even these life brings to nought. How aridly we answer life’s lushness, and how
insufficient it is to supply us with what is worth possessing. You must want something small
indeed, if you trust that the world could give it to you.

35 Such small things

We need so little in order to be happy, but we need that little so much. To win your happiness,
you don’t need much, but you always need more. And you could scarcely guess how slight a
lack will rob you of all your peace. ‘I have wanted only one thing to make me happy,’ Hazlitt
said, ‘but wanting that have wanted everything.’ How much the ravenous heart craves, and what
coarse gruel it makes its meal on.

Such small things suffice to make us happy. Yet we need such a constant stream of them, and
we’re still not happy.

It needs a lot of small things to go right to make you content. But it takes just one or two to go
wrong to bring it all down in a heap.

36 The triviality of happiness

Life is such small beer. But our self-delight lends it the fizz and flavour of the finest champagne.
If you lose your happiness, you learn that unhappiness is too much for you. Win through to it,
and you learn that happiness is not enough. Yet it is still worth attaining, so that you won’t have
to waste your years in the hunt for it. But once you have built your house of joy, however flimsy
it may be, it will crush you when it collapses.

Our happiness does not reach high, and our sadness does not dive deep.

If you can’t tell from your sufferings how little life matters, you can at least tell from your
success.

Does happiness count for nothing, since the lowest worm lusts for it? Or does the least creature
have an illimitable value, because it too yearns to win joy? Even a squashed bug squirms for
life.

37 Tasteless happiness
Happiness is perfectly proportioned. It is as low as it is short. But each year it takes up more
and more room on the earth.

In order to succeed and be happy, all you need is vanity without pride, greed without taste, and
selfishness without self-awareness. So why are so few of us happy?

Lack of taste gives you a head start in the race for happiness.

The world is too small for our cravings, but too large for our capabilities.

Happiness is the pale bourgeois surrogate for the rapture or damnation for which the princely
old states squandered all their strength. In order to be damned, one would first need to have a
soul. And most of us have the good luck to lack that.

38 The fear of happiness

Some trials harrow you by requiring you to act while rendering you too weak to act, and some
do so because they make all action vain.

It is the fall and not the being down that hurts you worst. So some fear most of all to ascend
once more from shade to sunshine. ‘Drowning is not so pitiful,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘as the attempt
to rise.’

Some shallow people would rather feel dejected for seeming deep reasons than be cheerful for
superficial ones. They cling to their heartachings, rather than grant that they could heal them
with ease. They prefer to put up with a lifelong ailment than go through a quick and painless
cure.
We suffer too much, and we can’t suffer enough. When our ills yield to such quack tonics, aren’t
we tempted to disparage even our health? The incurable has so much more dignity. We have to
speak as if life gushed with horrors, so as to gain the strength we need to bear its emptiness.

39 Prosaic happiness
When you’re young, unhappiness alone may seem deep enough for life. But as you get older,
you learn that life is too light to be worth such unhappiness. Aren’t most of our trials as trivial as
the goals that we aim at? However piercingly we suffer, we still stay buoyantly superficial. When
would we think of anything serious? Not when we are young and happy, and have not felt life’s
pains. And not when we are old and wretched, and we can hardly keep our heads above its
miseries.

The glum years write our life in a turgid doggerel, the glad ones in a reserved and self-forgetting
prose. But the quiet prose of happiness here and there breaks out in joy’s brief and causeless
poetry. You breathe a sense of wellbeing as ordinary as air, but you inhale a rare glee as
volatile as oxygen.

Our glad times don’t blaze like a wildfire, but gleam like a few flickering embers. Our pleasures
dance like the brief spangles on the afternoon freshet as it heads out to oblivion.

40 Shallow happiness
We are neither as simply content nor as grievously stricken as we ought to be. Having created
the world to wound us, the Lord in his lenity made us superficial enough to bear it. ‘Nature,’ as
Voltaire wrote, ‘has made us frivolous to console us for our woes.’ And yet who is so shallow,
that they can’t be pierced to the heart?

Those who have suffered from false profundity like an infection are glad to douse their sores
with the antiseptic of shallowness. ‘How much good sense lies in superficiality,’ as Nietzsche
said. The sole way to stay clean in this filthy world is to make yourself all smooth surface, so
that its slime will slip straight off you. ‘There are,’ Montaigne writes, ‘so many awkward
passages, that the surest way is to glide lightly over the surface of this world.’

Happiness is a low valley with closed horizons. Those who seek the truth must turn their backs
on it.

41 The ridiculous tragedy

There ought to be a word for disasters that don’t matter. Would such a word not sum up so
much of life? We act out in this world, as Swift said, ‘a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind
of composition.’
We are used up by all life’s sad commotion and bewildering ecstasies.

Life flows like a river, perturbed by the least cause, but unchanged by the greatest.

Life’s torpid stream now jets in rapture, now swirls in a vortex of sweltering misery.

Joy, like love, is a generous but jealous god, which inflicts a fearful beating on any who dare to
scorn its gifts.

Heraclitus and Democritus. Nietzsche would drag the human ass up to the heights, where it
would bray and break its neck in a grand tragic tone, even while he abuses it for having lost its
thoroughbred instincts. Montaigne leaves it to graze in the muggy lowlands it was made for.

Our wings melt before we have left the ground. Yet we still break our necks when we fall. As
Connolly wrote, ‘Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to
walk.’

God adds a pinch of the macabre and degrading to all our troubles, to rob them of the dignity
that might have redeemed them and to show us what we are, as if to kick us headfirst into the
mud as we stagger out the door, drunk with despair and disrepute. The last indignity that petty
suffering pelts us with is to make us as petty as itself.

OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM

42 Expensive pessimism
We use pessimism as a kind of insurance, but its premiums cost so much that they go near to
send us broke. Lugubrious people pay so dear to insure against catastrophe, how could they
afford plain happiness? They hope to forestall the worst by foreknowing it. But their fretting
levies such costly instalments of expected anguish, that it beggars them of the serenity which it
was their aim to preserve.

Fear the worst, and nothing will prepare you for how bad it will get.

A pessimist expects so little, and yet is still disappointed. An optimist expects so much, and
never is. Their hopes are so blind that they won’t see when they have failed.

Life belies our hopes, but is it worth our apprehensions?

An optimist lives by the expansive egoism of hope, a croaking pessimist by the pinched egoism
of fear.
43 The lie of hope
The success of optimism confirms the pessimist’s worst fears. How does such a meretricious
creed win so much trust?

We are now so delicate, that we can’t even swallow hopes for the future if they’re not sugared
with dreams of the past. Optimism is one of the most fatuous forms of our cowardly nostalgia.

44 The huckster’s creed

Optimism is the gullible and cunning creed of crooks and hucksters, spruikers and boosters.
They trumpet it, because they have so much faith in themselves, or else to inveigle their
satellites to have faith in them. They know that hope sells and that we are all sold on hope. If
you want to get rich, you need to have hope. And if you aim to inspire hope, you need to
believe.

Our optimism yokes the force of our naive self-belief to the cunning of our worldly self-seeking.

Few of us waste our expensive pessimism or our arduous hopes on anyone’s plight but our
own.

We know how fine we look in hoping against hope when we are sure that the failure of what we
hope for will not touch us.

Optimists charm us, because they signal to us that our greediest dreams will meet with success.

This is the age of the broad grin, shameless, self-delighted, on-the-make, and mesmerizing.

45 The bad news

Pessimism may be cowardly, but who in these hopeless times is brave enough to face the bad
news that all we do makes the world worse? Let go of the craven lie of hope, and what else
could fire you to act courageously?

People used to cling to the illusions of faith to console them for the fact that they can’t be happy
on this earth. Now they are too weak to admit so much as that.

You may be driven to optimism out of despair that your pessimism expected too much from
people.

An optimist is one who trusts that things can’t get much worse. And a pessimist is one who fears
that this may indeed be the best of all possible worlds, and that it’s now so bad that it can only
grow more dire. This may be the best of all possible worlds, but the possibilities get worse by
the day.
The optimist thinks life so good, that it can only get better. And the pessimist knows that it’s so
bad, that it’s sure to go on getting worse.

We have all learnt to read our life as a plot. And we know that every plot is preordained to reach
to a grand climax. Since all stories are about ourselves, we can’t stand any that don’t have a
happy ending.
SELF-INTEREST

Contents

Self and interests

Illusory self-interest

Swindling self-interest

Little interests

Self-regard

SELF AND INTERESTS

1 The good old cause

Our sole end is our own self-interest. Everything else we use as an implement to serve this. And
our self-interest turns everything into a machine to cater to our wants. But it also makes us
grateful, courteous, forgiving and prompt to team with those who might help us to gain our ends.
It has faith in nothing, but will bow down to anything that might raise it. Though resenting all
rivals, it will serve any scheme that seems to serve it. We have no true reverence, but we are
ready to abase ourselves as a way to exalt ourselves.

It is love of self, more than love of others, that ‘beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all
things, endureth all things.’ It sits enthroned in our hearts and in the world as the great anarch
and the great autocrat. No cause is too hallowed or too profane for it to conscript for its own
use.

It is the world that lives by faith, hope and charity, faith in its own unctuous lies, hope that its
greed will one day land the prize it craves, and charity for the respectable rogues who keep it
humming. Faith and hope keep you on the lookout for someone or something outside yourself
that might help you to get what you want.
2 The god of our idolatry
Our self-interest is the force closest to the core of our being. And so when it is pushing us, we
feel that we must be following our heart.

Those who vaunt that they are paid to do what they love are willing to love whatever they are
paid to do. And those who boast of their incorruptibility rush to lease out their souls for a low
rent. Yet some who have made their fortune from a calling grumble how dear it has cost them.

The disease loves nothing more than its own symptoms, which bear witness to its unique God-
given essence.

3 All for self

I won’t do a thing if I can’t squeeze out of it some private good. Yet there’s next to nothing that I
won’t do, since I soon find a private good in doing it. ‘We can all begin freely,’ as Austen points
out. Though you may choose a scheme or occupation with no thought of your own gain, how
could you stick at it for long, if it brings you no profit? Any labour that we persist in must be a
labour of self-love.

We are perverse alchemists who melt down all the more precious things to the base metal of
self. There’s nothing so great but we will find some means to milk it for our own low gain.

How could I hear the claims of others’ egoism, when I’m deafened by the dull drone and rumble
of my own? Yet I still feel that they speak too loud. ‘Their own din,’ as Céline wrote, ‘prevents
them from hearing anything else.’

We have the raw hunger of beasts but not their spotlessness. And we have the
presumptuousness of gods but not their bright capacities.

How little others want from you, and how hot they are to get it. They will tear you to shreds for
the least scrap of advantage.

No habit forms more quickly than that of taking as much advantage of people as they let you.
The dullest person spots your weak points in the blink of an eye, and the kindest can’t help but
make the most of them.

4 The slaves of self-interest

It’s clear how tyrannically self-interest rules us all, not when it pays its workers profusely, but
when it is so slavishly obeyed by those who don’t gain a cent from it. We are so bent on
prevailing, however high the price, and however mean the prize. Vainglory covets triumphs, but
will make do with the most meagre ones.
Some people let their own ambitions bully them as much as they use them to try to bully others.
They have the strength to hack their way to what they want, but they are so weak that they need
to. And they stop at nothing to feed fat their overweening desires, because they are loath to do
the least thing to bridle them. They owe their sterile initiative to their lack of self-restraint. And so
they have to slave to pay off the arrears by decades of strict self-discipline.

5 The hell of self

What but our selfishness could bear the strain of having to fill sixty minutes of every hour with
self?

To get out of hell, we would have to get out of self. But all we want to do is stoke its fires.

So long as we are the ones doing the tormenting, we don’t much care if we are living in hell.

The door out of hell stands wide open, but we don’t notice. We are having too much fun
torturing our fellow beings.

The self is a prison. What’s the worst of it, that you can’t break out of it, or that you can’t stop
the world from breaking in?

Hell needs no devils. There the damned are hard at work extracting gain from tormenting one
another.

6 Choosing interests
Chance will choose the ends that you aim at, and these ends will choose everything else for
you. My thoughts and moods are the shadows of my schemes and of what I need to believe in
so as to further them. I’m prompt to feel any emotions that might advance my prospects.

Our interests are our deepest self, and yet we borrow them from some source close to hand.
We hold fast to our own schemes and desires, no matter what others may think or say. Yet we
form our projects and desires on templates that we take from others.

Our egoism is so urgent, and yet our ego is so empty, that we have to fill it up with a range of
busy schemes.

7 Busy calculation
Our reason is quick to find expedients to serve our ends and pretexts to justify our vanity.

Most of us see only what we are looking for. And most of us are looking only for our own profit.
Nothing is too little to engross our thoughts, if it might get us more money or fun. No satisfaction
is large enough to match our fantasy, though no desire is too small to absorb our whole soul.

Ambitious schemers make up a grotesque menagerie. Some puff up like toads to several times
their real size. Some slither rat-like through crannies too strait for the rest of us. Others, like
caterpillars, chew up a fat harvest. And some, like a troop of ants, branch into sections, and
seem to swarm far and near.

8 The fickle persistence of self-interest

I don’t hesitate to give up on those ventures that fail to yield me a quick profit. So why do I stay
so obdurately loyal to some of my most unproductive schemes? We persist in our fancies, but
waver in our faith. Our desires are biddable yet unrelenting, and our passions are tenacious but
perverse. Self-interest makes us both obstinate and mutable in all things, not least our interests.
If they weren’t so changeable, how could they adapt to each untried confluence of conditions
and gain from all their projects?

The will never alters. It merely swaps its objects and hones its tools. We desire one good less
by desiring some other more, or else by desiring less of the one but desiring that less just as
much.

Where our self-interest is not in play, our talents are miraculous but soon discouraged, but
where it is, they are unwearying yet mediocre.

9 Renunciation and self-interest

I leave off my high aims, because I can’t let go of my low cravings.

When I give up my grand aims for mean ones, I claim that I have renounced them. But in my
defeat and despair I set my heart on a still paltrier stand-in for what I hoped to gain from
success. When a tall enterprise burns down, a hundred squat weeds soon shoot up in its place.
And I tend one of these, and put my erstwhile pet out of mind, and marvel that I gave so much
time to a thing so slight and unrewarding. I don’t remit my zeal when I retrench my ambitions.

I’m quick to leave off aspiring to the loftiest things. But I resent any objections that might chill my
lust for the lowest.

You may cease to hanker for any one thing, but you can’t stop hankering for something. I crave
so much, yet I care for so little. And I care for so little, because I crave so much.
It’s not hard to lack. But it’s killing to lose. It is, as Pascal says, ‘horrible to see all that one owns
slipping away.’ It may be easy to renounce success, but it’s parching to live without it. How it
wrings our hearts to lose what wasn’t worth having.

Some people give up their claim to all life’s silvered baubles, and then solemnly spend all their
force on some absurd but arduous cause. They resist the world’s blandishments, but are
seduced by its asperities.

ILLUSORY SELF-INTEREST

10 The illusions of self-interest and self-love

Our lives are lit up by our bright illusions, and warmed by our boiling desires.

The ego yields to the reality principle as a ruse to reap its unreal gratifications. Most of our
illusions are interested, and most of our interests are illusory. We use our godlike knowledge to
guide us to our low and delusive goals. Our delusions serve us so well that we would be mad to
give them up.

We are so used to taking false for true when it profits us, that we continue to do so even when it
fails to. Our dull wants constitute our inmost reality, yet they frame for us a world of gaudy
flummery. How brightly objects seem to shine, as soon as they come in range of the halo of my
own cravings.

We don’t believe the pious creeds that we profess. And we don’t dare to profess the self-serving
schemes by which we thrive.

11 Self-interest the illusionist

We are hustled on by our mad compulsions, and held back by our irrational inhibitions. There
are two kinds of people, the crazy and the dead. ‘Madness is in their hearts while they live, and
after that they go to the dead.’

To make a success of some schemes, all you need do is hold fast to the glittering lies which
hide how little they will satisfy you.

I know the world through my projects and ambitions. I let my self-interest choose my ends, and
these choose what I will or won’t know of the world and of my own heart. ‘Self-interest,’ wrote
Amiel, ‘is an endless fount of commodious illusions.’

Few things are more self-serving than our illusions, or more self-defeating than our selfishness.
We need knowledge to show us the way to what we want. And we need illusions to convince
ourselves that it was worth wanting. We fail because we can’t fathom how the world works. But
we don’t see that we have failed because we don’t want to fathom who we are.

A worldly climber is a combination of cunning realism and childlike self-absorption.

12 Illusion and advantage

We prefer our own advantage to most truths. And yet we prefer our own errors to many
advantages. We stay chained to rusted lies, because we are slaving to reach our goals. But we
can’t reach our goals, because we are chained so tight to our lies. We will stop at nothing to
expedite our schemes. But if they miscarry, we’re glad just to keep our grip on our false
opinions. We fix our eyes on our bright dreams, to help us sate our sullen lusts, or to salve our
chagrin when we fail to do so.

My illusions land me in real troubles, which hurt me so bad, that I have to seek sanctuary in
additional illusions.

Most of us think and act judiciously only in the schemes that serve our own ends, a few in all but
that.

Human beings are rational animals who have more sense than to try to use their reason to
guide them through this mad world.

Our illusions make the constitution of our lives. Our wants and schemes are the policies that
give them form. Information is the bureaucrat which advises them how best to act. And our will
is the minister who carries them out.

13 Self-interest forecloses self-knowledge

We are more foreign to ourselves than we are to our ambitions. And we dwell farther from our
hearts than we do from our schemes. Our concupiscence keeps us close to others and far from
ourselves. We are whirled on blindly by our greed, and we are gulled by our own self-belief.

We hone our self as a tool to implement our aims. And we want to learn who we are as we want
to learn the tool’s trade, to squeeze the most use from it.

The eye reposes most agreeably in the middle distance. And that’s where we live, with our
compulsions and career. I don’t dare to grasp who I am. And I don’t care to know what I aim at.
That would just hold me back from getting what I want.

We have to hollow out our hearts in order to lay hold of the junk that we are sure will fill them up.
14 We don’t know what we want
People are not quite aware of what they want, but how unwaveringly they fight to get their hands
on it. I don’t know what I want, and yet there’s nothing I won’t do to grab more of it.

We squander all our selfish initiative on schemes that yield us no gain. What won’t we suffer or
sacrifice to reach a goal which will bring us no good?

We are never sure of what it is that we desire. So it’s lucky for us that we have our self-
satisfaction to tell us that we’ve got it.

People can’t stop wanting not just what they do want, as Schopenhauer showed, but even what
they don’t want. As Hoffer points out, ‘We not only keep wanting what we cannot have, but go
on wanting what we no longer really want.’

15 We don’t know what is good for us

We set aside our principles for the sake of our profit. And then we squander our profit to give
rein to our giddy freaks and whims. We are willing to ruin ourselves for a caprice, but we won’t
so much as discompose ourselves for a conviction.

Our most potent motives lurk in the hiatus between long obsession and brief whim. ‘So little are
we governed by self-interest,’ as Hazlitt wrote, ‘and so much by imagination.’

If we weren’t so intent on our own interest, our folly would be sure to undo us. And if we weren’t
hobbled by our folly, our self-interest would devour the wide world. The harm that we cause by
our flailing avarice is abated less by our fine charity than by our gross ineptitude.

We rarely pursue our real interests, much less our best ones. So how could they bring us true
peace? Many people are too grasping to see where their real profit lies. And they care for no
more than a small segment of their own self. Their egoism sunders them not just from others but
from their own heart as well. What they serve is a baseless semblance of their present self, and
they sacrifice to this the part of them that is most real and lasting.

We are too much the tools of our compulsions to be truly self-serving.

SWINDLING SELF-INTEREST

16 Self-destructive self-interest
Our own self-interest treats our self with the same lack of care that the national interest treats
our land. We exploit and rifle it for gain. What we feel for it is both more and less than love. We
love our self as the fire loves the coal. And yet, like the fire, we love nothing else.
I do my neighbours no more good by my neighbour-love than I do myself by my selfishness.

What mayhem we would cause, if we loved our neighbour with the same boundless, ferocious,
unjust partiality that we love ourselves. Thank God there’s not much chance of that.

We are both more self-seeking and more self-destructive than we know. We care as icily for the
good of others as we toil clumsily for our own. Though we are disinclined to do a charitable
deed if it won’t further our own ends, we are lured to do a mess of discreditable ones that hinder
them.

A human being is a selfish and self-lacerating animal.

How lucky that few people care enough for us to do us as much harm as we do ourselves.

I oppose those who try to injure me with the same ferocity that I do those who try to save me
from injuring myself.

17 Swindled by our own self-interest

If we weren’t in such a sweat to seize what we want, would we be so easily defrauded of it? We
are as ruthless in the pursuit of our good as we are ready to be swindled out of it. People try to
bluff us for their ends, and we allow them to for our own. Our egoism, so versed in cheating
others, at last cheats itself. We gain so little from the intrigues for which we make them pay so
dear.

I’m glad to be gulled by my own mad fancies, so long as I can brag that I’m an astute exception.
But most of the time I choose to be swindled with all the rest, rather than profit on my own.

Venal people are fleeced with ease but reluctant to trust. The cunning can be entangled by their
own subtlety. A chump may be still more disillusioning than a cheat.

18 The heart is a hungry dupe

Is our deceitfulness more credulous or is our credulity more deceitful? We let ourselves be
cozened in our haste to snatch a quick gain. ‘The eagerness of a knave,’ Halifax wrote, ‘maketh
him often as catchable as ignorance maketh a fool.’

Our heart is the dupe of our wants more than the head is the dupe of the heart. We are so prone
to being hoaxed, not because our uncorrupted heart is too trusting to heed our judicious
misgivings, but because our clamorous voracity drowns them out. And we are so easy to cheat,
not because we are so guileless, but because we are so greedy. ‘How willing the vulgar are,’
Scott says, ‘to gull themselves when they can find no one else to take the trouble.’ As
Machiavelli knew, a mark always meets a quack half way.
We submit to be robbed by the arch deceiver, our own self-flattery. Our guileful self-interest is
fooled by our gullible self-regard. ‘A person’s vanity,’ Balzac says, ‘is a pretender that never
lacks for a butt.’

19 The cunning credulity of self-interest

We fool ourselves ingenuously but not innocently. The self-seeking that makes us cunning
makes us credulous.

We are too cunning to be innocent, and too naive to be wise.

We need others to share our delusions as much as we need to be deluded. It’s only fools, who
don’t see how the world works, that decline to be defrauded like the rest of us.

We make headway in this crooked world by becoming clever fools and conniving dupes.

The world distrusts all solid realities, and yet is determined to be deceived by the hollowest
appearances.

Some people are credulous because they are innocent, and some because they are corrupt.
The guileless can be bought for a pittance, since they naively trust that the world will keep its
promises. And the corrupt are not hard to bluff, because they are so keen to hear what might
bring them the least gain.

Most of us are not hard to fool, because we are so eager to believe, or at least too lazy to doubt.

20 We put our faith in the faithless

We don’t trust those who tell the truth, yet we let the most patent deceivers take us in. It is the
faithless that compel our cunning faith. We see straight through the few who have seen through
themselves. But we are hypnotized by the bright opacity of a self-swindler, most of all when the
swindler is us. ‘All other swindlers upon earth,’ Dickens writes, ‘are nothing to the self-
swindlers.’

I feel a great need to believe in the wisdom of those who fool me, so that I won’t need to see
what a fool I am.

21 Charm
The charmer thrives by the adage, Self-love conquers all. All the world loves a self-lover, like
Alcibiades or Rupert Brooke, who seems to be in love with all the world. Their charm is their
velvet selfishness turned outward, and their brashness supercharges them with a high voltage
charisma.
Charm, as Amiel wrote, is ‘the trait in others that renders us more pleased with ourselves.’ The
vanity of others delights or disgusts me, depending on how much it seems to play up to or snub
my own.

We are charmed by the self-importance of those who add to our sense of our own importance.

Charisma is one of the fake forces whose effects in this world of fakery are all too real.

We love a swaggerer as much as we hate a sneerer. We are beguiled by those who puff their
own importance as much as we are repelled by the few who mock the impostures of the world
from which we hope to gain. And what dire shame we heap on anyone who would make us feel
the least bit ashamed.

Rather than scowling, as if to show that the world is not good enough for you, better to smile,
and disdain to let the world know what you think of it. A smile may betray more deep scorn than
a sneer, since it doesn’t care to show how little it thinks of those it beams on.

The charmer has learnt that if you tickle people’s conceit, they won’t mind when you filch their
real gain.

22 The ruses of self-interest

Our self-seeking stoops so low to pocket its small gains that it may seem meek. It consents so
eagerly to be foxed that it seems ingenuous. And it schemes so wholeheartedly with anyone to
get what it wants that it seems trustworthy.

Like a threatened nation, you have three options to deal with the world, appease, ally or attack.

By promoting their schemes, people grow both brutal and accommodating. They forward them
with implacable economy and implacable excess. They will drop any principle that might hold
them back, yet they stop at nothing to push them on.

I’m scarcely aware of all the guile that my machinations prompt me to, and I don’t foresee the
troubles that they’ll cause me.

Our self-interest serves us well by appearing not to serve us better. It is advantageous to

miscalculate once in a while, to show that you are not calculating. We gain so little from our
compromises with the world, that they seem guiltless. And we reap so much from our
misconduct, that we feel no need to prove it just.

LITTLE INTERESTS
23 The smallness of self-interest
The puniest particle of life is worth more to itself than the rest of life as a whole. ‘What is the
entire world,’ asked Sade, ‘compared to a single one of my desires?’ And what is the long chain
of life and its delicate gestation weighed in the scale with my own brief term here?

We are more presumptuous than ambitious. Our hopes are modest yet insatiable. Our views are
microscopic, but our pretensions are megalomaniac. We are so crammed with vanity, that we
can let our true pride starve. Egotism surveys life through a magnifying glass, not through a
telescope. Our selfishness, which knows no bounds, sets very tight bounds to our world.

However wide or narrow our horizons, it is our own glory that lights them up. And the narrower
they are, the more glowingly it does so.

Since we are too weak to dominate the big world, we decide that our own narrow tract of it must
be all that matters. But the foreshortened arc of our job, household or cluster of friends looks
real from the inside alone, since no one else has any interest in behaving as if it were real. The
smaller the world in which we view ourselves, the larger the place that we seem to fill up in it.

24 The monotony and variety of self-interest

We are stitched together from such multicoloured odds and ends, so how do they make up such
a monochrome whole?

Self-interest is as monotonous as the self, and as multifarious as the ten thousand things that it
covets. What could be meaner and more predictable? Yet what could be more irresistible and
engrossing? How did unvarying interest frame so floridly variegated a world?

Some people’s self-love must be promiscuous, to embrace all the incompatible selves that they
are quilted from.

25 Zealots and opportunists

Those who have no principles may yet be willing to die for a cause that gains them nothing. And
yet most dreamy fanatics turn out to be crafty careerists. A deranged militant like Hitler may act
with wily duplicity.

Chancers presume that they owe it to their high merits to squeeze the most out of all the low
opportunities that come their way.

Some people are better than their ambitions, but by prosecuting them they grow worse. Like
Macbeth, they act by the rule that ‘For mine own good all causes must give way.’ They don’t
have the high integrity to follow their best projects, but they lack the self-command to give up
their mean ones.

We pursue goals that are unworthy of us, and by pursuing them we grow unworthy of anything
better.

26 Insatiable self-satisfaction
Our self-seeking is insatiable but easily appeased. I covet so much, yet I’m content with such
scanty takings. Since I rate my place so high, why do I take such pride in the lowest gains? How
readily we are disaffected, yet how cheaply we are delighted. Our hearts would not be surfeited
with paradise. Yet how hungrily they fall to feast on the broken meats of this corrupted world.
We are impossible to satisfy, but easy to please.

27 Self-satisfaction is easily satisfied

Our defeats are more bitter than we feared. And our victories prove more insipid than we hoped.
But our self-satisfaction helps us to digest the one, and lends seasoning and savour to the
other.

How blessed I would be, if I were as charmed with everything else as I am with my own self. I’m
never less than thrilled with my own merits, though this doesn’t quite suffice me. And I’m so well
pleased with myself, that anything else can please or displease me. Most of us are too delighted
with ourselves to be discontented with our lot. Yet we are all too self-seeking to sit still.

How modest or how conceited we must be, to have achieved so little and still to be so self-
satisfied.

I can bear to be stripped of all that I have, since I am still sheltered by my self-assurance.

All satisfaction springs from self-satisfaction. Most people are so pleased with themselves, that
they are pleased with all the rest of the world as well.

SELF-REGARD

28 We are proud of our demeaning self-interest

We are no less proud than avaricious. So we have to pretend that all that we do to feed our
avarice must redound to our glory. Yet we may still blush to seek the prizes that even our pride
wants us to get. We have to make our profligacy our pride, since we are too much the slaves of
our greed to break its shackles. ‘The jingling of the guinea,’ Tennyson wrote, ‘helps the hurt that
honour feels.’ Pride may be ashamed to calculate, but it’s yet more ashamed to lose.
We would be ashamed to lose the fight, but we are not ashamed to fight it in such a way that we
don’t deserve to win.

Proud of all that helps us to lay hold of what we desire, we yet deny that it is doing any such
thing. Though vain of our plans, we shy from acknowledging the mean ploys that we stoop to in
carrying them out. If we didn’t set our price so high, how could we bear to crouch so low from
day to disgraceful day to snaffle up such trim gains?

What we crave are the slight but solid prizes which we hope will magnify the slight and doubtful
distinctions which lift us a notch above our peers.

29 Self-interest is self-repairing
Self-interest is unashamed, yet is prompt to mend when it fails. And self-regard is quick to feel
shame, but refuses to reform when it has been disgraced. Ambition learns from its stumbles, but
vanity denies that it made them. Some of us would sooner face ruin than recognize that we
were wrong. We would rather weather our acts’ calamitous outcomes than mitigate them by
admitting that we had brought them on our own heads.

Some people recover from reverses because they are so limber, and some because they are so
unbending. My self- interest makes me pliable but persevering. And my self-regard makes me
obstinate and unwavering.

30 Self-regard at war with self-interest

My greed and my pride, like president and congress, form part of the same administration, but
they may come from adverse blocs and are incessantly bickering.

Our self-seeking racks us, but our self-satisfaction soothes us.

We are sustained by the solid diet of our self-seeking. But we breathe each instant the
impalpable air of our lies and self-conceit.

Our self-belief keeps us afloat, and our self-interest sweeps us on down the cascade of life.

Some people sell their real self-interest to gild the sheath of their self-regard. And some
abdicate their dignity to promote their mean designs.

Even the most unhinged people don’t lack clever reasons to confirm their mad immodesty or to
find excuses for their mad resolutions.

We act in order to push our self-interest. And we think in order to puff up our self-regard. We act
in order to do well for ourselves. And we reflect in order to think well of ourselves. Our thoughts
frame a continuous appreciative gloss on the text of our conduct. Our conceit is our faith, and
our self-seeking is our works, and we trust that we are justified by both.

31 Self-regard trumps self-interest

We need the luxury of our self-regard still more than our obligatory self-seeking. Our mad
arrogance outwits our scheming avarice. We keep up a fervent faith in the fetish of our self. But
pride is a jealous god, which may demand the immolation of its firstborn, our advantage.

Our self-seeking tells us how to act, and our self-conceit tells us what to believe. Domineering
self-regard truckles to low self-interest. And yet our deft self-interest is the dupe of our
simpleminded self-regard.

A selfish person, as the proverb says, will burn down your house to roast his eggs. But
blusterers will burn down their own house, to show that they know how to roast eggs more
skilfully than you.

Some people are so conceited, that they don’t deign to walk on two legs. So they hack off the
limb of their self-interest, to show how nimbly their self-regard can hop to and fro on one.

People are too selfish to repent the wrongs that they do to others. And they are too smug to
regret the harms that they do to themselves. The shock of the damage that they do themselves
saves them from recognizing that they caused it.
SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Contents

Causes of success

Illusory success

Effects of success

Denial

CAUSES OF SUCCESS

1 Causes of success and failure

Disdain to cash in a small share of your pride to buy a slight success, and you may find that you
have to spend all of it just to hold on to life. Refuse to accommodate the world, and you’ll end up
homeless.

The prosperous smoke out the needy, and coax them to give up their time and independence to
purchase a slender share in their own ruthless scams. And then they make them feel grateful for
the service that they do them. And they are adept at promising in such a way as to oblige you to
pay.

Some ambitious schemers, like Mussolini, have marched to office by appearing irresistible. And
some creep to it by appearing innocuous.

Shrewd people know how to parlay their endorsement by a few so as to win the plaudits of
many. They convert the respect which no one quite feels for them to a firm position of vantage.
And then they use this position to extort the regard of yet more.

I sweat to earn the good opinion of those whom I don’t respect, so that I can then trade it to buy
the good opinion of those whom I do respect.
2 Success through illusion
If you hope to get on in the world, you must learn to lie. And if you want to find the truth, you first
have to fail. Succeed, and people will flock to you, while truth, which hates crowds, will forsake
you.

Our delusions serve our real self-interest, and our self-interest works to keep up our delusions.

We make our way in the world by telling ourselves agreeable lies and then cajoling others to
share them. You gain a fortune, not by generating the most value, but by inflating the price of
what you sell and then persuading a throng of buyers to pay it.

We couldn’t achieve half our real success, if we dropped our self-deceptions.

Since we are all impostors, we all need to pretend to be taken in.

The sole truth that we put any trust in is success. So why should we care how false we have to
be to get hold of it? And we are ready to believe in any lie that helps us to it.

In order to function soberly in the world, you need to stay drunk on the cheap liquor of hopeful
self-belief.

If you don’t have the brains to deceive yourself, you are not cut out to find real success in this
world.

3 Small winners
I feel sure that I am more than the big triumphs that I have gained, and that my rivals are less
than the small ones that they have gained.

Those who have got small things done by dint of their small talents are in no doubt that great
things get done by the application of the same talents on a slightly larger scale. An efficient
manager assumes that a great statesman is just an efficient manager who has won promotion
to a higher office.

However low our success, most of the time it tops our abilities.

We strain to swipe those prizes that are high enough to seem worth attaining but low enough for
us to reach them.

We all now use up our lives auditioning for a cheap success, so that we can boast of it to people
who are so deafened by their own self-applause that they can’t hear ours.

A low success now comes so ready to our hands, that we don’t aspire to anything more glorious
than a well-paid ordinariness.
ILLUSORY SUCCESS

4 Paradise of fools
This world is a paradise for fools. They know how to make the most of its fatuous amusements
and how best to cope with its idiotic vicissitudes. And though they may make no better job of it
than the wise, at least they’re more pleased with their work.

A fool is far more sharp-witted than a sage, and is more fit to profit from the world’s foolishness.

Life sets problems so complicated that you have to be a fool to solve them.

In this world it pays to be a fool, so long as you don’t know what you are. And who would be fool
enough to do that? The only kind of fools that the world has no use for are those who are foolish
enough to know their own soul.

How could fools not scorn the wise, when they see them wasting their time on things that don’t
pay?

Fools are wiser than wise people, since they never need to feel the distress of finding out that
they are fools.

The world, like the Lord, makes use of fools to confound the wise.

You’re lucky if the best service your brains do you isn’t to make an ass of you.

We are all fools, but some of us are just shrewd enough to know how to exploit the foolishness
of others to serve our own turn. And that might make us the biggest fools of all.

5 Second-rate success
The mediocre and conniving have the best of it in this world of conniving mediocrity. We rise by
being ruthlessly second-rate. Our mediocrity wins us success, and success proves to us that we
are not mediocre. The world, like a magnifying glass, makes small talents look large, but turns
big ones to a blur. In this world it’s dogged plodding that does it.

If people’s vanity fails to save them from seeing how mediocre they are, their mediocrity will do
it.

They thrive most splendidly, whose superficiality squares with the world’s. Their shallow gifts
are best matched to serve the world’s shallow needs. And their efficient brutality is best able to
master its brute indifference.

Great careers are those that end in catastrophe. Middling talents go from strength to strength.
6 A little knowledge
Most of us trot on so well with the world, because we have no untoward thoughts about it. The
fewer ideas you have, the better you get on in life. And the more stolid our intellect, the more
secure our seat in the world. Lack of imagination is the key to success in any profession. Think
beyond it, and you won’t make much headway within it.

In order to make your way in this everyday world, you have to keep to everyday ideas. And most
of us are ready to do that.

It doesn’t take much intelligence to make a big success. Seeing this is so, intelligent people
scorn success, and successful people scorn intelligence. Which is more of a surprise, that
empty-headed people can be so competent, or that competent people are so empty-headed?

It is the nescient and narrow-minded who know how to get things done in this world. So is it any
wonder that most of what gets done is so bone-headed?

A little knowledge will suffice to speed you safely through the big world. Most people are quick
to learn just how little they need to know to get on, and they are determined to learn not one
whit more than that.

Is it a great wonder that those whose sole thought is for their own advancement should advance
so far in the world? They are just shrewd enough to spot the main chance, and plenty ruthless
enough to let nothing stand in their way as they go for it.

7 Confidence feeds competence

In this world of solemn quackery confidence does more than competence. The false self-belief
that we derive from our small victories gives us the real self-assurance that we need to win
more considerable ones. ‘As is our confidence,’ says Hazlitt, ‘so is our capacity.’ Conceit lends
you confidence, and confidence will render you capable and bold. ‘Consciousness of our
powers,’ as Vauvenargues wrote, ‘augments them.’

To make your way in the world, you have to act like you are already a success. But to make a
work that might last, you have to learn to be a failure. To get things done, you need confidence.
But to find out the truth, you need doubt and diffidence.

Some people prove how competent they are by getting themselves promoted to a position far
above their competence. And then their new status makes them able to do the job by putting
competent people at their service.

The emptier you are, the more you can inflate yourself. And you will be so elastic, that you won’t
feel the weight of the world pressing on you.
Incapacity is as much the effect of failure as its cause.

8 Confidence man
You gain confidence in your own powers when others show that they have confidence in you.
And they have confidence in you in so far as you have confidence in yourself. They are
convinced by the faith that you show in yourself, and you in turn are convinced by the faith that
they show in you. The world takes you for what you think you are, and you come to be what the
world takes you for. ‘Nobody,’ as Trollope wrote, ‘holds a good opinion of a man who has a low
opinion of himself.’ The dodge goes round and round and has no stop. ‘Life,’ as Pascal said, ‘is
a perpetual illusion.’

Those who are most full of themselves seem most substantial to others. Most of us are willing to
take others at the high valuation that they place on their own merits, since we do the same with
ourselves and we expect them to do so too.

The medals go to those who don’t doubt that they deserve them. We don’t think much of those
who lack the presumption to press their own claims.

In order to get on, you have to set too high a price on your own merits, till the rest of the world
finds that it suits it to share your inflated self-opinion.

Fortune favours the self-infatuated. How else could the human race have conquered the globe?

The least drop of self-doubt is fatal in this world of sincere self-promotion.

9 Overestimate yourself
In order to do great things, you need to make too much of your talent. And in order to stay
content with doing small ones, you need to make too much of their value. ‘To measure up to all
that is demanded of him,’ Goethe wrote, ‘a man must rate his capacities too highly.’

I overrate my aims more than my ability to achieve them. My conceit keeps me small by
assuring me how large my goals are. And it forgives all my faults, since they were serving such
vast designs.

All the petty toils that I have to go through to do a thing leave me in no doubt that it must be
worth doing. I know that my object is worth attaining, since I have had to smash through such
stubborn barriers to reach it.

If people do a thing with ease, they impute it to their virtuosity. And if they find it hard, they
impute it to the greatness of their goals.
EFFECTS OF SUCCESS

10 Winner takes all

Winners can afford to judge their worth much higher than it is, and losers can’t afford not to.

Success may be a flatterer, but failure is no friend.

All the world declares that it is better to deserve success than to attain it. And all the world acts
as if the opposite were the case. And yet those who win no garlands feel all the more certain
that they are due them.

11 To gain is to deserve
Most of us are sure that we prove that we merit a thing by the bare fact that we have got it.
Some conceited people so overprice their success, that they may demur that it’s more than they
deserve. Yet they are so conceited, that they will soon deem that they have earned much more,
and feel resentful that they have met with so little.

When I triumph, I deduce that I am not the impostor that defeat had tempted me to suspect I
might be. Success convinces us that we are genuine, and our failures hiss that those who have
trounced us must be fakes.

When we fail, we fear that the world’s judgment might be right. But it’s not till we succeed that
we feel sure that it is.

People now know that they are such big winners, that they feel that winning must be the best
gauge of merit, and that failure is the one indubitable refutation.

Our greed craves more than we get. And our pride tells us that we deserve all that we have got.
And our smugness assures us that all we have was worth the getting.

What I get is a measure of what I deserve. So how could I rate its value too high?

12 We learn the wrong lessons from success and failure

When I fare well, I conclude that I have too much flair to fail. And when I fail, I conclude that I
have too much decency to do the shifty things I would need to climb. If I prevail, I take it that the
world dares not gainsay my conspicuous merit. And if I’m vanquished, I take it that the world is
too dull to grasp it. I reckon that success is a post for which I am over-qualified.

I learn from my own adversity and from my neighbour’s prosperity, as both taste so bitter to me.
We learn from our stumblings, though in most cases the wrong lessons.

Winning hardens us, defeat corrodes us. Good fortune tempts us to dispense with our safe
virtues, and mischance makes us too poor to use them. You must choose either the victor’s self-
satisfaction or the loser’s self-pity. But many of us plump for the victor’s self-pity.

Which galls a failure more? The indignation that they don’t deserve to fail or the disabling
anxiety that they do? Some people are unsure if the world will now pay them the rewards that
they are due. But they still have no doubt that they are due them.

Some people lose their heads because they are maddened by their bad luck, and some
because they are flushed by their success.

13 Prudence and wisdom

We are content to be served by reason, but not to be ruled by it. And we consent to be guided
by cunning, but not to be governed by wisdom. Careful prudence grunts and sweats as the
lackey of our crazy compulsions.

Success makes some people seem sage, and some not need to. And failure makes some too
poor to be wise, and others too poor to seem much else. Our rebuffs bankrupt us of what is not
worth risking, and so may shrink us to a seeming sagacity. Those who have failed to get
anything else may thus appear to have got wisdom. The smug and prosperous love to praise
the luckless for their sage and unavailing dignity.

We may feel awe at those who have the sagacity and self-sufficiency not to care for the world.
But there is more than a drop of scorn mixed in with our awe. I too might pay it no mind, and
might cast it aside, if it didn’t need me so much. Don’t we all assume that we could get on quite
well without the world, if only it could get on without us?

When they meet with a shock, prudent people use the time before they have to react to it to
recover their sang froid, while rash people use it to pour oil on the flames of their anger.

14 The circles of success and failure

The very shocks that make it imperative for us to shift our mode of attack too often make it
impossible for us to do so.

We crave more than we have, but we aspire to less than we ought. Victory leaves us
complacent but not contented.

You pay for each of your triumphs by your need to stay on the prowl for the next one. Success
spurs you to reprise it, and failure stings you to recoup it. Winning is one of the most narrowing
of our addictions. Victory, as Nietzsche said, is not worth achieving if it doesn’t quench your
thirst for it. Elsewise it will drag you down to an enthrallment from which you will never break
free.

Victory is the worst teacher. It tempts us to reiterate our winning trick till it turns into a losing
groove. The stupidest losers will at last learn to mimic the winning tack of their conquerors. And
the cleverest winner will fall into the same mistakes as the losing enemies which they first
vanquished by doing the opposite.

All that I love and hate, each of my cronies and foes, all my devotions and ventures, handcuff
me to both hope and fear. Winning and losing both bind me more firmly to the world, and blind
me more blackly to myself.

15 The punishment of undeserved success

Some people are used up by failure, and some by success. Ruthless opportunists are punished
for obtaining what they don’t deserve by not deserving it. Their success supplants their self. But
this is one loss that they are happy to put up with. They are so pleased with themselves, that
they feel they have been singled out for a great reward.

Those who have scooped an undeserved prize have just made a start of their travails. Now they
must prove how scantly they deserve it, by parlaying it to scrounge more medals that they
deserve still less.

The brazen beg so much for themselves. And the proud demand so much of themselves. ‘The
gentleman,’ according to Confucius, ‘strives to deserve. The arrogant wish to get.’

16 The success of failure

Grant that you’re a failure, and you have earned an unparalleled and lonely success. But who
would want the sad distinction of possessing the sensibility to be threshed by their own
mediocrity and to be scarred by how unremarkable they are? Few of us feel our futility like a
wound.

How brave you have to be to front your failure and mediocrity. And how much nerve you need in
order to go on living once you have done so.

If you know what real victory means, how could you deem that you are anything but a failure?
But who aims so high or sees so clear, to discern that they have been worsted in the one
venture that is worth excelling in?
Each of us is doing what we are doing because we have failed to heed the call of some more
worthwhile vocation.

DENIAL

17 We never see that we have failed

Our drubbings don’t lend us the self-awareness which alone might have made them worth the
pain they cause us. We look on failure as a foreign land. A few of us may have strayed into it for
a short stint. But none of us are enrolled as its permanent residents.

Failure is a diminished country, in which all seems as it was before, momentous, absorbing, and
bright with hope.

Conceit makes us wild to win and too blind to see that we have lost.

Most people think so much of themselves, that they don’t have to win, and can’t grasp that they
have lost. They are too pleased with who they are to be much put out by the massacre of their
darling hopes.

I rate my own acumen and schemes too high to count myself a failure, and I rate others too low
to count them as failures. I have done as much as anyone could do. And they have got more
than their poor endowments deserve.

18 Sickened by success
We are too small to be disillusioned by our success. Our aspirations outstrip our abilities, but
our smugness outweighs our disappointments.

Few of us have the pride either to see that we have failed or to be sickened by our sordid
victories. Our minds are not large enough to size how small our success is.

How could I learn from my ill-luck or from my success? My defeats seem so small, that I can’t
see them. And my success seems so massive, that I can’t see anything else. The least triumph
lures me to think better of my talents, but the direst overthrow won’t convince me that I’m a
failure. My success looks to me much larger than it is, though a little or perhaps a lot less than it
ought to be.

19 Self-satisfied mediocrity
Our bungles may gain us so much, that they feel like the most brilliant victories. How many of
the young will achieve what they set out to do? Yet how many of their elders bewail what poor
things they have done? They have no doubt clinched a nice consolation prize or two, which they
feign they were aspiring to the whole time. Or they forget what they were first levelling at. Or
their eyes are still full of the victory that flutters just in front of their face.

A youngster daydreams of being elected president, and winds up opening a shop, and feels
overjoyed to have been voted mayor of some backwoods market-town. Life tempts them so
unstintingly with such measly pay, that they lose sight of the high aims that they once strained
for.

Satan wears a grey suit. He doesn’t take you to a mountain top. He just buys you a meal, slips a
few dollars in your wallet, and introduces you to some convivial companions.

Don’t ask a plodder what it feels like to be a failure. They don’t know a thing about it. Their eyes
swim with the glitter of all their victories, and can’t make out the glowering futility which
envelopes them. The tortoises feel thankful to the careless hares for reminding them what
sprinting successes they have made of their own race.

My self-congratulation fattens my lanky wins, and lightens my heaviest discouragements.

20 The speed of failure

Failure, like the hour of my death, seems so far in the distance that it’s not real to me. I see it all
round me, but I trust that it won’t come near me, though no doubt it’s with me right now. It waits
close in front of me, or else it’s been here for a long time. It comes down as implacable as night.
Defeat stalks me like my shadow wherever I go. But how could I descry it, when I am all day
staring at the glinting sun of success that beams so bright in my face?

I fail so slowly, that I don’t see that it’s happening. And I rise so slowly, that I feel I have a right
to do all I can to hurry it on. I don’t doubt that victory will atone for all the wrongs that I had to do
to slash my way to it.

Failure seems as far away from us as our first hopes.

I look back on my days, and try to trace where failure, like a cancer, made its way into my
bloodstream and began remorselessly invading each organ.

Persevere, and you will meet with unhoped for kinds of failure and frustration. What a
consummation, to have failed more dismally than you ever dreamed you could.

Our life is a fit apprenticeship for abject failure.

21 Illusion is the staff of failure
The blindness that lures me to my ruin spares me from seeing that I am to blame for it. I need
flimflam and self-flattery if I am to rise in the world. And I need them all the more when I fall. We
don’t learn what we are, whether we fare too well or too wretchedly. Surrender might teach us
generous lessons. ‘I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory,’ Pessoa wrote. But it
makes most of us too poor to pay for them, while our self-possession tells us that we are too
rich to need them. So we fail even at failure. We shrink to be unsuccessful failures or failed
successes. I’m sure that my very repulses are a proof that I am like no one else and that I am
bound to achieve at the last sortie some unexampled victory.

You are doubly defeated, if you can’t find some success in your deepest failure, and don’t
discern the failure in your highest success.

We make nothing of our fall, since we lack the courage to see the nothing that it has made of
us.

No one dares tell the truth to the fortunate, since they are so formidable. And we hold off from
telling the truth to the vanquished, since they are so fragile. When I think I am sparing them the
truth, I am sparing myself the unpleasantness of telling it. And even weak people are strong
enough to make it clear that you are not to tell them the truth.

However cruelly life racks us, it fails to extract much of the truth from us.

22 Retreat
The illness may make you too weak to stomach the remedy. But your dread of catching it may
render you too timid to do anything but try to shun it. What does not kill me makes me stronger,
protests the dying animal. What does not kill me proves that I lack the spirit to kill myself when
all that made life worth living has left me. It leaves me too fagged for more than a skulking self-
protection. Pull down the shutters and keep out the plague. Though prevention may seem
preferable to cure, it may do more harm than the disease. ‘The torment of precaution,’ as
Napoleon said, ‘is more excruciating than the pitfalls it seeks to avoid.’ How soon resilience
shrivels into irresolution. Why not just end it?

23 Resilience
How could asses learn, when they have such stout backs? If they had been weaker, they may
have had to grow wiser. They have the strength to bear the ill-effects of their own missteps, and
so they have no reason to stop committing them.
The failure of all that I have worked for would be far more dire than death. So why am I still so
unprepared to die when all that I have worked for has come to nought?

What does not kill me may make me too grasping to let go of life. And that may be the worst
way for the soul to rot. It is the blind pertinacity of a cancer cell which has lost the capacity to
die.

24 How we judge
I preen myself on my own evaluations of people and things. So why does their status and
success sway me more than the intrinsic traits which test their true worth? ‘Most judge people,’
La Rochefoucauld says, ‘by the favour that they have gained or by their fortune.’

In this world it is the fools who fix the grade of the wise, chiefly by the repute in which their
fellow fools hold them. ‘The touchstone of truth,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘has come to be the multitude
of believers, when the dolts in the crowd are so much more numerous than the wise.’

25 The bitch goddess Success

Human beings have never allowed reason to rule their minds. But they have always been ready
to bow to power and success. They won’t yield to evidence, but they will yield to what is worse.

Reason, like right, has no heft in a case, till force and authority make it superrogatory. And now
the sole authority that they know is numbers and the crowd. Quantity is the test of quality for
those who lack the taste to judge quality.

What most impresses us about an event is the impression that it makes on others.

‘Success,’ as Nietzsche wrote, ‘has always been the great liar.’ At least that’s what we say till
we succeed. And even if we fail, success is still the one thing that we all believe in. Those who
have been clobbered by years of bad luck still look on success and popularity as the hallmarks
of truth and worth. These are, as Burke put it, ‘the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar
judgements.’

Having seen how ready the world is to reward the cheap, the false, the pushy, the flaunting and
the ephemeral, why do we still regard success as the one incontestable proof of true merit?
PRIDE

Contents

In the minds of others

Seeking respect

Conceit

The pride of knowledge

IN THE MINDS OF OTHERS

1 We live in the minds of others

Our greed covets images that catch our eye. And our pride strives to sculpt our self as an image
to catch the eye of others. Our vanity makes us feel that we glow for them, and our avarice
makes all that we crave glow for us. Our self justifies our wants and all that we do to sate them.
And our wants justify our self and all that we do to serve it.

What we long for most of all is that others should bear a bright likeness of us in their minds. ‘We
want to lead a fictive life in the minds of others,’ as Pascal says. Each of us is a mere thought
flitting briefly through the brains of others. Our existence is only hypothetical till proved by their
attention. ‘We only begin to live,’ writes Houellebecq, ‘through the eyes of others.’ And the
person who matters most to us is doubly unreal. It is the person that we fancy others fancy us to
be. It is our false notion of the false notion they hold of us.

How could we doubt that there are other minds, when it is only other minds that give us a sense
that our own is real?

Others’ opinion of us means more to us than our own. And yet our own still means so much to
us that we feel obliged to deny this.

Of all things reputation exists most in the mind, but it exists in the minds of others. So it seems
more real to me than everything else, which exists solely in my own mind.
2 We take pride in the contemptible
How viciously I will vie with rivals that I don’t regard, to net prizes that I don’t want. And how in
thrall I am to opinions that I claim not to care for. I can’t resist my greed for the baubles that I
can’t quite respect. And I’m glad to gain the notice of those whom I rate so low.

If I can’t get what I do value, I will still fight as hard to get what I don’t. I have to learn to esteem
more than I in fact do, since I can’t refrain from craving more than I esteem.

How low our souls must be, that such trifles can raise them so high.

People are willing to act contemptibly to buy a good name, and to do demeaning things in order
to win praise. To win high honour in this world, you have to be quite shameless.

We spend our lives slaving to get hold of things that we don’t need, so as to gain the good
opinion of others, which we don’t value.

Those who are not engaged in a grand quest are still nettled by the small comparisons they
make with the people around them.

3 The pride of great and small egos

‘It astounds us to come on other egoists,’ Renard said, ‘as though we alone had the right to be
selfish.’ Ordinary people grudge that the extraordinary should lay claim to so much. And
extraordinary people grudge that the ordinary should strive so unrelentingly for such mean ends.
A little talent is determined to go a long way, and this world is the right place for it to do so.

The robustness of our attachments is not matched by the size of the objects to which we are
attached. And the ferocity of the selfishness bears no proportion to the quality of the self that it
is fighting for. The smallness of our ego sets no limit to the grossness of our egoism. Many
people chase a cheap prize as relentlessly as they would a grand one. Those whose egos make
do with mean rewards are not the less egoistic for that. They strive to aggrandize themselves in
the most trifling ways.

How are they able to stay so self-absorbed, who have so small a self to absorb them? How do
they rear such a vast selfishness on the base of so thin a self, and lavish such a trove of self-
love on so botched an object? A few anecdotes, a fixed routine, some petty vanity seem quite
enough for them. The smaller the mind, the larger it takes its own little world to be.

4 Pride and disdain

I have no doubt that people esteem me much more than they do, and that I care for their
esteem much less than I do.
How could renown be what I thirst for, when all I taste is the sickening indignities that I have to
choke down to get it?

I want to show that I outshine others by showing that I don’t need to, and that I set too low a
price on them to try to prove it. ‘We particularly wish to be praised,’ says Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘for
giving the impression that praise means nothing to us.’

High-minded people don’t deign to try to please, yet they grow exasperated when they fail to.
They prefer to disappoint than to presume. At least that proves they have the power to move
people in some way, or that they don’t think it worth their while to please or impress them.

What tolerant disdain we feel for others, just because they are not us, and want differing things,
and think differing thoughts. But our sneaking self-interest mantles the sneering which our
intolerant self-regard would parade naked.

SEEKING RESPECT

5 Pride is pretending not to care

Haughty people want to win the race, yet ridicule it a touch in case they don’t. And they display
a slight scorn for their own victories, to show that they are worth more than these too. If I can’t
win, I make sure that I lose ostentatiously, to prove that I’m not trying. ‘Since she was not
winning strikingly,’ George Eliot commented, ‘the next best thing was to lose strikingly.’

Those who spurn the world still care so much for it that they want the world to know it. And
those who hate the world still want it to love them. What brag could be more arrogant than
Landor’s line, ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’?

Some people are so perversely proud, that they won’t rest till they’ve been nominated as
members of an exclusive club, so that they can thumb their nose at it without being accused of
sour grapes.

We want to look down scorningly on success from the high citadel of our impregnable triumphs.

Proud souls disdain to conceal anything, save the craft that they use to conceal their pride.

6 Who cares
We don’t guess how highly people think of themselves, and how meanly they think of us. ‘If we
saw ourselves as others see us,’ Cioran remarked, ‘we’d vanish on the spot.’ And if we thought
as well of them as they do, we’d burst with envy. Most of them give us no consideration, unless
to confirm that we are not worth considering. But we take so much offence that is not meant,
because we don’t see how little thought they give us.

Whatever people think of you, you can be sure that it’s less than you think.

7 Trying to impress the indifferent

‘We are so vain,’ said Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘that we care for the regard even of those we don’t
care for.’ I toil night and day to win the notice of those who never think of me. And they don’t
think of me because they’re in such a sweat to win the notice of those like me who never think
of them.

My own talents satisfy me, but my own approval fails to suffice for me. No matter what the world
may think of me, I still think that I am all in all. And yet it is only the world’s regard that makes
me think that I am anything at all. I persist in thinking well of myself irrespective of what others
may think of me, but I still can’t bear not to seek their good opinion. And yet there are a lot of
people whose respect I would not much care for, if I didn’t think I might be able to win it.

8 The exchange of counterfeits

Though you spend no thought on others, you still want them to spend all their thought on you.
And you may scorn all the rest of their opinions, but not the one they form of you. ‘The notice of
others,’ Hazlitt said, ‘is as necessary to us as the air we breathe.’

My self-regard, which is the most real thing that I feel, craves the respect of others, which is the
least real thing that they feel. Of all their opinions, they give least thought to the one that they
hold of me. But that is the only one of theirs to which I give any thought at all. But having gone
to such great pains to win their approbation, it may be that in the end I care no more for it than
they do.

We all know that the world is a sham. Yet we all still hold that its good opinion of us is the one
truth worth proving.

We scarcely think people’s good opinion worth winning if they don’t hold a very high opinion of
their own worth.

9 We want to be respected in our own way

I want to win the approval only of those whose good sense I respect. But how could I not
respect the good sense of anyone who approves of me?

All of us want the same thing, to be well thought of. But each of us wants it in our own way. I
want to be valued for the one accomplishment that I see most value in. And I think nothing of
any kind of reputation except the one that I have set my heart on. But don’t we all cheerily make
do with whatever one we get? How pliantly I adjust the narrative of my self-satisfaction to follow
the ebb and flow of my fortune.

I don’t think much of a goal if I’m not in the chase for it. Yet I don’t think much of myself if I have
no hope of reaching the goal I choose. So I take care to choose only those goals that I know I
might reach.

Neither myself nor my ends amount to much on their own. But when paired they make up the
miniscule infinitude for which I would gladly torch the plenteous world.

Futility is the lives of others. The goal that is worth aspiring to is the one that happens to lie
within my reach.

10 We want the respect of those we don’t respect

In our inmost hearts we scorn the world and esteem only ourselves. Yet in our inmost hearts we
scorn ourselves and esteem only the world. ‘Deep down in his heart no man much respects
himself,’ Twain said. But deep down in their hearts none respect anything but themselves. I may
think little of the world and of the view it holds of me, and yet I think of little else apart from the
world and the view it holds of me.

There’s no soul so mean but I think more of myself for being thought better of by it, and would
think a lot more of it if it thought a shred more of me.

It is said that no one is a hero to their valet. But each of us is a hero to ourselves, and we are all
the valets of our own ego.

Those who see that the world is false and empty still crave its false and empty regard.

A fool cares nothing for the wisdom of a sage. But a sage still craves the accolades of fools. So
who is the bigger fool?

Like all the rest of the cheap stuff that I pine for, the less I prize their good opinion, the more I
crave it, and the more I crave it, the less I prize it. And no matter how slenderly I may value
reputation, I don’t value myself less for prostituting my best gifts to woo it.

11 We can’t bear the scorn of people that we scorn

If I didn’t think so slightingly of some people, I might not go to such lengths to impress them. It
galls me that those for whom I have such low regard should have such low regard for me. And
however many times they have disappointed me, I dread being a disappointment to them. ‘Man
seeks to acquire a rank among his fellow men,’ Kant wrote, ‘whom he detests but without whom
he cannot live.’

Why do we long for applause which we know is unworthy of us, yet feel unworthy if we fail to
obtain it? We may think nothing of a person’s praise, and yet think nothing of ourselves if we
don’t win it. And though we may not think much of their good opinion, we can’t bear to lose it.
Cicero points out that ‘many people scorn glory, who are still mortified by unjust reproach.’

It’s harder to bear the scorn of the people that we don’t respect than of those that we admire.

12 The perspective of pride

My ego frames the perspective by which I gauge all that I think good and estimable. ‘Egoism is
the law of optics in the realm of our feelings,’ as Nietzsche wrote. ‘What is closest appears large
and weighty.’ Anyone who dwells far from me and from the world that I project seems to dwell
far from reality. ‘Whoever lives at a different end of town to me,’ Swift said, ‘I look upon as
persons out of the world, and only myself and the little scene about me to be in it.’

I exist only in the minds of others, but they exist for me in my own mind. Anybody not lit by the
sun of my presence must live a gloomy spectral life in the shade.

The world is a smudged backdrop, from which I stand out as the one glowing figure who
deserves to last and be happy. The persians had no doubt that they were the greatest people in
the world and that the rest were of less and less worth the farther they dwelt from them. The
navel of the earth is always situated in our own backyard.

13 We care and don’t care for the approval of others

I use up my life vying to win the praise of people whom I barely know. But in the end I may not
much mind what people say of me, so long as they don’t say it to my face.

We don’t care how people think of us in towns that we pass through, as Pascal showed. Why
would you go to great trouble to impress either your friends, whom you see each day, or
strangers, since you will see them no more? Thus Gaskell’s Cranford ladies would ask, ‘What
does it signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?’ and if they were
absent from home, ‘What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?’ So the
tactic that we opt for is to try to dazzle our friends when we are in company with strangers whom
we hope to dazzle. Does the respect of each, of no worth on its own, make the other’s worth the
winning?
14 The self and society
The self is everything and nothing. We are all in all to ourselves. But we are nothing by
ourselves. Our aims and ends are egoistic through and through, but our egoism is social
through and through. The worth that we have in our own eyes comes from the regard that
others have for us. We believe in ourselves, but we depend on others. I barely exists, but me is
the nave of the world. I scarcely exist for myself, but I don’t doubt that everything else exists for
my sake.

Self and the narrow worlds that it nests in each weigh not an ounce on their own but an infinity
when twinned. And these low worlds raise the self to a priceless me rather than a lone and
worthless I. Society beams on us like a glad sun. All our inclinations are selfish yet social. ‘It is
easy to live for others,’ Emerson wrote, ‘everybody does.’ Our egoism finds its meaning only in
a group, though the group means something solely because we are part of it. Even the most
selfish person lives for others. And the most selfless people love others for their own ends.

There is so little to this self of ours, that it must absorb itself in something outside itself. And to
be absorbed in some other self may be just as selfish as to be absorbed in anything else.

15 Pride is not ashamed to seek praise

We have such a rich store of self-esteem, that we can afford to spend a large sum of it to buy a
crumb of others’ esteem. And yet some fling away all the world’s regard, to banquet their own
yawning self-regard.

Some people market their golden gifts to purchase a moment of the dull world’s attention. To
snap up the refuse that they want, they trade all that they cherish. They are in such a rush to
reach a goal, that they lose their way. If they didn’t have so much self-regard, how could they
bear to trade it for the paltry awards that they crave? What low dodges we sink to, in our
campaign to keep up our high opinion of our own deserts.

A whisper of others’ praise is enough to silence what slight shame I might feel at the mean shifts
I had to stoop to on the path to attaining it. And the fake acclaim that I gain is enough to cool the
slight bruise to my vanity that I incur by having stalked it so doggedly.

16 We respect whatever wins us respect

Most of us think as well of the world as we think it thinks of us. And we think as well of a thing as
it allows us to think of ourselves, unless we might think even better of ourselves by disdaining it.
We are pleased with anything that makes us pleased with our own lot. And we extol any skill
that we excel in.
Nothing seems small to me that shows me a hair taller to the small people whom I hope to
impress.

We don’t think much of any kind of talent that we don’t have, unless we believe that it has been
conferred on others to aid or amuse us.

It’s amazing how much respect we gain for a club that has the sense to admit us.

People know that the boss who fills the place one rung above them is a fool. And yet when they
are at length ensconced in it, they have no doubt that it proves how savvy they are. My success
is proof of my own merit. Their success is confirmation of the world’s conniving boorishness.

How could I doubt the value of any triumph that I’ve won?

17 We love the world as much as we think the world loves us

We love the world as much as we judge that the world loves us. And so it’s just as well that we
judge that it loves us a lot more than it does. And no world is so small that we don’t think it worth
trying to cut a big figure in it.

‘No one,’ as Leopardi says, ‘is so wholly disenchanted with the world, that when it begins to
smile on him he does not become in part reconciled to it.’ I will kneel to kiss its foot, as soon as
it shows me the least favour. I judge its prizes unfulfilling and deceptive till I have won a small
clutch of them. And I don’t see what good sense some people have till they come to share my
own point of view.

The soul is a beaten dog, now growling, now whimpering, which at last learns to fawn on the
brute world.

The simplest way to persuade self-believing people to think more highly of your own merits is to
show how highly you think of theirs.

CONCEIT

18 True and false pride

You need not be undeserving to be vain. Vanity dogs pride wherever it goes, as hyenas tag a
lion. No one has a monopoly on conceit. But some blowhards manage to squeeze more profit
out of it than the rest of us.

Our smugness shields us from humiliations which would prove fatal to true pride.
Proud people pay too dear for good turns. But braggarts deem that all the favours people do
them are no more than their due, and so they pay them back too stintingly.

How could our self-regard be undermined, when it’s 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?

19 Pride torments, conceit comforts

Pride is obnoxious to itself and all the world. The proud are dangerous, but the complacent are
disarmed by their own complacency. Pride is a querulous radical, conceit a smug tory. Pride is
solitary, conceit is clubbable. Smug people are more straightforward, less venomous and too
vain to be vindictive. The false pride that makes them deaf to real derision makes them
receptive to feigned praise. Stroke their ego the right way, and they will purr like kittens. So long
as they are flattered as they like, they will be quite amicable. And since they’re always flattering
themselves, they are friendly and accommodating.

I’m stung by my pride, since I have to justify it. But I’m comforted by my conceit, because it
justifies me. ‘Pride, a noble passion,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘is not blind to its faults, but hauteur is.’
The independent weigh their own and others’ worth by their intrinsic merits, the vain by the
prestige that they have won in the eyes of the world.

How could pride please others, when it is so displeasing to itself?

20 Conceit and illusion

Pride pioneers new concepts. But conceit contents us with the rusty banged-up idols of our
tribe. False pride makes do with humbug, but honour will make do with nothing short of the
truth. Most people have enough front to support all their trumpery. But few have the pride and
courage for an assault on it. Principled people give up their chance of happiness to serve the
truth. And the vain give it up to serve a lie.

Most people don’t have the pride to seek deep truths. But their vanity piques them to take part in
petty squabbles over small details.

Our pipedreams cost us nothing but our true pride. And we are always ready to shop that in
order to serve our sham self-belief.

Who isn’t blinded by the limelight of their own self-admiration?

21 Conceit
We are gratified both by our enemies, since we know that we are not like them, and by our
friends, since we are sure that they are not like us. We feel that our friends are better than
everyone else, and that we are better than our friends. And so they give us a double reason to
think well of our own worth. Two will jog on well together, so long as each feels superior to the
other in some respect. And as Chesterfield wrote, ‘most people enjoy the inferiority of their best
friends.’

We judge that those above us are arrogant when they assert their preeminence over us, and
that those below us are presumptuous when they assume an equality with us.

A group is maintained by a corporate vanity of its own which feeds but exceeds that of its
several members. Being part of a crowd adds to your egoism, but dilutes your individuality.

22 Conceit speaks
Some vainglorious people babble to you about all the wonderful things that they’re up to, and
some take it that they are so well known that they don’t need to. They don’t want to insult you by
implying that you alone of all the world are ignorant of it.

‘One speaks little,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘when vanity does not make one speak.’ Some
people have nothing to say of a thing if they have no part in it. But most of us can find
something of our own to talk of in everything.

Smug people tell themselves the self-serving lies that most of us know we have to tell others.
And they dare to tell others the mad self-glorifying lies that most of us keep locked in our own
breast.

The words that I quote with most relish are my own.

23 The self inflated by its trappings

‘A man’s self,’ says William James, ‘is the sum total of all that he can call his.’ It takes in all that
pertains to us, from our body and clothes and belongings to our spouse or child, clan, car, club
and address, firm, homeland, faction or church. The self that my vanity fancies I fill up juts out
much further than the self that others can see. So without purposing to they are all the time
bumping and bruising my phantom being. We use words to fix the outline of our shape, and they
stretch it farther than we reach.

I reckon myself richer for each of my possessions. And I reckon my possessions so rich
because they are mine. Custody is nine-tenths of how we rate a commodity. Our beaming self-
satisfaction gilds all the dross that we manage to scoop up.
24 Everything adds to our pride
I have such a strong need to think highly of my own gifts, that it’s lucky that I find it so easy.

We so hunger to think well of ourselves, that we would starve if such stingy rations failed to fill
us. We thirst for praise, yet such quick sips of it slake us.

False pride is a most efficient organism. It can draw nutriment from the driest crumbs, and yet
digest the most noxious toxins.

Self-belief can induce us to do anything at all. And anything at all is apt to swell our self-belief.
Our mere performances lend us a false sense of proficiency. We gain more reason to rate our
deftness favourably just by doing a thing than we lose if we do it ineptly.

I think so well of myself, and others think so little about me, that nothing I do could make either
think any better of me.

Our smugness is an ever-flowing fountain. It can’t get any fuller, but nor can it run down.

25 First in all comparisons

It is our curse to be all the time comparing our own merits with those round us. But we are
blessed to come out first in all our encounters.

Those who don’t know what I didn’t know till yesterday I deem disgracefully benighted. And I
jeer at those who fear what I was frightened of till yesterday.

I weigh my own worth by what I aspire to, but others’ worth by what they have achieved. I
dignify my own purposes, but discount their accomplishments. So I trust that my aborted
undertakings will vouch for the value of those that I got done. If this is what I had to leave aside,
you can guess how great are the things I finished.

We size our own stature by those near to us. If we live with pygmies, we judge that we must be
giants. And if we live with giants, we judge that we must be giants too.

A snob is anyone whose pretensions top my own. I want to act like a snob up to the threshold of
my pretentiousness. But I lambast as a snob anyone who dares to overreach it. Anyone more
punctilious than me must be a pedant, anyone less is lax and neglectful.

THE PRIDE OF KNOWLEDGE

26 The pride of knowledge
I don’t doubt that my ideas are unique. Yet it still shocks me when no one else seems to share
them. I flatter myself that I differ from others, but that they must be like me.

Numbers are always on our side. If all are of the same mind as me, then I must be right. And if
no one is, then I am not merely right but bold and far-seeing.

Most of us swallow the same slop and poppycock as everyone else, but we are sure that we do
so for deeper reasons. We like to feel both the security of belonging to our herd and the
smugness of presuming that we stand at the forefront of it. I glance to my flank at all of them
galloping in the same direction as I am, and I pity them for blindly stampeding the way that I
chose by reflection.

Messengers bulge with the weight of their news. They ought to be shot now and then, to lance
their tumid pomposity.

27 Pride in what we don’t know

Some people glory not just in what they do know but even in what they don’t know. And they are
vain of what they don’t know, since it seems to certify the value of what they do know. They feel
like great landlords, who don’t deign to attend to all that occurs on their vast estates, and are too
grand to seek to grasp such trifling details. What they modestly pretend tops their competence
they in fact judge falls below their concern.

If you can’t take pride in your good sense, you can at least take pride in your folly. We pique
ourselves on our lazy preconceptions as much as we would if we had found out strenuous
reasons.

I think little of what I don’t know, so that I won’t have to think less of myself for not knowing it.
‘We scorn a lot of things,’ Vauvenargues says, ‘so that we won’t have to scorn ourselves.’

People who don’t know what they do are still proud of themselves for doing it. They plume
themselves on the mannerisms of which they are not even aware.
VANITY

Contents

Perfection

Belief

Consolations

Dependence

PERFECTION

1 Vanity triumphs over time

Beauty jilts the loveliest and leaves them bereft. But vanity stays loyal to the homeliest. Beauty
is as frail and fleeting as vanity is robust and enduring. Time despoils beauty. But vanity
triumphs over time.

Beauty lasts for a season. Vanity lasts for all life. Beauty soon grows old and grey. Vanity stays
evergreen.

Our vanity inventories each slight alteration in our aspect, but fails to see its long geological
collapse. But we fail to see that we are now the sum of all the small deviations from what we
think we look like. Our very flaws help to take our eyes off the wrecks that time has made of us.
And death is merely the signature on the hideous canvas that time has daubed.

Vain people know their weak points quite well. But they look on them as great strengths. A
narrow scholar takes his narrowness as proof of scrupulous precision.

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. They still presume on their title, though they lack the means to keep it up.

As you get close to some bodies, the pull of their vanity draws you to them with more force than
the refulgence of their beauty or the light of their mind.
2 The torment of perfection
What extraordinary toils the most ordinary of us cumber our lives with, in our campaign 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.

I have to fight anew each day to defend my image of my self. So it’s lucky for me that my self-
regard has forearmed me for the fray in impenetrable steel. It’s a struggle that I can’t win and
can’t resile from.

We can’t be content, unless we are embarked on some mad scheme of self-betterment which is
doomed to leave us more wretched than we were before. Why not on the contrary do as the
man in Balzac does, who ‘was wise enough to estimate life at its true worth by contenting
himself in all things with the second best’? You ought to thank life each day for giving one more
proof that you were right to rate it so cheap. What pangs I cause myself and others by striving to
perfect my perfectly mediocre life.

Those who are irreparably flawed still go to great lengths to prove how special they are.

3 Our botched perfection

Perfection is mediocrity polished to a high sheen.

Our restless pursuit of excellence condemns us to a facile mediocrity.

People who fall in love with the idea of perfection are prone to make a foul mess of their lives.

We judge that we are struggling to make the best use of our gifts. But aren’t we just scrabbling
to get the most into our grip?

People are so set on perfecting themselves, but that’s so hard, and takes so long, and costs so
much, and gains them nothing. And so they try to surround themselves with the most perfect
trappings that they can.

People don’t want to change, but they do want to grow perfect, and they trust that they will do so
by growing more perfectly who they are.

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.
4 The vanity of the imperfect
How hard I toil to improve, but how pleased I am with the botched job that I make of it.

Our vanity projects for us an enhanced self, but tells us that we have already formed 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 special, and evincing that I am not.

How could we make ourselves the best that we might be, when we are so intent on showing our
peers that we are better than they are? We spend all our strength striving to prove to ourselves
that we are better than we are and to others that we are better than they are.

Vain people are well aware of their flaws. But they take it that they will have reached perfection
once they have rectified these. My past botches promise me that I must be progressing, rather
than alerting me to how far I have gone awry. And my own faults are mere chips which I’ll set
right with a few revisions. But others’ faults are undeniable proofs that their design was wrong
from the start.

BELIEF

5 Our deepest belief is our belief in ourselves

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. This is the one catholic and ecumenical creed. Our self-trust beats
the blazing certitude of the most fanatical ranter. So long as we 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.

Though I am willing to trade most of my errors, I cling to my overvaluation 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 cajole 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 formed by the fiery core of our self-belief.

We think an idea nourishing if it swells our vanity.

6 The metaphysic of our vanity
Providence is the metaphysic of our ego. Our littleness stretches a vast way.

We have long known that the earth is not the pivot of the universe, and so I’m thankful that I am
still the axis round which all bright things revolve.

The least person in the world is still the centre of their own world. And that is the one world there
is for them.

How could this not be the best of all possible worlds, when it is the one that I am part of?

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 get 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 set adrift in a cold universe. ‘Our egoism,’ Renard says, ‘is so excessive, that in a deluge
we believe the thunder to be directed at us alone.’

Has anyone had a revelation that told them that they don’t matter enough to damn or to beatify?

7 God’s plan
We may not believe in God, but don’t we all trust in a power immeasurably bigger than
ourselves whose job is 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 paltry to form part of God’s plan. How ready
the unassuming are to see fate operant in their own small lives.

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.
And in this age of mass celebrity, he is just one more of our fans and backers.

We swell our self-worth either by our insistence that we are self-made or by our praise of those
who have made us what we are.

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 special protection so that no harm can come to
them.
8 My merit, others’ luck
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. Only the
unlucky need to believe in luck, both the bad luck that made them fail, and the good luck that’s
coming to save them.

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.’

I have as much as I have by dint of my own merit, but I have no more than that due to my poor
luck.

I have my moral sunshine, in which my good fortune assures me that God is in charge of
events, and my rainy days, when I know that none but the righteous must suffer as I do.

Many people whine that luck has allotted them such scant pay, but few that it has allotted them
such scant talents. The poor in spirit presume that they would be blissfully happy, if for once
they got what was due to them.

CONSOLATIONS

9 Conceit consoles us
Self-regard finds the right words to soothe us for all our humiliations. We brazen out most of our
batterings by relying on our essential conceit and our casual distractions. And we live down any
truth by applying the sovereign antidote of our grandiosity. In the wilderness of our neglect
angels come and minister to our self-belief.

Why strive to get gaunt wisdom with toil, when you can have plump conceit with ease? A sage
would need to work for a lifetime to win the self-possession that smug people have by birth. We
set up our vanity in the seat where our sagacity ought to be, and how much more competently it
does the job.

10 The kindness of conceit

Our conceit is our staunchest guard, our kindliest nurse, and our most persuasive pleader.

Who is so poor that they can’t keep up an exorbitant estimate of their own value?

People’s false pride, which assures them that they deserve the best, tells them that they have
got it. It turns their life into one long victory lap. The clapping deafens them, even if they’ve
pressed just a few bored stragglers to sit and watch them in the grandstand. We stride from one
conquest to the next, to find at the last that each day we have been surrendering a portion more
to death. What triumphant nobodies we are.

Some people are ballasted by the freight of their self-importance, and are buoyed up by their
expansive self-delight. Kept afloat by their swollen self-opinion, they don’t drown, but don’t see
that they need to be saved. They are so light and hollow that nothing can sink them.

Vanity gives its possessor an ease and assurance which mere good looks or talent could never
provide.

11 Vanity the tormenting comforter

Touchy conceit is the self’s skin, so easy to wound, yet insulating us from scores of wounds.
Our self-belief is the part of us that’s most prone to blister but speediest to heal. ‘I’ve never any
pity for conceited people,’ wrote George Eliot, ‘because I think they carry their comfort about
with them.’ My faith in my own worth solaces me for my inveterate mortifying failure to cajole
others to share it.

Vanity brings on us the hurts that our vanity salves us for. It advises us erroneously, but tends
us compassionately. It’s an erring counsellor, but an infallible consoler. It is both our punishment
and our exceeding great reward.

If we felt less need to think so well of ourselves, we might be more content. And yet if we
thought less well of ourselves, we would have no grounds to be content at all.

Self-love fells some like a blow, but sustains most like an unfaltering faith. Though ravishing
some, it desolates others. Like the fabled divine charity, it strips these bare, and leaves them
with nothing to clothe them but their egoism. It contents some like an untroubled marriage, but
buffets others like a squally romance. In our self-adoration most of us love not wisely but too
well.

12 Bittersweet vanity
Our conceit sweetens or curdles all that we feel. It may assuage our pains, but it poisons our
joys. It both intoxicates and embitters us, rendering some of us serene and others savage.
Though maddening some, it mollifies others. ‘The golden fleece of self-love,’ Nietzsche writes,
‘is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.’ It makes some respected, and some
ridiculous. Pride binds up the wounds that our pride inflicts on us, and finds a balm for most of
the disorders to which it predisposes us.
We are our own scourge and our own salve. Self is both our curse and cure. The worst
punishments are those that we bring on our own heads, perhaps because no one else knows us
so badly.

Some people are always pleased with their milieu, since it is a proof of how good they are. And
some are always displeased with it, since it can never be good enough for them.

Some people love with their hopes, and some with their fears. And in the same way some love
themselves with their hopes, and they strive and swagger, while those who do so with their
forebodings flinch and hang back.

DEPENDENCE

13 Dependent conceit
Why do we sweat for the pay of the world’s regard, when we could live at ease on the
independent income of our own self-regard?

We are kings of conceit. Yet we all slave for the low world’s good report. Vanity gives us at no
ostensible charge a rich estimate of our own worth, but then binds us to slog like drudges to
keep it up.

Our vanity is as desperate as a beggar, and as complacent as a billionaire.

We are self-centred but not self-sufficient. ‘We seek for knowledge,’ Pascal wrote, ‘to show it off.
So we would never go on a trip if we had no hope to talk of it afterwards.’ For all our selfishness,
don’t we need one more soul at least to share our self-satisfaction and to participate in our
greed? ‘I relish no enjoyment,’ as Montaigne says, ‘if I can’t share it.’

Your conceit may content you, so long as you don’t need a lot of people to share it, or else
assume that they do. I am blest with such high merit, but I am cursed by my need to prove it to
the rest of the world.

14 Our shared self-love

We have not slaked our self-love, till we have found another to partake in it, another’s eyes into
which we can gaze and glimpse our own bright reflection. I spend my days in the search for
some cause to have faith in and some soul to have faith in me, who will tell me that people like
me deserve the world’s love and admiration. Pious people find both in the Lord.

Most people need no larger idol than their own success, especially when they make it out to be
so much larger than it is. But they still need a few fellow-worshippers at their shrine.
15 Vanity shows too little self-respect
The conceited may have too little pride, but the proud still have no end of conceit. ‘To be vain,’
as Swift points out, ‘is rather a mark of humility than pride.’

Many of us are less modest or less proud than we seem, but none are less conceited. No one
has too little self-esteem. But it may be that all of us have too little self-respect.

Narcissists suffer from a deficit of self. It is not their self but their mirrors that they are in love
with. And they need to circle themselves with as many of these as they can, to show them that
their self is real and rounded.

Some people set such a high value on themselves, not so much because they overrate what
they are, but because they underrate what they might be. They think too highly of what they are
to be modest, but they don’t think highly enough of what they might be to be proud. They shoot
at such a low mark, how could they fail to hit it?

16 We can’t see our own vanity

None but the most high-minded people have the modesty to grasp how immodest they are.
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 are too vain of what we are, but we lack the
vision 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.’

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 inspired most of our deeds.
Something in the style of our own egoism assures us that we are not egoists.

We agree with Pope, that pride is ‘the never-failing vice of fools.’ And since we know that we are
no fools, we conclude that neither are we proud.

I can’t break the grip of my egoism which stings me to act with such ruthlessness. But I can no
more conceive the rare feats that might prove my right to my ambitions.
PRAISE

Contents

Corrupted praise

Self-regarding praise

Flattery

CORRUPTED PRAISE

1 All for praise

If people weren’t so thirsty for praise, they would do far fewer stupid or desperate things. But
would they do any great ones? ‘Nine tenths of the work of the world is done by it,’ as William
James notes.

Why be Caesar, if not to be admired? Yet what’s the good of being admired by anyone less than
Caesar? Conceited people crave praise from those of whom they value nothing but the praise
that they give them. And the proud crave praise from those of whom they value not so much as
that. Yet each of us is keen to tell our name, as Dickinson put it, ‘to an admiring bog.’

Praise is like the rest of our possessions. The praise that we have won buoys us up, but we
don’t think much about it, and it fails to satisfy us. It’s the praise that we hope to win that fills our
minds and keeps us on the go.

2 Fame
Most people have no need to become famous, since they feel as if they already were.

There’s no one who isn’t a household name in at least one or two households.

I am content with my lowly 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 feel at peace
with our lot.

We don’t know ourselves, so why do we long to be known in fame by those who know neither
themselves nor us?
No doubt it is absurd to seek our true good outside ourselves in the regard of people who don’t
know us and are so full of error. But is it any less absurd to seek it within ourselves in our own
self-regard, when we don’t know ourselves and are so full of error? As Montaigne says, ‘to stay
inside ourselves is to take up the worst place of all.’

None are more heedful of the transience and futility of fame than the few who have earned a full
measure of it. Their aim is to become a mere memory for men and women who forget.

Why does a celebrity who once enjoyed some faint notoriety seem such a sad nonentity to us
who have had no taste of fame at all?

3 Neglect
Neglect turns some to water, some to fire, and some to stone. It wears down the will of some,
enkindles others to flaming resentment, and some it reduces to a glazed numbness. Witness
Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Melville. ‘Too long a sacrifice,’ as Yeats wrote, ‘can make a stone of
the heart.’

Some people have to tell themselves that they will live posthumously, since the unregarding
world has buried them prematurely.

I resent the world still more for its rightful neglect of me than I do when it neglects me
undeservedly, since I know that its rightful neglect won’t change. On good days I’m vexed that
my work has not received its due. On bad days I fear that it has.

To soothe the ulcer of your bruised obscurity, think what sort of dunces the dizzy world fetes. It
lifts the untalented to such heights of fame, how could its esteem be worth obtaining?

Neglect goads some people to stack up a bonfire of the little that they have in order to strike a
brief flame of attention. They beggar themselves of the penny prudence that might have
rescued them from beggary.

4 We exaggerate praise
The ledger of my self-commendation always shows a profit, since I take much offence that is not
meant, but far more as a compliment.

We feel sure that others esteem us more than they do, though less than they ought to. Our
vanity amplifies both the praise and the calumny that we receive. And though we overprice the
compliments that come to us, they still seem to set our rate too low. ‘None of us,’ Colton says,
‘are so much praised or censured as we think.’
I’m surprised and elated by all applause, but it still comes short of what I looked for. When I’m
made much of, I feel like I’ve been brought to the ridge of some low knoll. It both dizzies and
disappoints me. I am not due this. Am I due no more than this? All toadying takes me in, though
it seldom satisfies me. I have heard it all so many times before done so much more fulsomely by
my own smug self. Twain quipped that compliments ‘embarrass me. I always feel that they have
not said enough.’

5 Praise for the wrong reason

You need to earn the praise that you give as well as the praise that you get. You have to make
yourself worthy of the high works that you commend.

We learn by admiring. So be sure to admire the right things. ‘All understanding,’ Goethe says,
‘starts with admiration.’ Though admiration may fool you with appearances, it is the one road
that might lead you to the truth. You ought to praise either because you understand or in the
hope of understanding. But most of the time we praise because we don’t understand or so that
we won’t have to. Our praise is mere presumption. We are willing to imitate the lazy applause
that all give to acknowledged masterpieces, but not to strain our minds to find out what makes
them worth it.

Unthinking praise wins a name for generosity in this self-congratulatory world, while cool
comprehension plies its plain justice in vain. As Pope wrote, ‘Fools admire, but men of sense
approve.’

You should admire as you should read, not much but ardently.

Contempt saves you from wasting your time. And your admirations teach you to use it in the
right way.

6 Fake praise
When you win praise for performing a worthless duty you soon learn that it is well worth
performing.

High-minded people may dine on the praise of a low toady, but they still hunger for an unaging
lustre. As Pascal said, we long to be famous through the whole world. So why is the mouth-
honour of five flunkeys enough to turn our heads?

Fake praise is good enough for me, if I trust it will last. And if a flattering semblance stays fixed,
I’ll be glad to take it for fact.
7 We praise the mediocre
We can make out small and common talents with our own eyes. But we need to be taught to
see great and noteworthy excellencies. We must be trained to discern which are the original
minds by those whose minds are in no way original.

We dote on cheap and second-rate things. But we coldly commend the best, since we love only
what is like us. We voice our awe for what is great because we have no choice. I prefer to
humour slothfully the many who don’t merit it than to do arduous justice to the few who do. We
hug to our hearts the beguiling frauds that have gained the world’s good report. ‘Great talents
and great virtues,’ Chesterfield says, ‘will procure the respect and admiration of mankind, but it
is the lesser talents which must procure you their love and affection.’

Superficial people and exploits stir us to the quick. The second-grade are a necessity, the best a
mere luxury. We judge the best strictly, while we pet and indulge the tawdry and amusing.

People claim to feel awe for great things, though they have no idea why they deserve their awe.
And they may know full well why the poor and broken have a claim on their sympathy, but the
best they can do is sham it.

SELF-REGARDING PRAISE

8 It is ourselves that we praise

Most of us venerate nothing but more successful versions of our own self. Bierce defined
admiration as ‘our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.’ The ideal that I
adore is my own self, corrected and perfected in line with the norms of the age.

What more could you wish for those whom you love than that they should turn out to be like you,
though more fortunate? Parents hope that their children will grow up to be just like themselves
but luckier. And they trust that they will have more luck since they have them as parents. And
they groom them in their own habits of self-adoration and self-torment as the best legacy they
have to pass on. But as most parents go, they are the worst luck you could have.

Procreation is an organism’s way of flattering itself, while rendering its own existence
obsolescent.

9 We praise what is like us

Few of us prize any talents but the ones we believe that we possess. But we all therefore prize
a swag of talents that we don’t possess.
I admire some people because I guess that they are like me. But by admiring them I come to
see that they are not like me in the least. True admiration begins in a false identification of
likeness, but grows to be an astonished delight in difference. But few of us know any higher way
to honour great things than to remould them in our own flawed image. And we think that we do
them homage when we note how like us they are.

We may espy all the traits of those whom we look down on, save how like they are to us.

I choke on the acclamation that I’m obliged to dole out to my rivals. But I lavish praise on those
who are like me, in order to boost the price that my own talents will fetch. ‘We but praise
ourselves in other men,’ as Pope points out. Whether complimenting or complaining, it is always
our own self that we are commending.

10 Self-regarding praise
Some people are sure that their own endorsement of a thing is proof of its worth, or that their
glib inattention to it is enough to show its unimportance. What value can a thing have, if it has
no value for them?

We think well of others on the strength of their accidental attributes, and of ourselves on the
strength of our intrinsic ones. I esteem them in parcels, but deprecate them in their entirety. And
though I may fault some of my own parts, I am never less than enraptured with the whole.

I praise others no more candidly than I criticize myself. And I’m relieved when my sincere
veneration of a person turns out to have been unfounded.

We might be far less warm in our admirations, if we had no chance to hold forth on them. ‘If the
commending others well did not recommend ourselves,’ Halifax wrote, ‘there would be few
panegyrics.’

When I praise, I preen myself on my generosity. And when I censure, I preen myself on my
discrimination.

You can count on people’s admirers to pare them down to size, and in most cases it’s their own
size.

11 Enthusiasm
We daub the plain face of our selfishness with our gaudy idealism. And we have to lay it on
thickest where it’s most unsightly.

Real enthusiasts are foredoomed to discouragement, despair and madness. And they are saved
solely because their zeal is so promiscuous and their illusions so faithful. But two-faced
enthusiasts don’t put a cent of their own funds into their pet ventures. They know how to
manoeuvre their dupes to sink their savings in them. They live on debt, which they don’t own up
to or pay back. And if the price of their object slumps, then it’s the clods who lodged their faith in
it that lose.

Some of our most selfless enthusiasms gain us as much as our most self-seeking schemes
harm us.

Enthusiasm is the virtue of salesmen. It makes them seem big-hearted. They hike the price of
what they hawk, and then convince their chumps that they’ve got a bargain.

Disgruntled supporters may come by and by to be enthusiastic leaders. They learn to praise
their loyal subordinates’ merits, which they poked fun at when they were their peers and
contenders.

FLATTERY

12 Conceit can bear to flatter

My self-regard makes me averse to flattering but desirous of being flattered. And my self-
interest makes me wary of being flattered but willing to flatter. My vanity can’t bear to praise
those who deserve it, but my ambition stoops to applaud those who do not.

How could we bring ourselves to praise the talents of others, if we didn’t think so well of our
own? And we can bear to flatter them because they are not worth flattering.

Some people gild the undeserving in order to show how dull is their clay. How much benign
contempt lurks at the bottom of most compliments. We condescend when we commend.

We are more gratified by a chance to truckle to the great than they are by our truckling.
Vauvenargues notes that, though the prominent are easily flattered, ‘we are still more easily
flattered when in their presence.’

I am so expert in overpraising others, because I have practised so long on myself. But I never
praise them as much as they would like, since I give myself all the praise I like.

13 Disguise your flattery

To flatter convincingly, you have to stay so far from the object of your homage that it is not
subject to your reason, or so close that your self-interest is subject to it.

You must disguise your fawning, first from those you pay court to, so as not to rouse their
distrust, then from your rivals, who would grudge you getting the start of them, and lastly from
your own eyes, since it would make you blush to see what a spaniel you are. My flattery of
others fools me as much as it does them.

Flattery, like fornication, can be decently done only in private between no more than two people.

Those who praise generously look jealously on their rivals when they try to do the same. ‘There
is,’ Renard wrote, ‘jealousy in admiration as there is in love.’

There’s no need to make your truckling too subtle, since most people’s appetite for it is so
gross. And yet you still have to use some tact to serve it up in the form that they find most
flavoursome. And you need a good deal of empathy to know how to flatter people in just the way
they want.

14 Self-flattery
Self’s the vilest toady of all, the ‘arch flatterer,’ as Bacon designated it. Each of us keeps a little
court of fawners in constant session in our heads, who cry up all that we do. We praise our own
selves so inventively yet so effortlessly, so variously yet so repetitively. Our self-flattery is
fantastic but unimaginative.

How could we see through the rare and mild flattery that others deal us, when we don’t see
through our own much grosser self-flattery?

We live inside a bubble blown by our own self-praise.

Even the most dim-witted people are never at a loss for clever pretexts on which to preen
themselves.

Even in others we find self-flattery more attractive than self-knowledge.

Other people’s mirrors seem more impartial and unflattering. But our own have learnt to reflect
back the image of ourselves that we want to see. How did we teach them? And there are no
more gratifying mirrors than our friends or spouse. ‘Whenever they can,’ Pessoa wrote, ‘they sit
opposite a mirror. While talking to us, they look at themselves with infatuated eyes.’

Even the few who tastefully understate everything else grossly overstate their own success. And
the unctuous terms that are so ridiculous when applied to others seem just and modest in our
own case.

The sole thing that no one makes too much of is the world’s indifference to themselves.

15 Vanity and praise

Angling for praise, I find that I’m caught in a snare of small achievements.
The fortunate, who have always had such a sufficiency of adulation, quaff it down like water. But
a bare thimbleful befuddles the inconspicuous like wine.

Those who give themselves the most unreserved praise still need to get the most praise from
us. Why do we assume that those who crave praise must be gnawed by self-doubt, or that a
narcissist must be lacking in self-esteem, or that braggarts feel insecure, or that fanatics are
prey to incertitude, or that the self-righteous are racked by their own guilt, or that ingrates feel
overburdened by their debts, or that executioners are traumatized by the atrocities they commit?
If only they were.

I’m never more rapt with the human race than when I’m intoxicated. And I’m seldom so
intoxicated as when I’ve been plied with a draught of cheap praise.

The braying of an ass sounds as sweet as the chant of the sirens so long as it is commending
me, though none but the most unfaltering hero can listen to it and not come to rack.

16 Grudging praise
I think less of others when I flatter them. Yet when they flatter me I think more of myself. I’m
sure that they are slow to commend me because their commendation is forced from them by my
real merit. But I’m slow to compliment them since my compliments are extorted by mere
courtesy. Their praise of me is as grudging as my praise of them is gratuitous. I am loath to give
them praise, since I suspect that they don’t deserve it. But they are loath to give me praise,
because they know that I do. Yet I’m pleased even by plaudits that I sense I have not earned
the right to.

17 I deserve the praise I get

I love to receive flattery, since I know that it tells the truth, even if the giver disbelieves it. And I
can bear to spoon out flattery, because I know it lies. ‘We give others praise in which we do not
believe,’ said Jean Rostand, ‘on condition that in recompense they give us praise in which we
do.’ People may not be sincere in the applause that they give me, but at least they are right to
give it. And how are they to know that I am due far more than the applause that they give me?
Though I may not trust the praiser, I never doubt the praise. And though I may not swallow all
the praise that I’m served, it tastes so good that I thirst for more.

When people flatter me, I take it that they must know me almost as well as I know myself.
Unfortunately they know me all too well.
18 Credulous self-flattery
‘A man must be a fool indeed,’ Greville wrote, ‘if I think him one at the time he is applauding
me.’ When we win the praise of those whose vision is bleary, we take it that our worth must
shine so resplendently that it gives sight to unseeing eyes. I make much of the perspicuity of
anyone who is perspicuous enough to make much of me. The highest compliment I can pay
anyone is to grant that they have the talent to see how talented I am.

How could I see that people are only flattering me, when their praise sets too low a value on my
real worth?

A flatterer pretends to think better of you than you pretend to think of yourself, but knows you
better than you think you know yourself. The demagogue works in just such a way.

Drop a small hint, and your mark will crouch to pick up a big compliment. By flattering them
tepidly, you learn how warmly they flatter themselves.

People are never more candid than when they are flattering themselves, or less convinced than
when they are flattering others. Flattery is the insincerest form of imitation.

19 Flattery is met by self-flattery

We love to learn from experience and flattery, since they don’t ask us to learn anything that we
don’t already know. Why does praise thrill us, when, as La Rochefoucauld points out, it reveals
to us nothing new? I still long to hear a voice other than my own telling me what I tell myself
each hour of the day. I’m cheaply pleased, since a mere murmur of praise echoes so
thunderously my own hollow self-applause.

My self-flattery is a meal that I never get sick of. But I still like to dine out on praise from others.

Take others as seriously as they take themselves, and you’ve made a good start. Do to them as
they do to themselves. That is to say, fawn, coddle, cosset and fool them. And in order to praise
them, track down what they think of themselves and replay it back to them. As Lawrence wrote,
‘the things that he tells himself are nearly always pleasant, and they are lies.’ Learn to talk to
them as they do to their own heart. Artists do this for us, and we dote on them for lending shape
and grace to our instinctive self-acclaim.

In order to flatter some people, all you need do is shut up and leave the field open for them to
flatter themselves. They’ll lay it on as thick as they like in just the right places.
SHAME AND MODESTY

Contents

Pride humiliates

Modesty

Humility

Shame and guilt

PRIDE HUMILIATES

1 Our pride puts us to shame

Some people’s pride is good for nothing but to find the best way to make fools of them. I am
often put to shame, but I’m not much chastened. And though my pride humiliates me time and
again, it never learns humility.

The furthest point of pride comes close to self-contempt, where pride judges that its possessor
falls short of its own high standard. False pride is proof against such shame.

Some people are so anxious to fill embarrassing silences, that they keep embarrassing
themselves by jabbering nonsense.

Pride, like a madcap billionaire, would be insolvent in a few days, if he didn’t appoint discretion
to be his steward. He is a potent monarch but a bumbling captain, who must hand on the
command of his feuds to temperance and astuteness.

Some people are so uncomfortably proud that they can’t feel at ease with you, till they have put
themselves to shame in front of you, and have no more to lose.

What embarrassing get-ups our vanity tempts us to put on.

2 Ridiculous dignity
How ludicrous I make myself by trying so hard not to seem so. If you don’t want to look
ridiculous, learn to be laughed at with a good grace.
How much of my dignity I forfeit by striving so clamorously to assert it. ‘Honour,’ Aristotle said,
‘does not consist in possessing a good name, but in deserving it.’ And when I press my claims
to it, I show that I don’t deserve it.

We must each work out our own rank with fear and trembling. Like Raskolnikov, we must show
that we have the right to our post by brusquely commandeering it. But most of us by doing so
prove that we don’t.

Dignity is just the solemn face of plodding self-importance. It is the swollen gravity of a
ponderous and inert body. ‘Gravity is of the very essence of imposture,’ as Shaftesbury wrote.

Some people are so proud that they have to act as if they were vexed by their own success in
order to veil their ebullience. And when embarrassed, they try to scarf it by pretending to be
elated. They need to work up their affectations, since they blush to seem so affected.

Some fools want to prove that they are more than just plain fools, and so by indulging their
pretensions they make themselves ridiculous as well.

3 The insulted
By endeavouring to redress an immaterial or fancied slight, some people heap a pile of real
ignominy on their heads. How egregiously they dishonour themselves, to avoid incurring the
dishonour which they scarcely seem to feel.

Some people smart at the most venial affront, yet fail to spot any but the grossest libel. They
fear all the time that they’re being defamed, yet they fail to scent real disrespect. Having
painlessly digested humiliations that should poison them, their gorge rises at the most
unoffending jibe. They bleed at the least snub, but sturdily brazen out the most cutting discredit.

If I had more pride, I might not bristle at such small slurs.

The blows that fell us are those that lower us in the eyes of others.

4 Mad consistency ends in shame

Life is so humdrum. Yet now and then it turns shabbily operatic, and tempts me to improvise
some bogus role which my pride then forbids me to give up. I hope to prove that I’m not playing
a part by continuing to play it in the same vein. What laughable airs I have to put on, in order to
appear as if I were behaving naturally.

Some proud people would have you believe that they were all the while purposing to do the very
thing that exigencies have forced them to do, or else that they are behaving on impulse when
they have in fact computed minutely how the world will view their acts. They become the
captives of chance, in order to prove that they are free. And they make fools of themselves by
pretending that they don’t mind what others think of them.

Some people own up to their blunders in order to prove that they don’t mean a thing to them, or
else they persevere in them for the same reason. They put themselves to shame by persisting
in the pranks and japes that have shamed them, in order to show that they have not. So they
hope to hide that they have gone wrong by continuing to go wrong in the same way. Thus they
exacerbate small indiscretions into grand calamities. They fancy that if they behave with
unswerving absurdity, no one will notice how absurdly they are behaving.

MODESTY

5 Modesty
Modesty is not a virtue. It is good taste or good tactics.

Most people are as self-effacing as they have to be. But they are as pretentious as they can get
away with.

Shrewd climbers speak reticently of the success they have gained, to screen how insistently
they sought it.

By observing people who do modest jobs with an unselfconscious grace we can learn to bear
our own dull lot. But the largeness of a great mind might also go close to reconciling you to your
own littleness.

Most of us pretend to be meek from prudence and good policy. But some do so out of a
circuitous pride. I speak bashfully so as to savour my strength in overmastering or
underestimating myself. And I take pleasure in my icy strictness when I judge my efforts so
astringently.

Some proud people put on a front of modesty, to show how far they are above what they are
prized for, and how cheap they count most praise. They decline some plaudits, since they know
how valueless they are. And they class their worth so much higher than most people’s, that they
feel no call to boast to them. They parry compliments which they feel fail to do full justice to their
vast talents.

6 The vanity of modesty

I am ashamed to expose my pride, but I am proud to flaunt my meekness. Watch out that you
don’t overplay your lowliness, lest others spot how haughtily you rate yourself.
Those who are genuinely modest are chary of advertising their modesty, since they are loath to
draw attention to it. But the falsely demure turn down praise that has not even been proffered to
them. The winding trail of their humility leads straight to their pride. ‘All censure of a man’s self
is oblique praise,’ as Johnson wrote.

Few people use modesty as a hook to fish for compliments. Most just scoop them up in the
dragnet of their self-flattery.

If you can’t flatter yourself that the world appreciates you, you can at least flatter yourself that it
undervalues you.

Even unfeignedly modest people take themselves more seriously than you could guess. ‘The
most humble,’ Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, ‘think better of themselves than their best friends think
of them.’

7 Modesty overvalues itself

Some people have to overdo their humility, since they overrate their success. The vastness of
their exploits shocks them into modesty. They feel obligated to ascribe it modestly to luck or to
the gift of God. So they prank up their self-worship as gratitude to some superhuman source.

Some people may strike you as modest, since they seem so content with their small and
peripheral post. But they are awestruck that they have arrived at the centre and have done so
much. They owe both their modesty and their vanity to their low horizons.

I know my place so well, that I am the hub of the world, that I feel that others ought to know
theirs too, that they are not. So how is their sight so clouded, when I see so clearly?

All of us are modest, since none of us is quite so mad as to let slip how well we think of our own
merits, because we know that the world is too foolish to share our view. I take care not to boast
to those who might not agree with me, or to run myself down to those who might. ‘We find it
easy to reprimand ourselves on one condition,’ says Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘so long as no one
else concurs with us.’

Many people feel that they have no need to brag, but they think that others still need to hear of
their phenomenal success.

Some people will go to a world of trouble to prove to others that they have nothing to prove.

8 Shame and self-deprecation

Pride prods some people to flaunt themselves, and some, like T. E. Lawrence, to bury
themselves. Some who lust to be noticed still long to be anonymous, ‘the world forgetting, by
the world forgot,’ as Pope phrased it. Infected with a fever for renown, they find relief in dreams
of obscurity. And though they may be glad to stay in the shade, they still begrudge others when
they shine.

Hermits dream of adoring crowds who wait at the mouth of their cave to hear the world-
redeeming wisdom which they have gleaned in their retreat.

Some people are so proud that they refuse to laugh at their own foibles. And others are so sure
of themselves that they are always game to. Pity those who have no one to contest their
compulsory self-deprecation.

Season your boasts with a spoonful of self-deprecation, and most people will swallow them
whole.

How obscenely our natural self-belief shows through our skimpy and synthetic modesty.

9 The pride of shyness

Some people who seem inordinately proud are just excessively shy. But most of those who
seem uncommonly shy still nestle an overgrown pride in their breast. They curl up into shyness,
not because they doubt their own gifts, but because they don’t trust the world to grasp how
remarkable they are. They may seem to be uncertain of their own talents, but they in fact
suspect that the world is too unwise to do them justice. When they drop their guard, they don’t
let show their submerged diffidence, but lay bare their buoyant vainglory. Give them the
occasion, and their conceit will more than rise to it. And any occasion will do.

10 The insincerity of modesty

Our modesty is fake, but we love to flaunt it. And our conceit is sincere, but we sense we have
to hide it.

I think that others ought to be modest, but that they only fake it, whereas I really am modest, but
ought not be. We don’t believe what our modesty makes us say. And that is precisely why we
do believe that we are modest. If modesty were sincere, it would not be modesty.

I trust that people will discern that I am unreservedly but mistakenly meek. So I want them to
doubt what my forced humility feigns to believe, and yet still see that I am humble at heart. I am
convinced by my own self-effacement, but I trust that others won’t be. This is the one pose of
mine that I hope they will have the wit to see through. I count on them to read between the lines
of my lowliness, and I’m chagrined when they take it literally. ‘He who speaks humbly of
himself,’ wrote Multatuli, ‘grows angry if you believe him and furious if you pass on what he
says.’
I presume that my meekness will make people see how much they have underestimated me.
But unfortunately I overestimate how insightful they are.

True humility would be the death of any living thing. And yet society could not go on, if most of
us did not keep up a false show of it.

HUMILITY

11 Inhuman humility
A creature that was genuinely self-effacing would straightway cease to exist. How could it dare
to claim for its own use a mere breath of air? Even if my pride failed to trounce my humility in a
frontal assault, my greed would still overrun it in its inexorable march.

We may not believe that we are the most important beings in the world, but each of our desires
drives us to act as if we were.

A person who was truly selfless would be an object of contempt to all. They would be so put
upon, that their soul would soon corrode, and they would be eaten up by spite, misanthropy and
suspicion. And they would be of no more use to us than they are to themselves. We think that
they ought to be unselfish towards us and selfish towards the rest of the world on our behalf.

12 Assumed humility
The one kind of humility that we think much of is the kind that makes much of us.

I trust that unimportant people will be meek, but I overrate their meekness, as they overrate their
importance. I think too well of them when I judge them to be modest, and they think so well of
themselves that they are not.

We deem that obscure people ought to be modest, seeing that they are so obscure. And we
deem that the great ought to be modest, seeing that they are so great. We think that the first
have nothing to boast of and that the second should have no need to boast. But when did that
ever stop anyone?

13 Pride’s grotesque perversion

Humility is one of pride’s most grotesque perversions. It is conceit flattering itself that it can
mortify itself. Would-be saints, like Tolstoy or Weil, who are racked by their inordinate pride,
trust that they can harrow their hearts into self-abasement. Their itch to mortify their pride is a
clear symptom of its gross inflammation.
If I were to knock down the high tower of my pride, I would have to use the tools of pride to do it.
And when it was done, I would take a fiend’s pride in my work.

I don’t doubt that there must be a horde of humble people, since I know that I at least am one.

Nothing beats the presumption of the lowly soul which can conceive of nothing more exalted
and commendable than a lowly soul. They are all the time bragging to God about how meek
they are.

How do humble people dare to assert that humility is a duty, and expect all the rest of us to
emulate their own laudable lowness? They presume that the great must be as meek as they
are. ‘One law for the lion and ox is oppression,’ as Blake wrote. Isn’t it better to do great things
and not be modest than to be modest and lose the power to do great things? ‘Humility to
genius,’ Shenstone wrote, ‘is as an extinguisher to a candle.’

14 We don’t doubt ourselves

‘No cause,’ Johnson said, ‘more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of
our own importance.’ Some people’s very self-conceit leads them to put on an unneeded
diffidence. They make too much of the difficulties of doing a thing, since they make too much of
its size and significance. And they make too much of its size and significance, since they make
too much of their own.

Those who look dubiously at the rest of the world still trust steadfastly in their own integrity. And
those who suspect all appearances still have faith in their own feigning. My overall scepticism
steels my belief in myself. But even those who never have a doubt of their worth still need to
give new proof of it each day.

Most of us mistrust completely anyone who would tempt us to mistrust ourselves a touch.

I shun those who seem stricken with self-doubt, for fear that it may be catching, though I have
not shown any signs of it myself.

SHAME AND GUILT

15 The pride of shame

Nothing but love or self-love is strong enough to win out against shame.

People as a rule are at least a little proud of anything of which they say they are ashamed. Or if
they are not, they are proud of being ashamed of it.

Any slander can be borne with, save one that all know to be true.
Your hearers will be willing to wink at most of your faux pas, so long as you don’t blurt out the
truth, since this would spatter them with as much mud as it does you.

My shame flatters me. I glory in the gash that it makes in my pride.

Who would not prefer to shoulder a world of shames than grant that they have called them down
on their own heads? Pride, having pricked me to act inexcusably, then robs me of all my
excuses.

Shame is a competitive imaginist, which vies with its rivals to live up to some socially sanctioned
pattern of perfection.

Shame tells you to conform, and it tempts you to rebel. It varies with all the various mores that it
hedges. And it shifts in what it prohibits or prescribes. It may make you mild or make you a
monster. It might tell you to slit your own wrists or to assassinate an enemy.

16 Shame and guilt

Shame can inhibit you or incite you. It may make you brazenly own up to your faults or brazenly
deny them. It may stay you from doing wrong, but it will bind you to requite small insults by the
most disproportionate means.

Shame is shallower than guilt, and so sticks faster in us. ‘It is easier to cope with a bad
conscience than a bad reputation,’ as Nietzsche points out.

No one lacks a good conscience. What we crave is the good opinion of others.

It is not our sins but our failures that prick our conscience. And so in order to soothe it, we
blame the sins of others and try to besmear them with as much shame as we can.

Even the most devout people dread the condemnation of an unknowing by-stander more than
that of an all-seeing God.

We don’t blush to do in God’s sight the indecorous acts that we would squirm to have witnessed
by the world. And he doesn’t blush to be privy to them.

Guilt torments, but shame prevents. Guilt may sting you, but it won’t stop you.

Shame may warn you not to do real harm, but embarrassment will hold you back from doing
positive good.

17 Shame and embarrassment

Embarrassment may spread like a blush over a whole life.
Egoism makes some people proof against shame, and others all too prone to it.

I’m mortified by the least frailties which should in no way embarrass me, and I’m far less
embarrassed by more grievous ones which should. The smallest misstep might abash us, yet so
few things shame us.

In most cases, the person who is making an ass of himself is not at all put out. It’s the onlookers
who cringe on his behalf.

Bashfulness is shame’s tender infancy, in which you wince at each slight graze to your social
self, before you’ve had time to grow the tough hide of your self-assurance.

Embarrassment is to shame what vanity is to pride. They are shallow lakes, more readily stirred
up than the deep sea.
WORK AND INDEPENDENCE

Contents

Servitude

Self-reliance

True pride

Admiration and imagination

SERVITUDE

1 Servitude and independence

People resent restraint, but they don’t want to be free. And though they chafe at duress, they all
need to find some person or some cause to depend on. They cast off the encumbrance of
choice, though they still hit back at those who would dare to take it from them. They are born
rebels, because they are born serfs. And they long for liberty only with a view to selecting their
preferred kind of subjection. They know neither what it is to be truly free nor what it would be to
serve loyally. They are content to sell their independence, but they scratch and claw at those
who would come between them and their borrowed wants.

Those who drudge as lackeys of their own despotic compulsions scream if others lay the least
curb on them.

We submit with alacrity to a servitude which is real, present and enduring, in order to win a
release which is distant, ephemeral and fake. ‘All ran headlong to their chains,’ as Rousseau
wrote, ‘in the hope of securing their liberty.’

Why do subservient people make a footstool of themselves, and then squeal when their masters
plant their feet on them? Some who bite the hand that feeds them are glad to lick the fist that
beats them.

2 The willing slaves of avarice

Slavery has oftentimes been more galling, but when has it ever been more willing? Proud of our
servitude, we pity those who lack a place in the system of subordination. We seek relief from all
our ills in a more highly paid serfdom. What most of us yearn for is not liberty but a more
lucrative yoke.

Our wages plate our chains with gold. ‘Most things free-born,’ as Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘will
submit to anything for a salary.’ We love our gilded collar, and every morning we put it on with
pride. ‘Inside the coop where he’ll stay till he’s killed,’ Pessoa wrote, ‘the rooster sings anthems
to liberty because he was given two roosts.’ Our desires imprison us, and we hope to win our
freedom by appeasing them. ‘We must,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘make our election between economy
and liberty, or profusion and servitude.’ But who these days would choose a rugged freedom
that could profit just as well from an affluent vassalage?

3 Time, money and independence

We spend too much time working to make money in order to buy things that are not worth the
time that we spend on them. ‘Money,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘often costs too much.’ Few wares are
worth the days and hours that we have to waste to earn the cash to buy them. But we can’t
resist the lure of wealth since there’s no more enviable way to use up the time that we take to
get and spend it.

People waste no end of time doing what they would not do if they had to pay for it. And they pay
large sums of money to lay hold of what they would not care for if it came free. It would bore
them to spend much time contemplating a piece of scenery which they would be glad to waste
half their life labouring to buy.

A noble soul hates slavery more than death. But we love our sumptuous slavery more than life.

4 Importance or independence
We are urged on by a servile self-regard and a busy futility. We are cringing but not humble.
Though we cling to our self-importance, we cede our self-reliance.

Why are the haughtiest people so proud to serve a world that is not worth mastering? They
need to have the courage to grapple with the world, because they lack the self-control to
withdraw from it. The brave must come to craven accommodations with the world, since they
are too weak to rout their lust to dominate it.

5 We want indispensability not independence

Those who have no work of their own are keen to serve as the tools of others. They strive to
make themselves indispensable because they are slaves to their own ambition, and they do so
by enslaving themselves to the ambitions of others.
We have made life rushed and bustling enough to match our sense of our own centrality. The
hardest burdens to lay down are the ones that break our backs. We are all now as busy and
indispensable as cabinet-ministers, overseeing our broad portfolio of vital interests.

6 Independence and the bondage of work

Labour, the inveterate demeaning curse of the many, has become just as much the vaunt of the
few. And we now honour it, since we have no choice but to do it.

Paid work prostitutes your real vocation. True work ennobles, but employment degrades. But we
can now see no difference between a calling and a career. ‘All paid posts,’ Aristotle said,
‘absorb and demean the mind.’ They make stupid people more clever and cunning, but
intelligent people more stupid and abject.

Where all careers are open to talent, the old vocations that were pursued as ends will be
reduced to careers. And those that can’t be reduced to careers will die off.

To hire out one’s body is the dishonourable deed of a prostitute. To hire out one’s mind is the
respectable job of a bourgeois.

Work for the joy of the work, not for its wages. If you have to be paid to do it, then it can’t be
worth the doing, but only worth the pay. Yet people who work for pay spurn those who work for
love as idlers or fools.

Labouring for others does not alienate you. It integrates you. And it’s your alienation that might
have forced you to rely on your own resources, and fired you to find your path to the truth.

The devil finds hands for idle work.

Hard work is the refuge of the intellectually unemployed.

7 Independence and your true work

Do what the world wants, and you will become indispensable and make what is dull. Do what
your spirit demands of you, and you will grow superfluous and may create what is priceless.
Working for pay will fritter away your life, your true work will ravage it.

You know you may be doing something worth your while if no one else can see the point of your
doing it. And you may be on the right track, if all are aghast at where it has led you. In labouring
uselessly you find your true calling.

The world is keen to get from you the dull services that anyone else could have done for it. But it
has no use for the precious things that no one else could give it. All it wants from you is some
cheap means to advantage it or some cheap toy to amuse it. It won’t know what to make of
what no one but you could make.

You need a great deal of leisure if you are to get your proper work done. But most of us now live
life so fast, that we can’t shape what might outlast it. As Kraus notes, democracy ‘makes no
provision for those who have no time to work.’

8 Independence or pay
We are too undisciplined to keep to what we need, and too impatient for quick returns to reach
for the steep and arduous essential. We want to pluck the fruit before it’s ripe. The meaning of
our work is the prizes that it wins.

These days it’s only the most destitute who can afford not to work. And they alone are
condemned to bear the ennui and reproach of leisure.

We are now so rich, that everyone must work, and everything must pay.

Even professors who seem to have their heads in the clouds know to an inch the height of the
chairs on which their backsides are perched relative to their peers.

How ridiculous true devotion now seems. To let all those rich rewards go begging, and waste all
that time on what yields no pay.

Few regret the path that they have chosen. What we resent is that we have been paid so poorly
for following it.

The world will pay you abundantly so long as you consent to waste your life. And when it pays
the plodding such high fees, as it does now, what sense is there in aspiring to do a great work?

9 Act without thought for the fruits of action

The rest of us work for our living, artists must work for their lives.

Even the luminous moment wins its worth only by being transfigured into the hard lustre of a
lasting work. And even the richest interior life gains its value only by virtue of the forms in which
it externalizes itself.

Your own work is always easy. And if it’s not easy, then it’s not yours. If you find it hard, you
have not yet hit on your true calling. ‘All that is good is effortless,’ Nietzsche said. ‘What is divine
runs with light feet.’ With no strain Ulysses strings the bow, Aeneas plucks the bough of gold,
and Arthur draws the sword from the stone.
10 The rewards of vocation
High aims 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?

The self-spending that makes some of us futile makes others fertile.

What worthier end can we aspire to than a grand futility? How glorious of the easter islanders to
squander it all and leave some marvel for the time to come, rather than live on soberly bereft of
a name. How fine, to take your life in your hands, and fling it at the stars. What matter that the
violin will soon be smashed, so long as it has played the one blest hour of immortal music it was
made for. Better to blaze for an instant than to sputter for an age.

You can make a full and happy life out of a studied futility. Dickinson toiled for twenty queenly
years to shape her songs, which she felt sure no one would hear.

11 The reward of despair

Heroes 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.

Is it worse to die with your work unfinished, or to live on to see how it has failed?

I work, at first in the hope of defeating my futility, but then just to deflect my thoughts from it.

12 Between the aspiration and the achievement

It is a fearful thing to fall into the abyss of your own shallowness, and to be crushed by the
weight of your inanity, to have the will but not the talent to do great things, to stand in awe of the
best and to know that you will never be good enough, to hold that the work is all in all and to see
that your own work is nothing at all. ‘No fate is more dismal,’ Vauvenargues wrote, ‘than to have
grand aspirations but not the calibre to carry them out.’ I’m sure that I have suffered enough to
make some rare work. But not the least of my sufferings has been that I lacked the talent to
make it.

Between what we dreamt we might have been and what we know we are lies the urgent
nightmare in which we live and strive to prove our worth. ‘There is not a fiercer hell,’ Keats
wrote, ‘than failure in a great object.’

The most bitter martyrdom is to give your best and find that no one wants it. And the truly
cursed are those who feel not only the pain of their afflictions but their futility. But our misery is
almost as good as our joy at concealing from us its pointlessness.

13 The heroic ego

‘Egoism,’ as Nietzsche said, ‘is the lifeblood of a grand soul,’ though this is no less true of a
small soul. Noble minds have the most unflinching dedication and the coldest contempt of
rewards. They are thrust on by a fiery pride, and kept in order by a chill aloofness. They don’t
care how dear a deed might cost or how much it will pay, but what its true worth is.

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 cling to 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.

SELF-RELIANCE

14 Time and independence

The rich still own lots of room, but now brag that they have less time than the poor. They used
to be proud of possessing more leisure than the rest of us. Now they are proud to be so short of
it.

The poor must sell their time, since they have nothing else to sell. And now the rich are just as
eager to sell theirs, since they have nothing better to do with it.

We value money far dearer than time, since there’s no way that we can make a great deal more
time than our peers or show it off to them. Our time is our own, and so it’s scarcely real. Wealth
gains its worth and reality by being paraded before others. Time is an intrinsic good, and is
therefore of far less value than wealth, which is a status-marker.
The right use of money is to buy more time. But we have so little use for our time that the best
we can do with it is to try to make more money.

15 Leisure is independence
True leisure is a full-time job. It is not a hiatus in which you rest so that you can do more work. It
is the purpose of life, not a means. But capitalism has smashed the social structures, stable
classes, standards of taste, sense of vocation, ideals of duty and service, and concept of time
and speed which were necessary to keep it up.

In a culture that puts a high value on leisure, few have the means to share in it. And where all
have the means to share in it, no one will value it much.

Those who believe that the only work worth doing is the work that is paid can think of nothing
better to do with their leisure than to pay to be amused. In a world in which all must have its use,
the only superfluous thing we have time for is fun.

We may be adult and efficient in our job, but we regress to childhood in our pleasures.

Drones and rentiers have been responsible for nine tenths of the great work of culture.

16 Wealth eats our independence

Freedom belongs to the dimension of time, greed belongs to the dimension of space. So we are
glad to waste our time in order to acquire or tour through more space.

Why do we let our greed poach from us the hours which are the sole good that we can call our
own? As Montaigne points out, ‘We are never so profligate than with the very things over which
avarice would be useful and laudable.’ We are now paid so well for our labour, how could any of
us take the time to indulge in leisure?

In order to make each of us rich enough to enjoy cultivated leisure and be free of squalid
material needs, every aspect of life had to be turned into a machine for making money, in which
no one sets any value on cultivated leisure and each of us must keep slaving to fill our
superfluous material wants. A society that has all the money it needs in order to do what it likes
will find nothing better to do than to make more money. ‘Increased means and increased
leisure,’ according to Disraeli, ‘are the two civilizers of man.’ But we have sold our leisure to add
to our means.

17 Independence of means and ends

Few of us have independent means, still fewer have independent ends. Some people are as
self-reliant in small things as they are subservient in big ones. They stick obstinately to their own
how, while wantonly misappropriating another’s why. ‘Many are stubborn in following the path
they have picked out,’ as Nietzsche tells us, ‘few in following the goal.’ They are parasites of
purpose. The noble have high aims, which they choose freely, and work at on their own. Allow
anyone else to mark out your goals for you, and you have sold your soul as a willing slave.

Which is crazier, to live for the sake of winning the approval of others, or to dream that you can
live without it? When I try to rely on myself, I rely on the regard of others than those whose
regard I rely on most of the time. And when I try to think for myself, I let myself be fooled by
those who are not the usual ones to fool me.

TRUE PRIDE

18 Heroism
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. And 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. ‘Blessed is he that waiteth.’ They wait but are not
corrupted by their own impatience. They yield to passion without letting go of restraint.

The corpse of archaic heroism stiffened into the rigor mortis of roman stoicism.

19 A hero needs a cause

A hero may fight in a bad cause but not in a small one. In order to be brave they have to
overrate some cause more than the rest of us overrate life.

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.’ Each fateful creed has its heroes, the hateful no less than the honourable, and
the most illegitimate no less than the justified. The SS pullulated with them. The grossest hokum
armed them in a sterling resoluteness.

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 justice.

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?
Some of us fritter away our courage on a fight for a mean cause, since we lack the daring or
clarity to find a deserving one. But there is no escape. A great soul is racked for a great cause.
Small souls are just as badly racked for small ones.

20 The demonic providence of pride

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 pride is lacking, there will be no
truth, no worth, no achievement. And where greed gives out, 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.
‘Take egotism out,’ Emerson says, ‘and you would castrate the benefactors.’

It is in the furnace of perversity or pride that great things take shape. Only the sickest can see
the truth, and only the most insane would dare to speak it.

Truth alone could shame us out of our pride. Yet none but proud souls can pluck up heart to
seek out the truth.

21 Pride must prove its worth

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 like no one else. 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 called on to defend the steep price that they set on their own merits. But they
scorn the common ventures that could prove it to their peers, and so they spend their force on
the rare exploits which fail to.

You win your happiness when you light on some impersonal mission which gives full scope to
your most personal desires. Large achievements are totally egoistic but rise above all self. Life
gains its victories by a ceaseless selfish self-sacrifice. Our devotion draws its force from the
selfish energy with which we fuel it.

22 Redeeming selfishness
We are too weak to shrink our selfishness. So you should strive to make the most capacious
self that you can. Most of us do this arithmetically, by supplementing it with more selves, by our
love of kin, tribe or natal 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. And 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 people who set aside their self-interest in the achieving.

Better to burn the self to a crisp in some arduous and fiery quest, than starve it by a juiceless
and lingering asceticism. It’s not worth effacing, but it is worth expending. Why strain nature to
abnegate a thing so paltry? The self is worth annulling, but not usually for one’s fellow selves.

ADMIRATION AND IMAGINATION

23 Independence and 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. But when distilled as form it shapes the most
delightful 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 doesn’t deserve their admiration. But those
who are on the make can’t afford not to. You learn by genuinely esteeming what merits your
respect. But you please and thrive best by pretending to prize what does not. You rise in the
world by lowering your 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.’

Creators need both the veneration which prompts them to emulate and the daring which spurs
them to deviate. Their task, as Hopkins said, is to ‘admire and do otherwise.’

24 Independence and imagination

The best you can hope to attain is neither true humbleness nor true heroism but a mere
semblance of them. But by aspiring to nobility you may bring off rare feats, whereas when you
try to put on lowliness you stunt your high faculties.
Heroes are self-sufficient people who must keep their gaze glued to the mirror of fame to assure
themselves of their own value.

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. 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. But
the vain preen themselves on what the world takes them for.

Imagination makes the coward as imagination makes a hero. The fainthearted see the threat in
all its horror. But the fearless see the fine figure that they might become by defying it.

Resolute people have both the boldness of mind to glimpse how much they might gain by losing
all and the fortitude to lose it.

Artists sculpt new forms that they imagine. Heroes remodel themselves as an ideal that they
imagine. They must be the sculptors of their own lives. Saints dream that they can turn
themselves into paragons that they take to be real.
VICES

Contents

Two devils

Greed

Corruption

Cowardice

Cruelty

Envy

Revenge

TWO DEVILS

1 Pure vices
It may be true that most virtues are vices in disguise, as La Rochefoucauld showed. But aren’t
many vices merely more costly 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 just so
that I can earn a clerk’s scant pay.

We suspect that the virtues of others are vices in disguise, but that what seem like our vices are
virtues in disguise.

My vices are not pure, though it’s not virtue that contaminates them. When my motives are not
mixed, they are all bad.

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?

Some virtues are closer kin to certain vices than they are to their fellow virtues. Courage has
more in common with violence than with pity. Justice drives us to take vengeance as well as to
give charity. And prudence is nearer to greediness than to generosity.
2 Shut in your devils and parade your angels
When you shut one devil out, you don’t see that you shut another in. And when you bolt the
door to keep out one tempter, it is some other that helps you to hold it closed.

We are fond of parading our virtues where there is least call for them. Irresolute people love to
show off their staunchness where they are not in jeopardy. And mean people love to proffer
what would cost them nothing to give. And the cruel love to flaunt their gratuitous chivalry by
sparing a victim who is sure to be pilloried anyway. We like to give poignant voice to our
gratitude when there is no one in especial that we have to be beholden to.

3 Virtue is a balance of opposing vices

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 greedy to sit idle, too inconstant to nurse a long vendetta. Some of us
have such grave faults, that we need to grow strenuously good in order to get the better of
them. Virtue is a balance of conflicting vices. We don’t hold fast to a single vice because we
give our hearts to such a jostle of them.

The just relish those deeds that meld right and wrong. The wrong wakes their compulsions, and
the right lulls to sleep their watchdog conscience. ‘What we all love,’ wrote Clough, ‘is good
touched up with evil.’

We have to be shamed into virtue, and corrupted into rectitude. ‘So unaccountable is our
predicament,’ Montaigne says, ‘that we are led by vice itself to do good.’

4 The two devils

Two dark angels hold us in their spell. 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, discreet, grasping and well-liked. He keeps you to cautious crimes and cautious
virtues, and bans any kind that strays from the common path. And he warns you not to do
wrong, but abets you in absconding when you do.

The prince of this world advocates none but necessary evil, since he knows that those who
have sold their souls need only be perfectly righteous 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.’ And we think that we are on the side of the angels, because we
keep aloof from all the devils save the one that the world adores.
5 The prince of this world
Even the devil’s disciples are sure that they are doing God’s work.

The Lord may have made our metal, but it’s the fiend 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 all that followed. The Lord made heaven
and earth, but Satan made the world, both the best and the worst of it. God may be the
chairman of the board, but he leaves its day-to-day running to Lucifer, his trusty lieutenant. God
may be a metaphysically necessary being, but to judge from the state of the world, it is the devil
that is more practically necessary. And yet who has not seen enough of sin and cruelty to
believe in the fiend, or enough of our own rapacious race not to need to?

God may have made the world, but it must have been the devil that filled it with life. He is the
god of the living. And he is happy to leave the dead to the good Lord.

God abandoned the world, seeing that his grace was not wanted. And the devil did the same,
seeing that his malice was not needed.

In this world to have God on your side is the next best thing to having the devil. And the
sanctimonious are in the saddle since they have the both of them.

6 Anger
I give way to anger, because I can’t control myself, or in an attempt to control others.

Anger is the screech which naked will emits when it grates 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 have lost the debate. Hold on to your good
humour, and you won’t need to find good reasons.

GREED
7 Greed
Our greed is a calculating insanity.

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 live to serve it. As Johnson said, ‘You never find people labouring to convince you that you
may live happily on a plentiful income.’

People feel an almost religious ardour and voluptuous pleasure in the squalid details of the
things that bring them profit.

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.

Greed will do what it thinks it needs to do in its rage to get what it does not need.

The eye began as the organ of greed, the ear as the organ of fear. Our nose was the organ of
disgust, touch was the sense of love, and taste of deliciousness.

How low people will stoop, if they have some mean gain in view, and some high principle to
serve as a pretext for seeking it.

8 Greed drains life of its meaning

We lose ourselves in our mad haste to gain so much costly trash. We have drained the globe of
meaning by clogging it with objects. Greed fills up each of our lives, and hollows out life as a
whole.

Life leaks away, and we try to bung its holes with dollars and refill it with our bottomless wants.
We boom along trying 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.

Piling up wealth is a waste of life. But so much of life counts for so little, that it could be called a
mere waste of money.

We have cheapened all that is truly precious by subjecting it to the sordid touchstone of wealth.
And so what choice do we have but to sell our souls to get as much of it as we can? When we
can weigh and count everything, 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
seize as much as we can of what is most readily measured.
The whole world is in our hearts. That must be why they are so empty.

9 The false perspective of possession

How vast an object looks when it’s out of your reach. But how soon it shrinks once you’ve got it
in your clutch. I call grapes sour when I fail to obtain them, but would they have tasted so sweet
if I had caught hold of them?

All the things you possess threaten to possess you. Yet you never really own what you have
got.

How jovially I could abjure most of the things that I drool for, if only I were first accorded a great
glut of them. ‘Many disrespect wealth,’ as La Rochefoucauld notes, ‘but few know how to give it
away.’

We tally what we have gained and lost with minute irrationality. I prize a bargain or rue a loss
out of all proportion to the sum I make or lose by it. A skinny but tangible gain or loss weighs
heavier with me than a far bulkier intangible one. My winnings don’t please me half as much as
my deficits grieve me, so it’s lucky that I can eke them out with my boasting. I feel each loss like
an unmerited wound. But I take windfalls for granted as my right.

10 Greed and death

Life is greed, thirsting for one more day, for one more brief taste of sugar.

Consumerism has changed how people feel about death. Now they are not even afraid to die.
They are just too grasping to let go of this life which has given them so little. They seem to be
reborn with each fresh desire. And they feel that they will never die, since there is always one
more want to fulfil. So they no longer fear death as the king of terrors. They merely resent it as
the cessation of all their getting and spending. It cuts short their career of guzzling and
devouring. Life is what is next, and they hate death, because when it comes, nothing at all is
next. But they are too busy cramming their maw to give it much thought.

The smallest joy or the direst misery make us feel that we are never going to die.

Our immortal soul has shrunk to a bustling shopper, bent on reliving its crass fantasies till the
world goes to hell.

11 The brutal solidity of money

We are ghosts striving to devour as much as we can in our rage to gain some substance in this
spectral world.
We hoard like gold nuggets the scum that we have scooped up, since it seems to have so much
more solid actuality than we do ourselves.

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 all
things 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.

12 Satisfaction
We can’t get our fill of our greed. 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. I forge my chains when I choose my iron desires, and these eat
into my soul and rust it.

We bring to the banquet a yawning maw, but neither good 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 you play for a prize that you can’t carry home.

Life yields you such meagre fulfilment, that the best you can do is scramble to get more of what
has failed to fulfil you.

We have no right either to our discontent or to our self-satisfaction. We don’t aim high enough
for either.

When nothing that you get has a value of its own, all you can do is try to get more of it.

13 Greed and nostalgia

Nostalgia, like the rest of our avocations, is now a garnish for our gaping hunger for the bliss
which we hope awaits us. It piques us to find new forms in which to reprise our old pleasures. It
tries to recapture the past by pandering to our lust for more of the crude stuff that we guzzled
then. And it drives us to duplicate in a more opulent form the synthetic sludge that filled our
childish dreams. We grind up all that is good in the world, to paste our lives with gaudy nostalgia
and anecdotes.

We are tethered to the world from the front by all that we can’t stop desiring and from the rear
by all that we can’t help remembering. Our cravings and our memories divide up time between
them, and leave nothing for the present. By living in the past, present and future, we multiply the
dimensions of our misery.
14 Greed the moral controller
In this age it is greed and not God that wards off moral misrule. Avid wants incite us, but also
keep us in order so that we can seize our cut of them. Avariciousness, Tocqueville said of the
americans, ‘disturbs their minds but disciplines their lives.’

Greed is the great peacemaker. What’s the point of keeping up all those old quarrels, if they
don’t make any money?

Moral regeneration trudges like a halting gleaner at the heels of speedily advancing greed. Pity
hobbles in the rear, as avarice strides on to its electric dawn. ‘The greatest meliorator of the
world,’ Emerson says, ‘is selfish, huckstering trade.’

Philanthropy spiritualizes our lust for gain. Grasping individualism thrills to the spectacle of
random and unavailing charity. It throws a sop to our conscience, while leaving in place the
system of privilege from which we are profiting. We dole out charity so that we can withhold
justice.

The dream of do-gooders is to raise the poor to the same level of rapacious affluence as the
rich.

15 Greed the false moralist

Hopeful greed learns to enthuse, and thwarted greed loves to moralize. Sellers must learn to
gush effusively. And those who have got a lower price than they hoped dredge up some moral
law which has been infringed. ‘As soon as one is unhappy,’ Proust says, ‘one grows moral.’ And
by being moral we hope to blight others with our unhappiness. I have money troubles, because
others have moral flaws. I would have more in the bank, if they had more integrity.

The rich have so much wealth, say the poor, that it’s all one whether they gain or lose. And the
poor have so little, think the rich, that it’s all one if they gain or lose. The poor are playing for
such small stakes, and the rich should have no need to win. Yet both will balk at no trick to
boost their odds in the game.

The poor, who can’t afford it, must pay for all that they get. And the rich, who can get all they
want, are too jaded to enjoy it.

The poor can’t see why the rich won’t flick them a few scraps from their vast treasury. And the
strong can’t see why the weak don’t just die and leave the world to them who have the strength
to make use of it.
16 Justifying greed
We chatter about our aspirations, but we mean our avarice. Our dreams garnish our greed, and
our greed gives body to our dreams. And we keep spawning more and more exorbitant fancies,
to justify our sharp-toothed voracity.

We have to keep multiplying our wants so as to give some purpose to our vast wealth. And we
need to keep adding to our desires, because we have to find some pretext for piling up all that
wealth that we don’t need. What was all that frantic accumulation for, if we could have satisfied
our needs with so much less trouble?

17 Love and money

Constant in our selfishness, we grow inconstant to one another. How wantonly we wound the
hearts of those we love, in our hunger to glut our own with the coarse stuffs which won’t content
us anyway. We are always gazing past them to some gaudy toy that we hope to grab. They
don’t ask much from us, and we are loath to give them even that. We could so easily make them
happy, but we are too busy doing what will make us unhappy. And all the small things that we
withheld from them come back to haunt us when they are gone.

18 The addiction of avarice

Money addicts us but fails to intoxicate us. I dread to lose the things that it gave me no joy to
own. ‘Riches,’ as Epicurus says, ‘do not exhilarate us with their possession as much as they
macerate us with their loss.’

We drudge like donkeys, whipped on through the joyless years by our wants, broken by the
weight of all that we have gained and lost. How little we have to show for a life devoted to
extortionate greed. The scant victories that life rations out to us are not worth all the venal
devotion that they cost us.

Our greed keeps us in too much of a spin to learn how best to placate it. I’m scuttling so
furiously to grab what I want, how could I find time to chart the most undeviating route to reach
it?

Wealth frees you from every kind of captivity, save that of having to waste all your time
labouring to stash up more of it.

19 Competitive desire
You learn what you want for yourself by competing with others. And when you compete with
them you learn to want more and more.
Life is a mad scramble for things that you wouldn’t want if you didn’t have the chance to heap up
more of them than others.

We’re all in this together. That’s why we have to tear each other apart to come out of it with
more than everyone else.

We could easily get what we want, but we waste our lives jostling to get what the rest of the
world wants.

All that we gobble swells our faith in our uniqueness by exhibiting our taste or wealth. Half the
pleasure that people take in a thing springs from the pride that they feel in their own success,
that they possess the means to procure it and the taste to enjoy it. Beauty is the polish that their
self-satisfaction imparts to their possessions. They look at them and see their own success
reflected.

The lust to gain makes us prize the object, but possession makes us preen ourselves on the
skill we showed in gaining it.

20 The consumer
A child is a natural consumer, and a consumer is an overgrown and unnatural child. Both of
them drool for the confected and the flashy, the cosy, instant and saccharine. And now that we
have all become as little children, the only kingdom that we are fit to enter is the voracious
kingdom of global cupidity.

The child in the bosom of the loving family learns that happiness comes from the heaping up of
material goods.

It is not the astonished philosopher who retains the heart of a child, but the acquisitive trader,
whose aim is to grab as many toys as possible to play with and show off.

Each plump devourer now feels like a little Napoleon or king Ubu, a triumphant gullet that has
wolfed its way through such fat years.

We love the world because we think we have such a large stake in it.

Our expensive pleasures assure us that we’ve made it.

Our pleasures are so hollow, that we have to fill them up with our self-satisfaction. And our self-
satisfaction is so full, that it makes us buoyant and expansive.

To live in this age is to have too much and to lack the self-control not to want to get more.
We take it that life is worth just as much as we can consume. And so we are frantic to consume
as much as we can get our hands on.

21 Making do
If we can’t get what we want, we learn to want whatever it is we think we can get.

We crave so much. We make do with so little. And yet nothing satisfies us. Such dull pleasures
tickle us. But a world would not be enough for us.

We are often satiated, but we are never satisfied.

You rise from the table of life famished and yet nauseated, but still craving more.

How little I need, until I wake up to how much I might have the chance to get.

Desire is a river in spate. It is not a standing lake. We may think that we want to fill it, but all we
want is that it rush life on as fast as it can. And so long as it is rushing we don’t much care
whether it is turbid with misery or sparkling with joy.

22 Insatiable
Our nature could be satisfied with so little. But it’s our nature not to be satisfied with a single
thing. We did not need to need this much. But we are lashed on by a fundamental need to want
more than we fundamentally need. How easily we could have all that we require, if we could just
stop clambering to snatch all that we don’t even want.

It’s not the having but the getting that we love. So how could we ever say enough? A sip or two
of life ought to be enough to sicken us. But we can never get our fill of it.

Life is insatiable yet mendicant.

We can set a limit to our physical proclivities for food or sex, but not to our societal drives of
venality, contention, maliciousness or revenge. Each joys or sorrow, bane or blow acts as grist
to swell our selfishness. I want more than I foresaw I would. But I need less than I think I do.
The importunity of my own greed dismays me as much as that of others appals me. People are
not uniformly better or worse than you surmise, but they all crave more than you suspect. Those
who don’t want much still want more. And even those who have moderate cravings still crave
them immoderately.

23 No class is impervious to greed

No class is impervious to the blight of greed. The penniless may seem to be, since they have
not yet got as much as they want. We mistake incapacity for disinterest. Wealth may
impoverish, but indigence does not enrich. The poor are just as covetous and crooked as the
rich, but their privation gives them less scope to show it.

Greed is low and insinuating enough to worm its way into the heart of the masses, though we
claim that it blights none but a small clique of plutocrats.

The tame and weak might inherit the earth, but why would they want it? Are their dreams as vile
and venal as those of the proud who tread them down?

If the meek inherit the earth, they won’t stay meek for long. Or if they do, they won’t keep the
earth for long.

The poor are worn down by life’s abrasions, and the rich are overworn by all the accretions of
flotsam that they’ve skimmed up.

One half of the world is a slave to scarcity, and one half to surfeit. And now both join in a
confederacy to enslave the untainted earth to their shared greed for more and more.

CORRUPTION

24 Corruption
The independent are incorruptible. But it’s the corrupt that are indispensable. It is they who keep
the world running so smoothly. The self-sufficing are too proud to submit and too disengaged to
rebel.

We betray routinely in order to get what we want, not purposely to spread our beliefs.

The world is not content just to see pure souls defiled. It wants to see them of their own free will
defile themselves. And it pays a high stipend to those who have a gift for respectably depraving
the innocent.

How keen I am to be corrupted, if I get the chance. And how sullenly I hug my virtue, if I don’t.
Some people weren’t made for this world, and yet were not made for a better one. Are there any
more pitiful than the few whom the world has had no need to seduce? They are left beached on
their desert island of integrity, desperate to be called like the rest of us to a life of gainful
connivance.

The world has no need to corrupt us, we corrupt our own hearts by wanting it too much. It is still
a magic zone, so long as you are not bewitched by it.

Opportunity may make a petty thief. But a great rogue makes every occasion an opportunity for
pious swindling.
The world has always been as raddled with corruption as it is now, but at no time have the
inducements to it been so vast.

25 Ideals and compromise

We live our real life through our compromises with the world. The blurred prints of my ideals fail
to come in to sharp focus. Most of us mislay our ideals before we get the chance to barter them.

Few of us believe so much in our moral codes as to be capable of betraying them.

We have no lack of principles, but they are too polite to get in the way of our pushing self-
interest.

Those who have no faith are not hard to suborn, since no convictions hold them back. And
those who do have faith are not hard to suborn, since they’ll stop at nothing to push their cause,
which is worth just as much to them as the devotion that they have invested in it.

Some people lie with no compunction because they have no principles, and some because they
are serving such lofty ones.

26 The small rewards of corruption

Our schemes and desires debauch us. But most of them yield us so little pleasure that we think
them quite innocent.

Our accommodations with the world diminish us. They tempt us not into crime but into littleness.
But they lend us an exalted stature in our own and others’ eyes.

Lawyers have figured out that the best scams are the legal ones. Honesty is for them a
commercial calculation.

‘Most people sell their souls,’ said Logan Smith, ‘and live with a good conscience on the
proceeds.’ But most of us don’t see that we have done so, since we have got such a small
return for it. The price of souls stays low, because there’s such a queue lining up to bargain
each day.

27 The soul unmade

Does anyone feel so burningly irate as those who have sold their soul and not received the
world?

We are willing to sell a lot more than our souls to gain a lot less than the world. But most of us
have no soul to traffic. So what we trade is the chance to mould one. This life is, as Keats said,
a vale of soul-making. But you pass through it most smoothly if you don’t have one to make.
Those who have gained the world are glad to find that they had no soul to lose. How could you
find time to make a fortune, if you had first to make a soul?

Some people are so high-minded, that they can’t bring themselves to sell their souls, till the
buyer offers them a good cause as well as a good price.

Society is a system of conveniences which gives us the means to thrive without a soul.

28 All traitors
In this double-dealing world even the perfidious may be betrayed by their own conniving
loyalties.

An unfeeling corporation, such as a bank, can be counted on more than the most upstanding
individual.

People’s competence is of more use to us than their probity.

We are all traitors. We just don’t agree on what country we belong to. And we keep up our
faithfulness by our opportune defections.

Don’t we betray most eagerly those ideals that we know are too good for us? We are glad to
sling off their yoke and to prove that they could not have been worth our allegiance since they
were too weak to keep it.

The institution that people have served devotedly for years they would be happy to see implode
the day after they leave it. What stronger proof could there be of how indispensable they were?

29 The ruses of treachery

Most of us have too much guile to act like patent traitors. So I withhold my disloyalty as warily as
I withhold my assent.

When you hear someone extolling trust, look out for your independence.

We conceal our curiosity so that those whom we plan to entrap will entrust us with their secrets.
Who has not cast out a small confession of their own as bait to net more compromising
disclosures from others?

We hitch our wagon to the treacherous. We sense that no one is more fit to get on in this
devious world and drag us up in their train.

Some of us can think of no more convincing way to prove our fealty than by offering others as
an oblation to it.
Where you need merely collude to prove your loyalty, you may turn renegade to hold fast to
your truth.

30 The bond of perfidy

The most worthless cause may command the most unwavering loyalty. And the worst and most
meretricious ones are apt to rouse the strongest and sincerest passions.

In order to bring down one person, ten must stand by their sacred pact of trust.

If you want people to trust you, there are a bevy of things that you have to be ready to betray.

It’s the disloyal to whom we give unwonted devotion. We spot their duplicity but stay affixed to
them. So they have our bad faith and fear, which knit sturdier cords than normal fidelity. Only
the most wholehearted adherents will still stick to you once they have witnessed your lies. No
glue holds more firm than shared but unadmitted perfidy. Treason is the most reliable token of
trust. You know that you can lean on someone, when you have securely leagued with them to
double-cross a third party.

31 Loyalty looks away

We cleave to our self-serving loyalties because we lack any principle which might sever us from
them.

The most trustworthy partisans are those who refuse to see the truth regarding the people or the
cause that they serve. To stay loyal to persons, you must avert your eyes from the truth. And to
stay loyal to the truth, you would have to turn your back on persons. We trust others, not
because we have found them honest, but because we know that we can count on them not to
be. We trust that they will pretend to share our self-deceits and not blurt out what might hurt us.

Tell the truth, and you will lose the trust of all. Hold fast to your integrity, and they will all desert
you. The world is sure to make a fool of you, if you are so foolish as to refuse to fool yourself.

You showed him what he is. Needless to say, he didn’t believe you. But he will never forgive
you.

Life is a treacherous game, in which the worst form of betrayal is to tell the stark truth.

COWARDICE
32 Cowardice
Some people lack the courage to be constant cowards. So they have to shrink life to a regimen
so strait and safe, that they seldom need to act timidly.

Some cowards sleepwalk into danger, because they lack the nerve to wake up and face their
real fears.

Cowards, like tottering autocracies or our ebbing democracies, squander their strength battling
phantom enemies, because they lack the firmness to discern who their real foes are.

In order to keep up their courage, some cowards have to steel one another with the dangerous
lie that their enemies lack the grit to put up a fight.

The valiant never taste of death but once. It’s the faint-hearted who chew it over through the
whole of life, and so get to know all its flavours. The coward must be braver than the hero. A
hero need face only the danger. Cowards must face all their fears, which never let go of them.
The danger done, their fears dream new terrors. Poltroons suffer far more from their anxieties
than the brave suffer from their enemies.

Cowards tend to treat most amicably those whom they like least. They dread lest their dislike
will be detected. And being cowards they quail at what they hate.

The world’s not safe, now that there’s so much paranoia around.

33 Shocked into daring

Fear jolts some people to acts of mad fearlessness. And it foists on others such a long and
exasperating circumspection, that they are at last stung to act rashly just where rashness will
bring them to ruin. ‘Timorousness,’ as Clausewitz wrote, ‘will do a thousand times more damage
than audaciousness.’

A sudden upset shocks some cowards into daring. The crisis strikes with such rapidity, that they
don’t have time to put on their wonted irresolution. They drop their habit of anxiety, and forget to
be craven. Their impulsiveness lands them in enemy territory, before their cowardice can catch
up and bundle them back to safety. Once they’ve sallied out on a foray, they need the
headstrong mettle to encounter any menace, since they lack the boldness to retreat. As Fuller
wrote, ‘Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.’

How many risks people are willing to take in order to feel safe.

Fools have no choice but to act fearlessly, since they don’t dare to be wise and sit still.
34 The cowardice to stay alive
In order to go on living, you need as much cowardice as courage, as much foolhardiness as
prudence, as much insensitiveness as attentiveness, as much forgetfulness as remembering,
and a lot more self-deception than truth.

Suicide is a crazed and craven act, which few of us have the sense or courage to commit. The
ones who do need the deserter’s desperate recklessness. How could they have been so mad,
to end it all, and give up their chance to go on with their life of busy futility? They must screw up
their resolution for a moment, since they can’t bear to have patience for a lifetime. Pride nerves
you to stay alive. And if it fails, then fear and shame have to do it.

We lack the decision simply to die. So we need to keep up the vitality to dance.

Suicide, like all consolations, comes too soon to be necessary or too late to be useful. But most
are too late. If they were not, there would have been no need for them. Suicides know that their
life will go on interminably, if they don’t put a stop to it this day.

Are suicides more desperate to evade their future or to erase their past?

We are rats in a maze scampering to locate the way out but debarred from taking the nearest
one.

35 Cowardice loves cruelty

Cowards prize the cold aggression of their protectors, too craven to fear that they might one day
use it to hurt them. They cheer on any kind of cruelty that makes them feel more secure. It’s
thus that the faithful adore their god.

Bullies are not cowards. If they were, the world would be in a quite different state. Nor are
tyrants sadists. And if bullies are cowards, what cowards we must be, to give in to them all the
time. Cowards love a bully, so long as they hope that his bullying might help them.

Fear bids us entrust our safety to people of dubious valour, whom we think brave because they
have a brand of cowardice that is not like our own. And we love tyrants who promise to keep us
safe, even when they put us in worse peril.

Some people are more dangerous when they are sane, and are lucid only when they are mad.

Paranoids are prone to put their trust in the most dangerous people.

CRUELTY
36 Cruelty
Honour and its codes rest on a vast deal of cruelty, both to oneself and to one’s rivals. In them
shame is more to be shunned than torture, and pride is worth more than life.

We take pride in our hardness of heart, as if it were a duty that we owed to our unique mission.

Squeamish people can be the most cruel. They feel distress most acutely, and so may gain
some relish from the infliction of it. And though they quiver at the small unkindnesses of day-to-
day life, they may be numb to its real atrocities.

37 Too callous or too calculating to be cruel

It’s rare that we act cruelly, not because we feel others’ pangs too piquantly, but because we
scarcely feel them at all. It is not our deep sympathy but our bland indifference that saves most
of us from being cruel. We are too heartless and insensible to take pleasure in maltreating
people. Only those who feel what others suffer could enjoy torturing them. We picture the pain
of others too dimly to savour causing it or to writhe in rapport with it. And we need responsive
victims to pique our sadism. Torturers don’t waste their rack or thumbscrews on stones.

Cruelty calls for as much imagination as kindness, and for far more than we are ready to lend it
or than our everyday affability asks of us.

Children love to play at cruelty. Like cats, they dabble in it with an offhand curiosity. It tickles us
when we are young and unstained by the world. But as we grow up our calculating interest
cautions us to drop it, since it fails to yield us the pleasure or profit that we hoped for. Like
innocence, cruelty is as natural in an infant as it is abhorrent in an adult. Our instinct for inflicting
pain forsakes us at the same age as our purity of heart.

ENVY

38 Envy
It is not merit that we envy but fortune. We don’t doubt that we have more than enough merit,
and lack only the good luck to profit from it. ‘Most people,’ as Chesterfield wrote, ‘complain of
fortune, few of nature.’ I feel jealous not of what others are or of what they do but of what they
get. And I don’t want to get what they have got but what they have not got. I want to show that I
could get better than they have got. And even if I do envy what they have, I think them the more
unworthy for having it.

When we envy, we set ourselves aflame to light up the fine deeds of our rivals.
I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of those for whom I feel a genuine awe. They have plain and
costly virtues, and I prefer my cheap and crafty ones.

39 Too conceited to envy

The disease of envy is cured by the same conceit that caused it. ‘The pride that rouses in us so
much envy,’ says La Rochefoucauld, ‘often conduces to moderate it.’

We don’t think well enough of people to envy them, though we would be right to, if we knew how
well they think of themselves. Their talents may not be worth envying, but their self-assurance
is.

I think so highly of my merits, that I assume others must envy me. But they think so highly of
their own, that they don’t. I suspect that those who dislike me must feel jealous of me. But they
feel less jealous than I fear or desire.

All the gifts of fortune are wasted on most people, though at times I fear that my vast talents
might go to waste because of my bad luck.

‘Envy,’ as Gay said, ‘is a kind of praise.’ And we set too much store by our own gifts to pay our
rivals the tribute of jealousy. Envy stews, but admiration froths. Disdain cools our praise, and
checks it from simmering over into jealousy. Envy is the most reluctant and hence the frankest
form of praise. Why else would it be so rare?

40 Rather pity than envy

I pity or depreciate people for the lack of some small gift that I have, instead of envying them for
a great one that I lack. He may own a billion dollars, but can he play chequers like me? And just
look at that shirt he’s got on. ‘He is a poor creature,’ Butler says, ‘who does not believe himself
to be better than the whole world else.’

My pity sets me above those whom I pity. But my envy would place me below those whom I
envy. Our pity is as gratifying as our envy would be mortifying.

We like to believe that we pity others nearly as much as we like to believe that they envy us.

41 Rather envied than pitied

No one envies, but we all hope to be envied, and most of us assume that we are. Envy keeps
us in its grip, not because we envy our rivals, but because we burn to be envied by them.

We all think so much of others that we want to be envied by them. And yet no one thinks
enough of us to envy us.
We would all prefer to be envied than pitied, as the proverb says. So why make envy a sin and
pity a virtue? Your jealousy would gratify people more than your kind heart could aid them. If
you wished to do unto them as you would have them do to you, you should show that you think
them enviable rather than pitiable.

REVENGE

42 Revenge
Some proud and revengeful people have to turn their hearts to stone, so that they won’t vibrate
unendingly to the sneers and stripes that they dream they meet with.

How slyly revenge slinks into the most effusive eulogy.

How I hate those who have hurt a hair of the one whom I love and have hurt much more.

Revenge is a kind of violent restorative. We are needled to take revenge because we are weak
enough to be wounded, but strong enough to wound in return.

Ordinary avengers put their victims to the knife. Outstanding ones, like Hawthorne’s Roger
Chillingworth, seduce, dismantle and instruct them, rendering them participants in their own
demolition. And the gods scheme with the dumb world to wreak just such a subtle retribution on
the best and the worst of us.

You know how low you’ve fallen, when your rivals don’t even think it worth their while to crow
over you.

43 Vengeance and victim

The cycle of revenge would soon run down, if it were only tit-for-tat. But many people take
vengeance not on the real cause of their injury but on some weaker substitute whom they can
get at more safely.

All successful revenges are self-inflicted. And, as Pavese said, ‘there is no finer requital than
that which others visit on your enemy.’ Though the best of all is the revenge that your enemies
visit on themselves.

Some people are their own worst enemies, and that’s the best thing that can be said for them.
They relieve you of the need to lift a hand against them. And they are kind enough to do unto
themselves as you would have done to them.

I can wound others so badly because I see their weak spots. And I can’t help wounding myself
so badly because I don’t know my own.
44 The rewards of revenge
Revenge is a prime duty of honour, equity and defiance. It therefore gains less pay than the rest
of the wily virtues in this world of chill utility and rectitude.

Indifference is the one kind of requital that costs you less than the person it is meant for.

Vengeful people learn that vengeance always founders, and this rankles as one more wrong
that the world does them. What meal looks more appetizing or turns out to be less filling than
retaliation?

The sole reprisals that I regret are my ill-judged or unnecessary ones. But most of my reprisals
are ill-judged or unnecessary.

The most arduous retributions are those that must rely on the justness of their claims. Injustice
would have had readier confederates and a smoother passage through this rough and thorny
world.
VIRTUES

Contents

Morality

Self-interest

Moral acting

Self-control

Courage

Gratitude

Justice

Self-sacrifice

MORALITY
Not only are all the virtues not one, as the stoics claimed, not one of the virtues is simple and
indivisible. Like all the rest of our qualities, they are discrete and disconnected, not integrated or
unified. ‘No specific virtue or vice in a man,’ wrote Shaw, ‘implies the existence of any other
specific virtue or vice in him.’ Each of them is made up of a congeries of skills and
predispositions, some of which you may be proficient in, while the one next door you may have
no aptitude for.

For wickedness to thrive, it needs no more than opportunity. But virtues need a diligently policed
regime of restraints and penalties.

A deed counts for as much as the person who does it. But the person who does it counts for no
more than the deeds that he or she does.

The difference between a good person and a bad one is luck and circumstance.

Even where a slave morality holds sway, all the slaves are would-be tyrants.
1 Codes of virtues
In order to give some reality to moral freedom and the moral sphere, Kant had to shift it to the
realm of the thing in itself, the noumenal beyond time and space. That is, he had to show that it
has no reality at all.

Utilitarians hold that the plain matter-of-fact test of the moral value of an act is, what
consequences does it have? But consequences are the very thing that we can’t foresee,
because they are endlessly ramifying. Where does the chain of effects come to a standstill? And
how can the doer discern what they will be? How could the person who first tamed fire guess
that the act would end in burning up the world?

Codes of right and wrong lag a few hundred years behind common practice, though the lag is
getting shorter. They seem so pristine because they are so antique.

2 The unnaturalness of natural law

Natural law proscribes things that are natural, and prescribes things that are unnatural.

Nothing is less innate than our innate sense of right and wrong. And few things are more
unnatural than our conception of natural law. ‘Man corrupts all that he touches,’ as Montaigne
wrote, yet he loves to hold forth on what is clean and natural as he does so.

Natural law is no more natural than divine law is divine. They are both convenient projections of
human prejudice.

The one realm in which natural law has no place is nature. The notion of natural law and natural
rights turns the order of nature on its head.

Even the most repressive regulations are too weak to keep us within the pale of natural law.
Societies have had to make marriage a binding legal contract because monogamy is so
unnatural.

It is our so-called instinctive beliefs that set us on to kill one another.

Few eternal laws last as long as written ones.

3 Natural virtues, natural vices

Our virtues are more at variance with nature than our vices. And if our artificial virtues have any
value, it is as a salt to flavour our natural depravity.

Original sin may be the sole trace that remains of the nature we have lost.
Few acts are more natural than the crimes and abominations which natural law proscribes. And
few norms are more artificial than those that natural law underwrites, such as property and
wedlock.

Pristine natural virtues are made a fetish in old, sophisticated and corrupt epochs.

If we have a good nature, then when we do good, we are merely following our bent, and there is
no merit in our acts. But if our nature is evil, even if we do good, we are still evil, and we have
no merit.

If we approve of a trait, we say that it lifts us above the animals or else that it is natural. But if we
disapprove of it, we say that not even the animals possess it or else that mere brutes do. ‘When
a man is treated like a beast,’ observed Kraus, ‘he says, “After all I’m human.” When he
behaves like a beast he says, “After all I’m only human.”’

4 The moralist and the virtues

A moralist blasts your innocence by opening your eyes to it. Once you’ve heard that it is more
blessed to give than to receive, the fine freshness of your generosity wilts. And when you have
been commanded to do good in secret so that God will reward you openly, your unforced acts
lose all the charm of unselfconsciousness. And how could the meek retain their meekness,
when they have been promised that they will one day be overlords of the earth?

How could anyone who set up as a great moral preceptor, like Seneca, Rousseau or Tolstoy, be
more than a great moral hypocrite, a grotesque centaur of self-abasement and mad pride?

Solemn moralists, such as Marcus Aurelius, seem to set out to bore us into goodness. They
might succeed in turning us off vice, if they could make it as tedious as they make virtue.

It is said that adjectives are the most morally salient parts of speech. No doubt. There are none
more smug, subjective, empty, rhetorical, judgmental and exaggerated.

5 Manners not morals win the praise

In this judgmental but superficial world, you are praised or blamed more for the way in which
you do a deed than because the deed on its own is kind or cruel. Do a small favour charmingly,
and you will win more applause than those who do more good with a bad grace. We like or
loathe people more for their habits and manners than for their morals.

What people want from you is the flannel forbearance that won’t thwart their own self-interest or
ulcerate their own self-love. What they ask of you is not your best but what will gain them most
and ask least of them. They wish you to be flexible and complaisant but not sternly just. And
they will love you more for your indulgent bad taste than for your severe good deeds. ‘In the
intercourse of life,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘we please more by our faults than by our fine
qualities.’

6 The virtues of means and ends

Moralists like Kant tell us that we must treat human beings in every case as ends and not as
mere means. But if we could not use each other as means, we would not have much to do with
one another at all.

Why should we treat all persons as ends, when that’s not even how they treat themselves?
They use themselves up to achieve their real ends, which lie outside them.

7 Thrifty virtues
The golden rule, to do to others as you would have them do to you, holds in the negative at
most, as Confucius framed it. We would no doubt like others to bow down to us and do all our
bidding. But none of us has the right to receive or the duty to render this. The most you can
expect or are obliged to do is to cause as little harm as you can and to tender the help that you
can’t withhold.

‘Virtue,’ as Walpole wrote, ‘knows to a farthing how much it has lost by not being vice.’ It keeps
a thrifty store, and insists that all its services be paid for in full, be it in this world or the next. And
we store up in our minds till the end of our days the good deeds for which we think we have
been short-changed.

Most people want to be well-paid for their good deeds, but the truly righteous don’t care if they
lose by them, so long as they can make others suffer on account of them. They are willing to
make their own lives a misery, so long as they can make it hot for their enemies.

Nice people are willing to do just enough for you to put themselves in the right. And nasty
people will go out of their way to do what will put you in the wrong.

I do good to my neighbours, in the prudent hope that they will do the same to me.

My faults scald me, but I am loth to part with them. And though my virtues don’t cost me a cent,
I’m glad to get rid of them. ‘Vice,’ as Colton wrote, ‘has more martyrs than virtue.’ Right is so
easy, but wrong is still so seductive.

SELF-INTEREST
8 Self-interest plays the role of all the virtues
We daub our self-interest in the livid tints of the vices and virtues. And we curse those who
scrape these back to lay bare the dun stuff that underlies them. We gild our interests with a thin
flake of bright virtues, to distract the eye and to extract a dearer price for them. Careerism dons
the decorous outfit of integrity to walk up and down in the world.

Our greed disciplines us better than our self-knowledge. It is our self-seeking more than our
self-awareness that keeps us to the straight path. What small desires won’t we set aside to
make way for our baser schemes?

Justice and the virtues are composed of noisy interests, but in such sweet consort that they
make an even music.

You may be as offended by self-interest as a platonist is by the flesh, but what else could you
live by? When we are not acting for our own gain, it’s some more crooked motive that has set us
on to act.

There’s nothing that egoism won’t use for its own ends, even friendliness. ‘Self-interest,’ as La
Rochefoucauld says, ‘speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of
disinterestedness.’ Far from slowing us down, our slippery virtues and ideals help to grease the
wheels of our steely self-interest.

Our selfless devotion is nine tenths self-promotion.

9 Adversity improves us
Setbacks make us no better. All they do is train us to push our schemes with more guile or more
force. Some trials seem to improve us because they damp down the high spirits which would
flash out in random delinquency. And some trials cow us into virtues and blanch us to a
whitened righteousness.

If we had been as untouchable as the gods, we would have been stupider and more vicious
than the worst of the fiends.

Life makes such a mess of us, that we would make an even worse mess, if we were granted a
second life. La Bruyère claimed that we do not live long enough to profit from our faults. But if
we lived longer, the sole profit we would reap from them would be to make them so much
worse.
10 Polluted by pain
The victims of one genocide volunteer as the expert perpetrators of the next. The bullied don’t
dream of a paradise in which no one is bullied. They dream of the day when they will get the
chance to bully their persecutors in revenge. His lambs love the Lord, because he is the biggest
bully of all. ‘Those to whom evil is done,’ wrote Auden, ‘do evil in return.’

Pain does not purify us. It pollutes us. The blaze and hail of purgatory would make us fit for the
underworld, not for the upper one. And yet a few years of bliss would harden the saints to the
pleas of the damned. Heaven and hell must be sinking by the day. How could the saints not be
corrupted by their joy? And how could the lost souls not be brutalized by their torments?

Suffering makes people punitive and cruel. And much of the suffering that they undergo is in
their own minds, while that which they inflict is all too real.

11 Beware of the drowning

Unfortunates long to have sharers in their gloom. And some, if they find none, will go out of their
way to make them. They are sterile in everything except the propagation of their misery.

Who are more brutal? The drowning who would pull you down into the murk for the bare chance
of one more breath? Or those speeding along on the surface who drive them off with clubs for
fear that they might reach their goal one hour late?

If there is anyone more ruthless than those who are resolved to rise, it’s one who is desperate to
be saved from going under.

MORAL ACTING

12 Posing virtues
Most of our good intentions are mean thriftiness or gaudy heroics. Most of the time we practise
a strict moral economy. But we revel now and then in a pantomime of moral extravagance, thick
with splendid attitudinizing, high words, eye-catching stage-effects, bottomless sympathy, tough
dilemmas and fine sentiments, in the vaporous and sublime vein of Sand or Rilke. The moral
sense, finding that indifference or self-interest has long occupied most of our acts and emotions,
migrates to our words and gestures.

Our life is not a charged melodrama of moral choice. And yet we still love to declaim like moral
posers. Our brains have been addled by virtues and ideals, or by the fine shows of them, or by
the desire to seem to dote on them.
There will be no end to our moral mummery and posturing, at least not till it has made an end of
us. Our deeds are so morally bland, that we have to pepper them with benevolent self-flattery to
give them some smack of seductiveness. There was no need for Jesus to warn us not to hide
our lights under a bushel.

Anyone who seeks to appeal to the better angels of our nature finds that they are too deafened
by their own pious squawking to heed the call to do good.

13 The virtues of hypocrisy

Our decent impostures make up more than half of our integrity. ‘Hypocrisy,’ La Rochefoucauld
wrote, ‘is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’ But it may be just as true that virtue is the tribute
that vice pays to hypocrisy. How could our misshapen natures straighten out but by
dissembling? As Goldsmith phrased it, ‘Till, seeming blessed, they grow to what they seem.’

In order to do good, we have to tell ourselves that we are good. But when we do so, we may
grow irretrievably evil.

I mimic bad people’s motives and good people’s stratagems for disguising them. The fine deeds
that we do may be the sole excuse for the foul motives for which we did them. It’s just as well
that the improvement of the world doesn’t hinge on the intentions of its improvers.

What devils we would be, if the devil didn’t persuade us to hide our true selves so that we might
make our way in the world.

14 Living up to our own poses

The self-righteousness that tells us that we are better than we seem spurs us to become so for
real. And yet we end up as fake and hollow as the virtues we impersonate. We are dazzled by
the images of greed and grow genuinely greedy. We fall in love with the images of goodness
and behave like mere actors.

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.’

Don’t we feel some of our most sublime moral moods when we strain to live up to the pose that
mere circumstance has forced us to put on? Wilde speaks of ‘that passion to act a part that
sometimes makes us do finer things than we are ourselves.’
15 Virtues and prejudices
Moralists do their best to pull down the rest of our prejudices and set up in their niche the one
good-natured prejudice that all prejudices err. But a virtuous prejudice is as much a prejudice as
a vicious one, though it may pass for a high precept. And good prejudice is the one force strong
enough to thrust out bad. And one virtue may drive out another. Our moral medicines work by
homeopathy.

Our moral scruples are adjustable, but our moral prejudices don’t budge. The first shift with our
self-interest, but the second are held fast by our self-regard.

We prefer people to principles, not out of benignity but out of egoism, to which principles would
give no purchase.

Those who are striving to live up to their principles commonly have to give ground to those who
are jostling to feed their preferences.

SELF-CONTROL

16 The virtues of self-control

I lack the sage self-mastery which would warn me to duck the punches of misfortune. So I need
to strive for the grudging self-government which helps me to brave them. We can’t hold out
against the lure of our brute desires, and so we have to learn to bear up under the brute pains
they bring on us. I grow hard to everything save my own cravings, which I’m too soft to resist.

We can change the world more easily than our own will. There are few things that we know less
than our own self. And there are few things that we can control less than our own cravings.

We try to control events, since we are too weak to defeat our urge to bend them to our will. And
we seek to control ourselves, the better to control what is outside us.

Many temperate people don’t learn to restrain themselves, but merely to dodge the provocations
which would rob them of their self-restraint.

Some people pretend to control their compulsions by concealing them. They seem mature
because they have learnt to hide how childish they are. They have rigged out their own
immaturity with the gear which is tailored to master the world’s immaturity.

17 The virtues of weakness

We have to be strong enough to hold on, since we are too weak just to let go.
Man of bronze. He was so weak and prone to wounds, that he had to encase his heart in brass,
and then dig from that carapace all that was soft and human. Why wonder that what he made of
himself should ring so hollow? He shuddered at the least touch. So he had to muffle himself so
that life wouldn’t deafen him. Some people have to hollow out their hearts to gain the nerve to
commit a titanic crime, and some just to keep up a lean subsistence.

Those who are weak to dare must be strong to endure. Some people have to use up all their
strength to extricate themselves from the effects of their own follies and frailties. Cowardice
foists on them such rigours, that it leaves them no choice but to act bravely. And their madness
gets them in such scrapes, that they have to use all their reason to get out of them.

How could the strong, who can bear so much, guess how much the weak have to bear just to
keep up their own weakness? The poor frail people, who have souls of porcelain, but long to be
admired like marble. They must be tenacious of life, who find the flask dry but go on pouring
from it from day to dismal day.

Our own infirmities prey on us, whether these are our faults or our virtues. Which of us does not
bear the brand of Blake’s ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’?

How weak you have to be, to find your true strength.

Frailty may make you firm, and timidity may make you bold.

COURAGE

18 Courage and the virtues

Courage may be the mainstay of all the virtues. But it is the mainstay of all the vices too. And
we might be far more vicious, if our cowardice didn’t keep the rest of our knavery in check.

Courage may be the source of the rare acts of heroism that we do, but it is fear and cowardice
that keep us from straying from the well-trodden path of good conduct most of the time.

You need as much courage to fight for a bad cause as for a good one. And you would need far
more daring to become an outlaw than to remain a law-abiding citizen. Some people join the
police because they lack the courage or initiative to be criminals.

Courage is not so much a virtue as a core competence, like patience, constancy or prudence.
You may be armed with all the rest of the virtues, but if you lack courage, you can’t put them to
use.
What extraordinary tenacity you need just to get through a single hour on this ordinary earth. As
Woolf says, it is ‘very, very dangerous to live even one day.’ All that you own is at stake each
instant, regardless of how little you have to play for.

Who needs more fortitude, the few who die glorious but alone in the van, or the mass who fall
unsung in the ranks?

19 The courage of despair

The wise know why they should give up hope. But the brave carry on as if they did not. It may
take as much staunchness not to scare yourself with phantom frights as it does not to flinch
from real ones.

When you meet with disaster, you may shake off the fetters of your fears, once you have learnt
that if you can bear this then you can bear anything. Or else you may see that anything might
scar you, and so you fall back to a trench of consternation, from which you may never climb out.
In middle age you come to see that there’s no infamy or calamity that you can’t ride out. And
then you know that you should despair for real.

The true test of courage comes when your luck runs out. Then nothing is left to fight for, but you
still have to see it through to the end. And you’re left alone in the night with your despair, like
Antony abandoned by his god.

20 False courage
Heartlessness makes up half of our courage, as squeamishness makes up half of our
compassion. Those who are merely insensitive boast that they are unsentimental. They scorn
the teary responsiveness of others, till they find that they have need of it in their own case. Their
resilience is a ruthless insensibility.

We have the worst kind of endurance, the hardihood to persist in our mean schemes for as long
as they cost others more than us. We ought to have had the constancy to say no to them from
the first.

All of us are sustained by the false faith that we are too important to come to rack. But this same
conviction prods the dauntless to sprint on, and the spineless to hang back. The latter think that
they are too precious to be put in harm’s way, the former that they are so invulnerable that
nothing could harm them.

Brave soldiers are ready if need be to die for their country, but their real business is to kill for it.

GRATITUDE
21 Generosity
Our impulses are generous, but our hands are stinting. Our second thoughts withhold what our
first would give. Twain prescribes that when fired by an urge to contribute to a charity, all we
need do is count to sixty-five. We find that it costs much less to promise than to pay. A lot of our
intentions start better and end worse than our acts. And a large brood of them are stillborn. We
are liberal on a whim, but miserly by habit. ‘Don’t trust first impulses,’ enjoined Talleyrand, ‘they
are all munificent.’

I am reluctant to give more of myself to others for fear that they will take too much or that they
will spurn what I offer.

I give gifts to show off my own taste and to mould the taste of others.

We are mean but wasteful. We are neither thrifty nor generous. I scatter thoughtlessly, but don’t
give liberally. We are scrimping, yet squandering.

Spendthrifts may seem generous, since they are willing to waste their spare cash on all sorts of
things, even other people.

22 Mean virtues
We grow attached to people when we give them gifts more than when we receive gifts from
them. ‘Men are never attached to you by favours,’ as Napoleon said.

Be generous to a person, and from then on they will take it that you must owe them something.
The more you give to them, the more they feel you are in their debt. What generosity gives rise
to is not gratitude but greedy expectation.

Dependent people don’t doubt that they are of more use to their patron than their patron is to
them. And it’s hard to tell which of them is the more smirched by their interaction.

People’s avid expectations touch us nearer than their gratitude. Their very unthankfulness
goads us to give more, if only to show them that we weren’t angling for their thanks.

People give you things that they don’t want and you don’t want, and think that you ought to feel
grateful to them. ‘A benefactor,’ Napoleon said, ‘demands more than he gives.’

‘It is the nature of men,’ Machiavelli said, ‘to be bound by the patronage that they confer as
much as by that which they receive.’ Doing good obliges us to repeat it more than receiving
good obliges us to repay it. So it’s our pride more than our kind heart that piques our generosity.
23 The pride of gratitude
The proud alone feel uncomfortably indebted. They are too haughty to submit to benefactions.
So they try to avenge the good that others do them by displaying how appreciative they are.
‘There are minds so impatient of inferiority,’ Johnson wrote, ‘that their gratitude is a species of
revenge.’ They are both ways of settling scores and reinstating our place in the estimation of
others.

Some people will never forgive you for the harm that they do you. And some will never forgive
you for the good that you do them.

I expect others’ thanks when I do good to them as much as I resent them expecting mine when
they do good to me. And I find gratitude to them as irksome as I find theirs to me natural.

I take offence at the churlishness of those who decline to accept from me the scant favours that
cost me nothing.

I’m disappointed with everything that I’m given, and it may be with gratitude most of all.

24 Ingratitude
I unhesitatingly acknowledge small favours, as I do my small faults, so that I won’t have to
acknowledge big ones at all. And I show least gratitude for those benefits that I least deserve.

Gratitude is said to cost us dear, but is there anyone who has been sent broke by it? Scott notes
that it is not prone to ‘distress itself by frequent payments.’ And though praise doesn’t cost us a
cent, we still don’t like to give it away.

Those who feel that they owe no debt to their own parents are indignant at the ingratitude that
their children show to them.

Even the most grateful people reserve the right to give you a good hard kick in return for what
you’ve done for them.

25 The pride of ingratitude

Some people try to dispense with their debts by displaying their gratitude, and some by
pretending that they have no need to. The former pay them off, and the latter act as if they did
not exist. Those who resent the burden of a boon may make a show of being thankful, in order
to shuck off the weight of their dependence. They feign gratefulness so as to be spared from
feeling it. It is the virtue of those who can’t bear to be beholden.

People are so unappreciative, because they set too low a price on what others give them and
they set too high a price on what they get for themselves. What they prize dearly they come to
believe they have earned by their own unaided efforts. The self-regard of the receiver devalues
what the self-regard of the giver sets such store on.

Few of us feel very remorseful or beholden. We set our own worth too high to reckon that we
owe much to those whom we have harmed or to those who have helped us.

Our ingratitude is as sincere as our conceit. And our gratitude is as feigned and grudging as our
modesty. How could we feel grateful? We can’t see that we have a thing to thank our
benefactors for.

26 Gratitude and resentment

Gratitude is as feeble as it is forgetful. And resentment is as fierce as it is retentive.

Need can drive people to revere their helpers or to resent them. And some try to hide their own
thanklessness by abusing them. They behave despicably, to show that they are not mean. So
it’s just as well that few of us feel so beholden to our benefactors that we need to disguise our
debt to them by detesting them.

It is only human parasites that both love and resent the host by which they live.

The wine of gratitude soon sours to a vinegar spleen. Our sense of indebtedness soon curdles
once it’s been through a brief churning in our mind.

Animals take things for granted, and the result is contentment. We take things for granted, and
what we feel is ennui, ingratitude and resentment.

Giving and gratitude make such a soup of pride, spite, expected dividends and bad faith, that
cold monetary exchange smells pure and clean when set beside them.

JUSTICE

27 Justice
Love and justice are both blind. But justice refuses to see persons, while love fails to see
everything else.

Karma commonly acts in reverse order. It first inflicts the punishment which will cause you to
commit the sin for which the punishment will be the just desert.

The unjust, if they don’t see their assailants justly castigated by the world, at least have the
satisfaction of knowing that the world is unjust. And this gives them the right to persist in their
injustice.
Criminals merely break the law. Judges corrupt it.

Lawbreakers ought to be punished with stern finality for their crimes, for the very reason that
their nature left them no choice but to commit them. ‘Lack of free will,’ as Proust wrote, ‘makes
faults and crimes more reprehensible.’

28 The ego, the root of all injustice

As Pushkin said, other people are mere zeroes and placeholders. They derive their value from
their affiliation with us, who are the countable units. In the deathly arithmetic of self one is
greater than infinity. So it is the task of justice to lop each of us to an equal integer, and tell us
that we count for no more than one of these.

The personal ego is the source of all injustice. And yet justice exists to serve our group egoism.

We fail to spot the most flagrant wrongs, so long as they are profiting us.

Much of our affability is mere selfishness. We let pass the evil that people do because it has not
touched us.

Most people slake their thirst for justice by pressing their own claims to fair treatment.

29 The sheep and the goats

Justice cuts the world in two. It segregates it into sheep and goats, clean and unclean. And the
sheep forthwith bleat that their wool is as white and downy as cherubs’ wings, and that they
have the right to browse in a fat paddock. They wait meekly for the coming of their good
shepherd to butcher the goats and shove them in the ever-burning oven.

God shows leniency to his lambs, but not so much as justice to the kids. And this is what the
lambkins call grace. They hate and fear the goats, but they love the slaughterer who comes to
massacre them.

When the sheep make the laws, then look out, goats. As one of the goats, one of the impure,
the unclean, the spotted, the cursed, the filthy, I don’t much look forward to the reign of the
immaculate lamb.

30 Justice is injustice to what is unlike us

The moral law is an offence against nature. It tells us to be kind to all living things that are like
us who are trampling on all living things that are not like us.

How would we stand condemned, if the animals were to demand of us a tenth of the justice that
we demand of a god.
Justice draws categorical distinctions where there are none, and fabricates unqualified
similarities where there are none. And then it asserts that we have disparate duties to these
disparate tiers of beings that it sets up.

Justice entrenches our egoism by extending it. We have duties to those breeds of life that are of
the same grade as our own. But we have none to all the rest. What we term justice is a mere
bias in favour of what is kin to us at the expense of what is not.

31 Our virtues, our due

People presume that right is what they are used to doing, and that justice is what they are used
to obtaining. They deem their innate rights to be whatever they are in the habit of receiving plus
the bit extra that they don’t doubt they deserve.

If they meet with good luck, people gather that what is rightfully due to them is what they are
accustomed to get. And if they don’t, they gather that it is what others get. If they fail repeatedly,
they feel that they have a right to fare well for a change. And if they fare well, they infer that they
should not have to fail when they have grown so used to success. Yet they guess that others, if
they have met with ill-luck all the time, must be inured to it, while if they have fared well, they are
now due their quota of blows.

We think that our great talents give us the right to keep what we have got, and that our bad luck
gives us the right to do what we need to even the odds.

None of us complains of injustice when we get more than we have earned the right to. And
which of us these days has not done that? Nothing is good enough for some people, though
they themselves are not good for much. We who make the worst use of everything have no
doubt that we deserve to have the best of all things.

32 The rewards of justice

I wish that justice governed the world, and at times I fear that it might. ‘Life is never fair,’ Wilde
said, ‘and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.’

It is the just who get their comeuppance in this world. The corrupt stride on from one shining
triumph to the next.

How swiftly mischief can turn the whole world upside down. Yet what long centuries we have
taken to rip up rooted injustices. ‘Haste is of the devil,’ says Muhammad, ‘slowness of God.’
33 Duties and virtues
I have to make too much of the urgency of some of my obligations in order to bestir myself to
carry them out. There are times when I can do my duty only by inflating its importance and my
own.

A light imposition galls me more than a large one. A light one comes so close to being nothing
that I could envision being rid of it.

Most people are not slothful or undutiful. But they seem so to me, since they are too busy doing
what they want to do, to do what I would have them do.

Nature seduces us by making purpose correspond to pleasure. And society seduces us by

making duty correspond to interest.

Filial piety is the first of the virtues. Too bad that most parents deprive us of the desire to
practise it.

34 Self-important virtues
Johnson remarked how ‘all this notion about benevolence arises from a man’s imagining himself
of more importance to others than he really is.’ My self-importance tells me that I have duties to
others, since they can’t do without me.

I’m sure that few achievements would lie beyond my scope, if I could be spared from the far
weightier work that it’s incumbent on me to do now. I could easily run the country. But who is
there that could run my stall? Each of us is like a mouse trapped on its treadmill. And we know
that it’s our own speed that keeps this vast world spinning.

The work-ethic is a moral screen which we use to hide or justify our greed and self-importance.

35 Maudlin mercy
When clemency is more than an anomaly, it is an iniquity. And where it grows to be a system, it
puts an end to justice. ‘A God all mercy,’ as Young wrote, ‘is a God unjust.’ Pity twists our
principles, but won’t set straight our conduct.

Justice works by mathematics, mercy acts out a lachrymose play. So justice looks cold, and
mercy heartfelt. The cry of mawkish people is always for more charity and less justice. And so
they will connive in inverting all right.

Fiction is full of stories of the ills that flow from requiting evil with evil. There has been no need
to delineate the mayhem that would result from requiting evil with good.
SELF-SACRIFICE

36 The calculating virtues of altruism

You ought to do some charity from time to time, to still your rankling remorse, burnish your good
name, and buy a superstitious indemnity against misadventure. But altruism can snap the bands
that are sewn by reciprocal self-interest. And egoism can knot the sturdiest bond of all, the bond
of common frailty which makes us feel how much we must lean on one another. ‘It is through
our mutual dependence,’ Voltaire reminds us, ‘that we are helpful to the species.’

Why do we put ourselves out in every sort of way save the one that might do real good? We
fetch others aid in the small things that they could do for themselves, while abandoning them to
drown in the deeps. But don’t we do the same in our own case? ‘Our friends,’ Hazlitt notes, ‘are
generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.’ They are
keen to give you things for which you have no use but which will cast them in a good light.

How nobly I would lay down my life, if the world were so ordered that I would lose nothing by it.

We may be willing to love our neighbours in an abstract way, but we won’t let them get the start
of us in any real contest.

How much low guile we use to steal a march on our rivals. Yet what childish tricks inveigle us to
lay down our lives for a cause that we scarcely care for.

37 The virtues of self-sacrifice

You affirm your self most powerfully and permanently by surrendering it for the sake of some
worthier end. You enlarge it by sacrificing it for the rest of the souls in whom it will continue to
live and who will continue to live through it. So you live on in a more extensive being, for which
you have no more need of your self as it now is. Like the athenians overrun by the persians, you
quit your land to save your country.

There are people who have such unique gifts, that it would be as unjust for them to act selflessly
as it is for the rest of us to act selfishly.

Some people forget themselves in a cause that gains them nothing. But they are no less selfish
for that, since it has come to make up such a large part of their self.

‘The man who is readily disposed to lay down his life,’ Pavese wrote, ‘is one who does not know
how else to give meaning to it.’ Live for others, and you will be spared the hard work of finding
your own strong reason to live.
38 Self-sacrifice sacrifices others
To forward our schemes, we are ready to damage our own happiness. And how much readier
we are to damage the happiness of others. Those who give up a little of their own good for a
cause won’t balk at giving up a great deal more of others’ good. And those who have the charge
of the welfare of many feel that they must have the right to disrupt scores of lives to safeguard it.
‘Self-sacrifice,’ says Shaw, ‘enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.’

Those who impair their interest to keep up their conceit don’t doubt that they are urged on by a
high principle. And when they rein in their self-regard to push their own self-interest, they judge
that it is self-surrendering duty that sets them on.

Those who are not doing just what they wish would have us believe that they are
magnanimously discharging their duty. And those who deem that they are discharging their duty
don’t doubt that they have a mandate to use any means they need to gain their ends.

In this age of the inviolate individual altruism means not the sacrifice of each for the good of all,
but the sacrifice of the common good for the good of a few.

39 Self is the idol of altruism

A code of selflessness will end up making us more self-obsessed. It sets up the human self as
the sole good, which all our acts must serve. The cosmos contains no richer gem. So by trying
to act altruistically we will grow more clamorously selfish, and more shrunken and sterile.

By encouraging people to act for the sake of other selves, you won’t induce them to act
unselfishly. You will merely teach them that the human self is the sole end worth acting for.

Altruism is just a less expeditious way of feeding the aggregate of selfish human wants. Self-
seeking may look unlovely, but unselfishness works inefficiently. I don’t know where my own
good lies. So how could I judge what might be good for others or how to come at it? ‘Be sure
that you give the poor the alms that they most need,’ Thoreau warned.

We cause ourselves so much harm by our passionate self-love, might it not be just as well for
our neighbours that we don’t love them in the same way?

40 Waste of altruism
The self is neither an end nor an enemy but a tool. Try to act philanthropically, and you blunt it.
Try to act disinterestedly, and you wear it out to aid other tools as if they were the true work.
Why should I feel for the pain of others? It’s no doubt as ugly, boring and sordid as my own.
There’s no reason to think that any other human self would be less ugly and worthless than my
own.

Treat your neighbours as if you loved them, and you’ll soon find out how loveable they are.

In this world it is the finer self that learns to sacrifice itself for the sake of the worse.

41 The egoism of altruism

I take it that I win high merit when I spend my own paltry self to help others just as paltry, and
that these paltry selves must be priceless because I have effaced my own self for their sake,
and that what is akin to me but not me must have an inestimable worth. To love your neighbour
as yourself would be to overvalue two objects at once. An egoist tramples on rival selves, and
an altruist tramples on all that is not self. Pride alone might inspire you to raise up something
that will overpass all self.

We praise dogs for their selflessness, because their selfish subservience plays up to our own
selfish need to lord it over them.

Even those who live for others live for those others who are their own, their family, friends, tribe
or nation.

Don’t the saints feel that the rest of us are on earth to serve as the grateful recipients of their
own virtues? How else could they ram their way to their beatific reward? ‘We are all here on
earth to help others,’ Auden wrote. ‘What the others are here for I don’t know.’ Such is the
benign circularity of self-surrender. The virtues always act in the service of some ego, whether it
is the prudence that picks out the best way to push our own self-interest, or the good will that
works on behalf of another’s.
PITY

Contents

Selfish pity

Imaginary pity

Indifference

Weapon of pity

SELFISH PITY

1 Pity is politeness
Passion is brusque to all but its beloved. But pity is a mere embellishment of our tact and
decorum. It is born in politeness. But often it’s kept warm and breathing by our hostility to those
whom we blame for inflicting the hurt.

Courtesy is a door which may let people in or shut them out. And affability is the least
troublesome way of holding people at a distance.

I shrink from alluding to painful subjects, not because I don’t wish to cause pain to others, but
because it would embarrass me to show how faintly I care for their pain. All the care that I am
willing to show most people is to conceal how little I care for them.

How much empathy you need in order to make your fellows think that you feel empathy for
them.

I show courtesy by pretending to notice the frailties of others no more than I do my own. And I
prove my empathy by pretending to feel their anguish as much as I in fact feel my own.

2 Shamed into pity

Shame achieves more than sympathy. I show solicitude for the distress of others, since I would
feel embarrassed not to. A tramp who is not shameless enough to shame us into charity will
soon starve. I don’t forgive beggars for what they take from me, be it my small change or my
overlarge self-respect. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘it annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not
to give to them.’ What misgivings we get in return for our giving.

3 Empathy
We make too much of the compassion that others feel for us. So we trust that we can cause
them a sharp twinge by bemoaning our own troubles. Empathize with those around you, and
what you learn is how indifferently they feel for you. Johnson points out that whosoever
‘considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of
others is attracted by himself.’

Egoists rage at the callousness of the world, when they find that it fails to break its heart over
their own sorrows.

Empathy locks us inside our own selves. It is mindless action that makes us one. Feel the pain
of others too much, and you become nothing but a pain to them.

We grow hard-hearted to the ordeals of others, either because we have not had to go through
the same ourselves, or else because we have. We make light of them, because we have had no
occasion to feel how heavy they are, or because we have weighed them and found that we
could bear them with ease, and so we think that others should as well.

I don’t accept that any trouble that I am not prone to can be quite real. The maladies that I suffer
from are unmerited afflictions. But the maladies that others suffer from are defects which they
have been too weak to set right.

4 Self-pity
When howling misery rains down on me, I rush to shelter in the squat cabin of people’s concern,
which I’m keen to quit as soon as the hurricane is past. Though I’m too smug to feel sorry for
myself, now and then I act as if I do, as a snare to glean the aid or attention of others.

Our self-pity is a performance which we put on for others as much as our pity for others is a
performance which we put on for ourselves.

You have dipped low indeed, if you can find a narcotic in the pity of others, or need to in your
own.

I don’t feel sorry for others, because I care too frigidly for their troubles. And I don’t feel sorry for
myself, because I think too warmly of my own success.

Our own imaginary woes torment us. But the real woes of others scarcely touch us.
Sensitive egoists, such as Rousseau or Shelley, can find grounds for self-pity even in the
sorrows that they cause others.

5 The self-pity of the powerful

Ruthless people pity themselves for the expedient wrongs that they have had to do in the
service of others. The most cold-blooded potentates are also the most maudlin and self-pitying.
And when they rise to a post far above their deserving, they resent the world for placing such
blocks in their way.

The strong pity themselves for having to bear the burdens of the weak. And the weak pity
themselves for having to put up with the oppressions of the strong.

The great ones of the earth, when they are not exulting in their triumphs, are wallowing in self-
pity.

Those who pay a high price to push their overweening egoism are sure that they are martyrs to
good will. And since they think they have reaped no gain from their selfishness, they conclude
that they must be behaving unselfishly.

Some people are obnoxious when they are strong, since they know that they have the strength
to press their claims. And they are just as obnoxious when they are weak, since they feel that
their weakness gives them the right to make such claims. If they can’t tyrannize over you with
their force, they’ll try to do it by playing on your pity.

6 We pity to savour our own good fortune

When I condole with someone, I add the balm of an unsullied conscience and the piquancy of a
dram of discomfort to my contemplation of their distress, which I would elsewise not feel at all.

The cold flint of our pity for others strikes few sparks for them. But it whets the pleasure that we
take in our own good fortune.

I give alms as a small toll to ride on the highway of my self-approval.

Some of us holiday in compassion as an emotional tourism through others’ anguish, which

takes us on a brief scenic bypass from the broad highway of our uncaring. Your pity brings you
no nearer to the heartbroken. It cheers you that you are so far above them.

You need more fortitude to deal with clear fortune and wealth than with cloudy fortune and want,
say the fortunate and wealthy. Sweet are the uses of other people’s adversity. It may take more
virtue to bear prosperity than tribulation, but only when the prosperity is another’s.
Our pity for others helps us to savour our own prosperity, as a twinge of remorse now and then
helps us to savour how we’ve got away with the wrongs we have done.

7 The revenge of pity

Some poltroons take revenge on their enemies by pretending to commiserate with their mishaps
as an excuse to keep harping on them. They drip a rivulet of tenderness on them to try to drown
them in their own superiority. True consideration, like true agony, holds its tongue.

Pity is a sly way of triumphing over an enemy whom we were obliged to treat as a friend, or who
has fallen so low as to be no longer worth our hate.

Pity is condescension with a good conscience.

We don’t waste our pity on our enemies. We save that subtle poison to serve up to our friends.

Cruelty is a tastier dish when it’s spiced with pity for its victims.

8 The powerless are pitiless

The powerless are pitiless once they get their hands on power. Now it’s their turn to do to others
as they have been done to.

The heartsore have no compassion, since they are too caught up in their own woes. And the
victorious have no compassion, since they have to press on to one more victory. Prosperity
makes me careless of the troubles of others, and adversity enwraps me in my own. ‘Misfortune,’
Flaubert says, ‘renders us selfish and vicious and sottish.’

IMAGINARY PITY

9 Imagined pity
‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,’ claimed Shelley, who had so much
empathetic imagination, and did so much unimagined harm. Imagination doesn’t move us to
pity, though it may tell us that it has. Or else it does, and pity is no more real than a daydream.
Pity may begin in the imagination, but that’s where most of it ends too.

It’s easy to see how much others are suffering, but it’s hard to accept that it matters. People can
know about such a range of things, but there is just one thing they can care for, their own selves
and what is theirs. And if they care for anything larger, they can do so only by making it part of
their self.

Most people see more and care less than they let on.
My self-interest has a far busier imagination than my sluggish sympathy. Our brains never rest
from hatching plans to glut the cravings of our hearts, but they soon tire of the thought of others’
pain.

The oppressed are so stupefied by their oppression, that they think that if their oppressors but
knew their stories, they would not treat them as they do.

Moralists bleat that a bloodthirsty tormentor dismembers his victims because he lacks the
imagination to feel how sorely they smart. But is it not they who lack the imagination to grasp
how little he cares?

10 Sympathy and the senses

I feel no pity for the sorrows of others if I don’t see them sorrowing. Out of sight is out of
sympathy. The virus of compassion is contracted through the eye. And often it is cured through
the ear or nose.

Pity is a fleeting response to visual images, but justice is a cool virtue of slow reason. And in our
world of speed, pity is more eye-catching than justice.

Visual mass-media serve as sympathy superconductors because they are so cold. I pity the
picturesque, but I pass by the needy. And it is pictures that wring our hearts more than people.
It’s not our own sympathetic imagination but external images that stir our feelings.

11 The melodrama of our compassion

I love my own warm-hearted gestures more than I do the people that they claim to help. These
play the part of mere wordless extras in my pageant of affecting fellow-feeling. When I pity, I
stage an edifying mime of my own moods. And I watch that so that I won’t have to watch the
ugly writhings of the afflicted. My sensitiveness starts me blubbering, but then succours me for
the anguish of others which I felt so weakly. My sobs and convulsions drown out their pain. How
could I make out their agonies through the haze of my tears?

How delicious tears are, so long as it’s not our own woes that force them from us.

Our egoism appears luridly illumined in the gloom of another’s death. What lament would speak
so eloquently, if it spoke solely of the dead?

We are so sensitive, that we end up pitying ourselves for having to endure the sight of so much
piteous woe.
Other people’s woes are mere comic relief for the serious drama of our own. Humour is the best
medicine that we have to deal with the ills of others, or at least it is the one that we use most
frequently.

12 We pity to display our sensitivity

Most of our pity lasts just long enough for us to mouth how much we feel it. When people tell
you how their heart bleeds for someone in pain, it is for themselves that they are seeking pity or
praise.

We always care too late, when we have no cure left but words. It’s then that we can flaunt our
stricken artistry and air our agonized perplexity. The wounds that we feel for others speak
eloquently, but they don’t bleed.

The deaths of others give us one more opening to flaunt our own sensitivity. Their death is an
event in our life, not in their own. We shrink it to a drama in which we play the starring role.
When others are in pain, we declare how our hearts bleed for them. And when they are
wronged, we act out our righteous ire. And when they die, we play up our own loss and grief.
When we mention their troubles, don’t we pay more heed to how we sound than to how they
suffer? We sum up in a glib phrase a life that cost such deep pangs to live. The deaths of others
are mere gossip for us.

We are quick to feel pity, so as to throw into relief our own admirable rectitude.

Even your death does not belong to you. As soon as it comes, they snatch it, and use it to
bedizen their own grief and pity.

13 Squeamishness
We are the only animals that have a heart to feel pity. So why have we made such a pitiless
world?

It may be that the anguish of others stings me so much because I don’t wish to do a thing to
mend it. ‘We all like to see people in trouble,’ says Twain, ‘if it doesn’t cost us anything.’

The squeamish think that they are kind-hearted, and the hard-hearted think that they are clear-
eyed.

Some of us fancy that we feel an unselfish concern for the troubles of others, because we feel
so selfishly sensitive to our own, as invalids show an anxious concern for anyone who might be
prone to the same ailment that they are. By our concern for others we signal our fears for
ourselves. Our heart bleeds for those who die of a disease that we fear we might die of.
People view their hearts from the inside out. So their squeamishness feels to them like pity for
others. They hold that others should not have to put up with the blows that they could not bear.
Their tender egoism deems that all must be as nerveless as they are. Would they be so
solicitous to help the sorrowful, if it didn’t give them hope that they could help themselves?

14 Squeamish sensitivity
Unhappy people resent the happy for their heartlessness. But their own kindliness may be a
mere symptom of their sorrow. They vibrate to the world’s woes, because they can’t do anything
else, or else to turn their thoughts from their own woes.

So sensitive are we to the pain of others, that we have to shut our eyes and ears to it.

Selfish people pity themselves for feeling the pain of others too intensely. And frivolous people
pity themselves for taking things too much to heart.

If people ached for the troubles of others half as much as they claim, how could they bear to
live? And if they loved others as much as they love themselves, would they not be crushed by
all the woes of the world, which they can’t lighten by an ounce? It would, as Johnson points out,
be ‘misery to no purpose.’ Lucky there’s not much risk of us falling for that.

INDIFFERENCE

15 The ocean of indifference

We have so many ways of not caring and so many ways of seeming to. Behind the shining
mildness of good people you glimpse their glazed indifference. Beneath pity’s sparkling surface
rolls a cold unmoving ocean. Our fine feelings refresh us like oases of care in the parched
wastelands of our unconcern.

Indifference and selfishness are such innate instincts, that we need years of training to perform
the least act of self-denial. And the utmost consideration we can show most people is to conceal
from them how little we care about their woes.

Insensitivity is our prevailing moral habit, as self-interest is our prevailing motivator. We want so
much for ourselves, what do we have to spare for others but our stony blankness?

I snore through the pain of others, and wake for my own. The racked soul emits a shriek which
is pitched too high for our dinned ears to hear. The disciples sleep on in Gethsemane.
When ruffled by the sorrows of others, we find in our hearts a deep reservoir of apathy on which
to draw. When anything ripples our flat indifference, we calm it with yet more indifference. ‘We
all have sufficient strength to brook the misfortunes of others,’ as La Rochefoucauld showed.

The giant agony of the world is matched by its giant indifference.

Pity is one luxury that the rich are happy to deny themselves.

16 Reluctant sympathy
We dare not go near those who stink of misery, for fear that they might taint our scented
gladness. We step gingerly over the puddle of their spilt sorrow, which oozes so unbecomingly.
It seeps from their pores like a fetid sweat, and we hold our nose as we pass by. And so we
sprinkle a few drops of pity to perfume our hardheartedness or to cover up our repugnance.

Pity is not a tolerant virtue. It exacts strict terms before it goes to work. Before I lend my fellow-
feeling to those who are in trouble, I stipulate that they pledge the collateral of not presuming to
equal me and the interest of regularly acknowledging their inferiority.

‘Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery,’ as Gibbon points out. It is killed by time,
remoteness and each recurrence. ‘Death or distance soon consumes them,’ as Hopkins wrote.
A far-off catastrophe merely piques our flippant curiosity, and a drawn-out one palls. ‘How much
does a bloodbath in China,’ asked Pessoa, ‘discomfort the most noble of us?’ And even what is
close-by fails to come very close to us. ‘I doubt whether I can decently admit,’ Montaigne
doesn’t quite lament, ‘how little it has cost my repose to have passed more than half my days
during the collapse of my country.’

I decorously try to hide how little sympathy I feel for my fellows by avouching that I have used it
up by feeling so much.

17 Fizzling pity
Our sympathies are selective, capricious, brittle, short-lived, amoral, easy to manipulate, and
proud of their softness. They lack the gravity of selfishness. Though they look bright on our
horizon, most of them burn up like meteors before they reach our dark hearts.

Pity flickers with a thin flame which lends us a brief warmth, but fizzles before it has time to thaw
the frozen sufferer. It acts on us like ice. It may at first seem hot to the touch, but I let go of it
before I feel how cold it is. ‘We talk of goodness,’ Renard says, ‘brim-full of beneficence that
melts within us before, alas, we do any good to others.’
If tried too far, pity sickens into a queasy repulsion. Those who suffer unduly lose our
commiseration, which soon curdles into blame. Why did they not take steps to get clear of the
cause of their woe?

When you leave your resentment to stand, it grows more and more sour. But when you leave
your compassion to stand, it just goes flat.

WEAPON OF PITY

18 Indignant pity
Compassion fires us to hate as well as to love. Spite stirs us to pity those who have been
persecuted by our enemies. And pity incenses us with their persecutors. We don’t doubt that we
feel the pain of the oppressed, because we are so indignant with their oppressors. We pick up a
lot of our sympathies by moralizing our antipathies. And we mistake the blaze of our righteous
fury for the glow of real kind-heartedness.

Pity and vengefulness are more often allies than adversaries. We burn to avenge injuries more
than to remedy them, and to bring down the powerful more than to raise up the downtrodden.
We develop compassion like a glossy photograph out of the scowling negative of our
malignancy. So we feel sorry for people not because they suffer what we would hate to, but
because they are wrestling with those whom we hate.

19 Polemical pity
Our pity is in great part polemical. It is as much a shot aimed at our enemy as a salve that we
tender to the sick.

The woes of others are one of the best ways we know to prove our point.

Our creed, which we don’t quite believe in, frames a large portion of our sympathies, which we
don’t quite feel.

The circumference of our sympathy is exceedingly small. Cross the street, and you don’t know
the people there, and don’t care what they might be suffering.

Those who hold that all men and women are born equal can at least feel superior to the swine
who don’t. How nasty other people’s preconceived views are. And how I frown on those who
lack my own fine moral vigilance. Half our empathy would melt, if we weren’t so sure that it
would vex those whose prejudices smell so much more rank than our own.
A mob is both maudlin and punitive. It loves to pity almost as much as it loves to punish. But
what it most loves to pity is its own hard lot. And then its first impulse is to take vengeance on its
foes. And it will bow down to demagogues who prove their pity for it by persecuting its enemies.

Indifference is the best we can hope for from others. ‘When others start to think of you,’ Céline
wrote, ‘it’s to figure out how to torture you.’ This seems to hold for the gods and fortune most of
all.

20 Pointless pity
Most people are too pitifully pleased with themselves to need your pity when they meet with a
reverse. And if they do need pity, they are all too quick to provide it for themselves. They know
so little of their hearts and think so much of their merits, that your sympathy for them is as
gratuitous as your revenge would be ineffectual. Pity and revenge are both vain, since most
people are too obtuse to feel the subtle pangs that they ought. Our vengeance, like our
tenderness, is too crude or too fine to impinge on the one whom it means to touch. Our soft
heart feels betrayed, when those whom it pities forsake their anguish. What right have they to
suffer less than we deem they should?

We love to find hurt souls on whom we can lavish our unavailing pity. If it could do them any
good, we might not be so keen to lend it to them.

I don’t need others to pity me when I fail, since I never fail to spare myself the truth.
CONSCIENCE

Contents

Guilt

Shame and pride

Convention

Crafty confessions

Self-justification

Innocence

Forgiveness

GUILT
We preserve our good conscience by practising our bad faith.

Conscience, as Freud says, may chide you like a parent when you are young. But as you grow
up you have to train it to behave like a good child, to be seen and not heard.

The one weight harder to bear than our undeserved troubles is our deserved ones. So it’s a
good thing that we don’t admit that we deserve any of them.

Remorse is one of the devil’s best ruses. Owning up to your weak points may be the first step
on the way to correcting them. But it may just as well be the last excuse for not doing so.

Bad conscience is something that we judge our enemies ought to suffer from, though we
suspect they don’t, and that we ought not suffer from, though we assume we do. And yet no one
suffers much from it at all. And even if we do feel conscience-stricken, we’re not about to give
up what we have gained by our bad deeds.

Guilt is a snare which the saints use to make the goats feel guilty.
1 Conscience and magic
Some people have scruples and inhibitions but no conscience, as some have gaudy
superstitions but no faith.

Superstitious people may feel more guilt for an unintended wrong than for an intentional one.
They justify their intended wrongs as fair retributions against their foes. But if they can do harm
unwittingly, they fear that they in turn might be punished despite their blamelessness. They are
ready to sponge every sin from their accounts. But their chance misdeeds seem like someone
else’s doing, and so they are less predisposed to wink at them.

Conscience is feeble, except when it grows into a superstitious dread of real retribution.

You may feel less guilt for the wrongs that you have done than for those that you dread you
might do, which you fear will meet with a proportionately indeterminate punishment. ‘Present
fears are less than horrible imaginings.’

Guilt and remorse are like ghosts. Many of us claim to have been haunted by them at some
time, but few show any lasting effects.

Conscience is a small homeopathic dose of mental discomfort, which we trust will keep off the
real retribution that we fear.

2 The melodrama of conscience

It may be that people have crises of conscience only in books, though even in life they claim
that they do. When cleft between one temptation and another, they feel that they are torn
between desire and duty. Writers dramatize the moral choices which few of us have occasion to
make in life.

Most conscience has its place in literature and not in life. And most guilt has its place in magic
and not in morality. We superstitiously fear that a non-existent cause might recoil on us as a real
effect.

Moral play-actors are as keen to take on a confected guilt as they are to shirk a real one. They
force the note of their self-reproach, in order to play up their sensitivity.

3 Surface conscience
The sins that you hide don’t fester and poison you. They dry out, and crumble to dust, and do
you no harm.
‘He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence,’ according to Blake. But those who do act let
loose a far worse plague. They add a link to the chain of evils which will draw more evils on. We
are creatures of the surface, and what we don’t act out soon fades and turns to dust.

SHAME AND PRIDE

4 Shame and conscience

Morally dainty people grow furtive and mistrustful of their own fine intentions. And they feel
shame for some of their best deeds, though they still hope to win praise for them.

Why do some people go to such lengths to avoid feeling the gratitude or guilt which wouldn’t
oblige or inhibit them anyway? Pious monsters lumber themselves almost as heavily by
pretending to be held in check by their scruples as they would if they actually were.

Shame, modesty and justice are forthright but shallow. And guilt, humility and mercy are deep
but dishonest.

I own up to acts that have shamed me, to show that they are nothing to me and so ought to be
nothing to everyone else as well.

5 Unforgiving shame
I don’t forgive those before whom I let my faults show. ‘You glimpsed his weak point,’ as Schiller
wrote, ‘and he won’t forgive you.’ I pardon people for the wrong they do me sooner than for the
stupid things that they see me doing. We are readier to forgive them for mistreating us than we
are for witnessing us misbehaving. They are guilty of seeing me at my worst, and my shame
gives them no quarter. ‘We often forgive those who bore us,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘but we
can’t forgive those whom we bore.’ The worst fault that others can have is being aware of our
own.

Those who do unconscionable evil feel more easy in their minds than those to whom it has been
done. These it coats in a sticky scurf, which they fear is apparent to all, whereas its agents
deem that they have dealt out a cleansing justice. It is the victims who wake with the clammy
horror of guilt upon them. Evil is bold, eager to push its claims for justice, and keen to get the
good things that are due to it. Innocence is shamefaced and knows that it is not innocent.

Those who feel that they have been shamed are prepared to act shamelessly to win back their
honour. And then they deserve real shame.
6 The pride of conscience
You need to learn what you have the right to be modest about, what you have the right to judge,
what to praise, and what to excuse. Do any of us have a right to feel penitent for the blood-
soaked crimes of the past, if we had no part in committing them? To do so would be a mere
self-glorifying pose.

It may taste as sweet to confess as it does to crow. And it may be as presumptuous to pardon
as it is to convict.

Monsters of vainglory, such as Rousseau, love to show off their welts and sins. It’s only great
egotists that feel great guilt. They swell the importance of all that pertains to them, even the
wrongs that they have done. Saints lash themselves for their sins, but not one of them is humble
enough to see that neither they nor their sins are of the least importance.

People must take some pride in the misdeeds that they willingly confess. Those who publicize
their guilt must preen themselves on it. ‘We would rather speak ill of ourselves,’ as La
Rochefoucauld points out, ‘than not talk of ourselves at all.’

7 The vanity of conscience

Bad conscience is the inflammation of our self-regard caused by a virus of disapproval from
outside us.

We freely own up to faults that we would crimson to have witnessed. ‘People,’ as Canetti wrote,
‘love as self-recognition what they hate as accusation.’ We accuse ourselves of flaws that we
would be incensed to be accused of by anyone else, since we judge ourselves by our own strict
standard, while they judge us by their lax one. ‘What I say to myself, what I din into myself,’
Valéry remarked, ‘I cannot bear to be said by someone else.’ I know full well that I am a fool,
and I don’t mind too much if others think so. But I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should
say so.

Conscience is indignant to be accused of the wrongs for which it pretends to feel guilty.

‘The human being,’ as Twain said, ‘always looks down when he is examining another person’s
standard.’ We may see quite well that we are despicable, yet still detest those who dare to
second our view. Those who make a show of their humility or penitence would fume if anyone
else were to treat them as they claim to believe is their due.

CONVENTION
8 Conscience is the voice of custom
Conscience is not the voice of nature or of God. It is the dull hum of importunate custom.

The shortest way to stay in touch with popular prejudice is by listening to your conscience.

Custom and conditioning weave for us a fine mesh of conscience when we’re young, which our
impudence and self-interest then unpick as we grow older.

There is next to nothing that conscience can’t be trained to condone or to condemn.

Conscience is like language. You are not born with it. You have to be taught it. It fluctuates from
age to age and from place to place. And each of us speaks it with our own accent and intonation
and with more or less fluency.

Most people don’t feel the need to confess, as Goethe claimed they do. They confess only if
they have been conditioned or constrained to. And they choose which sins they will own up to,
and which they won’t, and to whom they do it.

Conscience plays the same part in our moral life as common sense does in our mental life. We
think them instinctive and the same in all times and places. But they just keep us to the safe
path laid down by custom.

9 Conscience, the guard of habit

Conscience stands as the guardian of our habits. It learns to salute the wrongs that you do each
day. And it won’t meddle with you, so long as you don’t depart from your fixed ways. Wilde
notes how ‘the sin that we had done once and with loathing, we would do many times and with
joy.’

You cease to feel shame for shameful deeds, if you do them often enough. It’s the wrongs that
you do only once in a while that make you feel uncomfortable.

The moral sense is a mirror. I gaze into it, and approve of what I look like most of the time, and
fret only when I swerve from this.

If you do our duty long enough, it becomes a joy. And if you practise injustice long enough, it
becomes your duty.

10 Power has no conscience

How could those who wield power afford to feel keen remorse? They want to control as much as
they can, while feeling answerable for as little as they must. If you are the sort that can repent
the harm that you do, then you are not cut out to do great deeds. Those who think themselves
indispensable never hold themselves accountable.

No victor has an unquiet conscience. But a few have grown so rich on their depredations that
they can spend a bit of their surplus on the pretence that they do. And no more do the defeated
have a bad conscience, though they may not find it quite so easy to hold on to their faith.

Notorious reprobates, such as Speer, though cognizant that all curse them for their crimes and
nerved to display their contrition, here and there let slip that they don’t quite grasp or recall what
it is they are supposed to feel so repentant for.

CRAFTY CONFESSIONS

11 The yield of conscience

My conscience, like an attentive accountant, tots up the debts that others owe me to the last
cent. A well-groomed sense of right and wrong is more respectable and profitable than none at
all.

A clear conscience costs so little, who would be without one? And who would be at the expense
of having a bad conscience, when a good one comes free?

The cudgelled are fond of recanting. It takes their mind off their defeat. And when their
conquerors are moralizing, as most of them are, then they may profit by it as well.

Our conscience doesn’t trouble us much, so long as we judge that our bad deeds won’t harm
our honour or interest.

12 Confessing to escape the consequences

It’s advisable to blame yourself for a small fault now and then, so that others won’t blame you
for your big ones. I pity myself in the hope that others will do the same, and I accuse myself in
the hope that they won’t. So I pretend that I can’t spare myself, as a bait to get them to spare
me.

I grant facts, so as to muddy my motives. I acknowledge what I have done, as a ploy to

misrepresent why I did it.

We confess in the hope of evading blame for the wrongs that we fear might be laid to our
charge. I admit my misdeeds, not because I feel that I ought to be punished, but because I trust
that I will be pardoned. So I own up to the derelictions that I know will be excused to the people
who I know will excuse me.
We are calculating even in our confessions. In my unbridled lust to lay bare my sins I still take
care to confide to those who love me too much to use my admissions to shame me or else to
those who could have no occasion to do so.

I don’t confess my real faults, because I know myself so little, or because what compels me to
confess knows the world too well. How mortifying to find out what were the real motives that
drove me to repent or mend.

SELF-JUSTIFICATION

13 Ineffective conscience
I feel morally healthier for having caught a mild dose of queasy conscience once in a while. But
my moral constitution proves more hale than I might have hoped. I’m too quick to recuperate
when my fits of heart-burning are past.

To leave wrongdoers to the stings of their conscience is to let them slumber on a feather bed.

When someone has done you wrong, the last thing they feel the need of is your forgiveness.
And the best thing you can hope for from them is that they will pardon you.

Conscience is a still small voice, because it has grown hoarse with repeating admonitions to
which we pay no heed.

The pure and upright treat their foes with punctilious fairness, that they might be free to curse
them with an easy conscience. Or else they claim to be encumbered by principles so much
more stringent, that they have a right to act unscrupulously so as to even the odds.

Some few may have died of a broken heart, but are there any who have died of a guilty
conscience? More incredible than any of the Gospels’ miracles is the claim that Judas killed
himself from remorse.

14 Conscience does not constrain us

Our cowardice tells us that we are constrained by conscience more often than conscience
makes us cowards.

My conscience likes to scold me, since it is too weak to stop me. I’m willing to lend it a hearing,
on the proviso that it comes too late to hold me back from doing what I want to. I bear with its
stings, but kick back when it tries to put a brake on me. And I chafe at its prohibitions, but
lounge in its regrets. I leave it its teeth, but draw its venom. So when it bites me, I feel more
righteous and more alive.
In the carrying out of our evil schemes, our right hand never knows what our left hand is doing.

15 The confidence of justification

People hide their mean acts and motives in the dark. And yet they have no doubt that they
would be vindicated if they were judged by God who knows their secret springs. If he showed
forth their true value they would be seated at his right hand. They may think that they want to be
saved, but all they want is to be rewarded.

My scrupulosity must have the eyesight of a lynx, since it can make out none but my most
minute flaws. It penalizes my small misdemeanours punctiliously, but my large ones leniently.

Having repented so often to no avail, this time I feel sure that I can make a fresh start. My
imperfections reassure me that one day I will grow perfect.

If I feel contrite, then I must have a keen conscience. And if I have a keen conscience, then I
can safely do as I like. I’m licensed to do what I wish, since I can count on the pricks of my
compunction to hold me back from doing wrong.

16 The rationalizing animal

A human being is not a rational but a rationalizing animal. We strain our topmost potentialities to
extenuate our lowest compulsions and to find fine pretexts to whitewash our foul desires.

The pure and upright, unlike boldfaced scoundrels, can’t bring themselves to do wrong if they
don’t have a high-sounding rationale to make it seem right. But they never have to go far out of
their way to find one.

We use our conscience to find rationalizations for our own sins and to smell out the sins of our
neighbours. Those who have a strict conscience are never at a loss for reasons to excuse what
they do or to condemn what their enemies do.

Our faith in our own clean conscience is incorrigible.

17 Exceptions and exemplars

When people are deliberating on how they ought to act, they take it that they are exceptions to
the moral code. But when they judge how they have acted, they feel sure that they are
exemplars of it. ‘Every man, in his own opinion,’ Hazlitt says, ‘forms an exception to the ordinary
rules of morality.’ And we judge that we form exceptions to the rules because we fulfil them so
faultlessly.
We frame strict statutes of conscience, but then suspend their operation. We treat each of our
needs as a state of emergency. And the need may spring from a crushing affliction or from a
compelling ambition. We use all occasions to excuse us from abiding by the rules that we have
laid down for ourselves. And we use our own destiny as a pretext to exempt us from the rules
that the world has laid down for us.

I congratulate myself that I have such unique faculties, and excuse myself that I have common
faults.

18 Conscience as judge and defender

Conscience ordains the code by which it is your duty to live. But it also acts as your advocate to
abet you in circumventing it. If acute enough to arraign you, it will be astute enough to acquit
you. ‘The moral sense,’ Twain says, ‘enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it.’
Conscience makes casuists of us all. When we feel a slight uneasiness that we may have done
wrong, conscience lifts up its voice to plead our case.

We condemn others because we do not know them. And we acquit ourselves for the like
reason.

Our conscience pleads our suit more cleverly than we know. But it rarely needs to plead it as
cleverly as it does.

Conscience may lay an accusation against you once in a while, but it rarely comes to trial.
Charges dismissed.

Righteous people are like intransigent autocracies. They have admirable principles but no
division of powers and no dissent. Their remorse acts like a conscientious but compliant tribunal
in a state where the executive supervises the judiciary. And the real guilty party is no doubt
some hostile foreign power.

How could God be guilty, since who is there to punish him?

19 Conscience justifies us by blaming others

What we hate in others we love in ourselves. The ruthless self-seeking that we detest in them is
the selfless assertion of the right on which we preen ourselves.

I try to blot out the wrongs that I do by reproaching others. I reconcile myself to the ill-treatment I
mete out to them by believing that it is they who are to blame for it. Our conscience soon
convinces us that we must be the victims of the harm we do to others, and that they are the
cause both of our woes and their own.
Those who are threshed by shame at their own acts are far more affronted by the vileness of
others. Most of us keep a sense of blame parked where our sense of guilt ought to be.

If it weren’t for our fastidious conscience, how would we know who to blame for all the wrongs
that we do? Each of us is more sinned against than sinning. If we were not, how would we
justify all the sinning that we do?

We won’t lift a finger to see that right is done. But how we love to rail when others fail to do it.

I do my duty, and one of my most pleasant duties is to lash you for failing so egregiously to do
yours. And I give my own back a stripe now and then, in order to justify flaying others.

20 Our conscience is strict with others

Those who live under the eye of their own unsparing conscience will sharply spy through the
motives of others and find fault with them. Our scrupulousness makes us more punitive than
forbearing. Self-accusers whip others’ backs far more spitefully than they do their own. If there
is as much evil in the world as our conscience tells us we have done, then it must be a sinless
Eden. But if there is as much as our indignation tells us others are guilty of, it must be the pit of
hell.

Conscience teaches us to be severe to others for their bad deeds, and indulgent to ourselves
for our fine intentions.

I have no doubt that my conscience is strict with me, since it judges the rest of the world with
such severity. I’ve trained it to bark only at strangers.

We, who are all guilty, blaze with indignation when the guilty go free.

The self-righteous feel they have a duty to behave obnoxiously to those who are of no use to
them, as a way to teach them how depraved they are.

Most of us are cynical about the motives of others because we are so sanctimonious about our
own.

Our conscience magnifies our grievances as much as it minimizes our sins.

21 The satanic delights of self-righteousness

If to have an unspotted conscience is peace, then no one can be more at peace than an
evildoer. The damned in the pit of fire will be refreshed by cool springs of self-approval, though
they seethe with righteous fury at the unjustness of their fate.
What sore grievances I would scarcely feel, if there weren’t someone that I could upbraid for
them. And what grave self-inflicted harms I would scarcely regret, if I can hold someone else
accountable for them.

People do such cruel things, not when they try to act like angels, but when they assume that
they are angels, and try to force others to live up to their own high pretentions.

The scruples of a prim swindler don’t stay silent, but rattle with righteous anger, like the press in
nazi Germany.

22 The pleasures of indignation

We would rather reprove a few people a lot than a lot of people a little. We want to believe that
people are luridly though sporadically cruel, but not routinely cold-hearted. And we flay a few
scheming hypocrites, so that we won’t have to admit that most of us lie to ourselves all the time.
Our indignation shines more bright and gives us more warmth, if it flames narrow and fervent.

For every gram of remorse in the world, there must be a ton of fault-finding indignation. And for
every one person who feels the sting of self-blame, there must be a thousand who burn for
retribution.

Beware of people who seem much concerned with good and evil. They are prone to think good
of themselves and evil of others.

23 Conscience makes us cruel

Self-righteous people don’t suffer from bad conscience. But how they make others suffer, so
that they won’t have to. They act shamelessly, so as not to see that they should be ashamed of
themselves. How much wrong they do, to prove that they are in the right. And they keep their
conscience clean by doing dirt on others.

Conscience is not thwarted instinct turned inward against ourselves, as Nietzsche claims. It is
our thwarted drives trying to take revenge on others. The thorns of conscience all point outward.

Only those who have, lies a very strong conscience are driven to do real evil.

Like all who have empty bellies, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are prone to
have bad tempers. And they find it thin and tasteless, if it’s not spiked with the blood of their
enemies. Get mixed up with the saints, and you can thank God it you escape with your skin.

One of the favourite occupations of the saints is proving that their fellow saints are possessed
by the devil and deserve to be damned.
Righteous people resent their own good deeds almost as much as others’ bad ones. You’re
lucky if your virtues don’t sour your temper.

24 Indignant sadists
The most delicious way to feel moral is by lashing the faults of others. And that is the cruellest
form of immorality.

There are few injustices that would much trouble us, if there weren’t some enemy whom we
could tear to shreds for causing them.

Indignation is colic and conceit secreted as a moraline acid. And the righteous hope to ease
their own discomfort by vomiting their bile on others.

Moral fanatics are sure that their victims will smart under the lash of their eloquent indignation.
They must think that those beasts have the conscience which they themselves lack.

Our conscience grazes us so that we can gash others.

25 Flattering conscience
I accuse myself of the most gratifying faults. And I find myself wanting in the traits that no one
would claim to want. I mutter that my worst flaw is that I am too modest, and that I lack the
slyness to tell the lies that would serve my own needs. You have not completed your moral
schooling, till you have learnt the trick of idealizing your own motives. Vanity sews tunics for our
moral nakedness. ‘All a man’s ways are clean in his own eyes.’

We may be frankly ashamed of ourselves, yet we still do all that we can to imprint the blotched
image of ourselves on the world.

We don’t so much conclude that we must be good people because we do good works. Rather
we take it that what we do must be good because we are such good people. So there’s no need
for us to do much good at all. And we don’t so much love or hate others on account of what they
do, we love or hate what they do because it is they that do it.

When someone dies whom I loved but left in the lurch, I take comfort that I did all I could to help
them. I rarely reproach myself for the wrongs that I have done to one who is no longer here to
reproach me.

INNOCENCE
26 Goodbye to innocence
Why in the wake of each atrocity do we take refuge in the cordial lie that we were all innocent
and undefiled before it took place? How many times have we lost our moral virginity, and how
many times has it been miraculously restored? The saints love to paw and slobber over lost
innocence, so that they can anathematize the unclean who have robbed us of it and fire us up to
take revenge on them.

Your moral childhood comes to a close when you find out that people may not be blameless just
because they have been misused, and that the oppressed may behave as nastily as their
oppressors.

People are too childishly pleased with the childish toys that they get when they grow up to
mourn the loss of their childhood innocence.

A grownup has no right to be innocent.

It is the perverse who retain their childlike innocence. They have not yet found out how dear
evildoing will cost them and how viciously the world will punish them for flouting decent worldly
interests. Or else they are so mad that they don’t care.

If there were a true saint on earth, he or she would stink in the fastidious nostrils of the
righteous.

Power, we say, corrupts. And since there is always someone with more power than us, we know
that we must be innocent. And so we must have the right to go on exercising our brutal power.

27 We know not what we do

We are all irredeemably guilty, since we know not what we do, though we so easily could. What
absolution can there be for those who are so negligent? And while we may not know what we
do, we know all too well how to get away with it. We pretend not to know, so that we don’t have
to care. And we don’t want to acknowledge how much our deeds cost others, because we want
to be free to keep on doing them. It is a devious kind of ingenuousness. ‘Ignorance is not
innocence but sin,’ as Browning wrote. Our sheepish innocence is a crafty ignorance, which
spares us an appalled awakening to the harm that we do.

You can’t be innocent if you are dishonest. And yet if you are honest, you would see that you
are not innocent.

Each of us is shrewd enough to hold to a naive faith in our own innocence.

We don’t care what real carnage we cause, so long as it is not set before our eyes. Our decency
demands that we cover up the foul consequences of our deeds. A good society is careful to
conceal the brutal force on which its wealth rests. But there’s no need for it to be so fussy, since
its citizens don’t much mind.

We all have a bad enough memory to keep up our good conscience.

Anyone who has a clear moral conscience must have an underdeveloped intellectual
conscience.

FORGIVENESS

28 Pardon’s the word to all

In the end all must be forgiven. Don’t we each need something or someone more than we are
needed?

Even those who pardon their enemies may have their hearts parched by the day-to-day
vexations of living with the ones they love.

We forgive people more for our own sake than for theirs. As Pavese said, ‘We forgive others
when it suits us.’

When I have a deep personal motive to loathe someone, I’m glad when they furnish me with a
fine moral pretext to mask it. I feel grateful to them when they put themselves in the wrong and
give me a chance to rain on them my lofty forgiveness. And I resent them for their rectitude
more than for their faults.

29 The virtue of despair

We must spare our fellows, not because they have it in them to do so much good, but because
they have it in them to do so little. ‘The greatest forbearance with people,’ says Ebner-
Eschenbach, ‘comes from giving up on them.’ The Lord remitted our sins, not because he
hoped that we might mend them, but because he knew that the imaginations of our heart are
evil from our youth. Mercy is one of the virtues of despair.

Some of us are forgiving because we care so much for principles or persons, and some
because we care so little.

We forgive people either because they mean so little to us or because they mean so much,
because we have no need of them or because we can’t get by without them.
To understand all is to forgive no more than half. You can find it in your heart to pardon those
who have done wrong, once you have grasped that their past made them unable to do
otherwise. But you can’t help but condemn them, when you glimpse that they were actuated by
motives still more vile than you might at first have thought.

Contempt may make you magnanimous, as confidence may make you modest.

30 Coals of fire
The saints spare their enemies, as a farmer fattens hogs, to render them fit and seasoned for
the everlasting oven. ‘For in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.’

We could afford to forgive our enemies, if we were sure that God would not. But we find it so
hard to forgive them, because we fear that he might. Lukewarm christians might not have found
it so hard to love their foes, if they had had more faith in the hell that they hoped they were on
the way to.

It’s dismaying to discover what small gibes people will loathe you for, or for what dire offences
they will forgive you. ‘An injury,’ Chesterfield points out, ‘is much sooner forgotten than an
insult.’

It is the heartless conquerors, such as Caesar or Alexander, that may be the readiest to set
aside the offences of their enemies. They love to display their scorn for them and to emblazon
the greatness of their own soul and victory. There is, as Billings notes, ‘no revenge so complete
as forgiveness.’

How could you bear to forgive those from whom you have had to ask forgiveness? I repent most
of my admissions more than the wrongs that I admit to.

Forgive your enemies, and they will heap coals of fire on your head.

31 Toleration
When people approve of me or bear with me, they show what a low value they set on me. I
don’t matter enough to rebuke or to resent. We think too poorly of most people to impute to
them grand faults. How could they be proud, when they have nothing to be proud of? How could
they be avaricious, when they have got so little? Why would they be vain, when, unlike us, they
have no grounds to be?

If we don’t judge, in most cases it’s because we don’t care.

The blight of intolerance bedevils the unbelieving no less than the bigot, the progressive no less
than the paternalist, and the thoughtful no less than the unthinking.
It’s not principles that are intolerant but the self that speaks through them.

Indifference may pass for tolerance, so long as it’s not asked to care. Then it’s clear that it’s just
a single-minded absorption in our own schemes.

Impatient people feel free to waste your time. Those who take it that they have a right to the
forbearance of others don’t see that they have a duty not to trespass on it.

32 ‘They ne’er pardon who have done the wrong’

There are some people whom we can’t forgive, not because of how much they have wronged
us, but because of how much we have wronged them. ‘They ne’er pardon who have done the
wrong,’ as Dryden, Tacitus and so many attest. We are ill-disposed to pardon those whom we
have hurt. And we are least willing to pardon the ones who have not deserved the hurt. And we
don’t pardon them in order to demonstrate how much they deserved it.

The closest we come to forgiving our victims is forgetting the wrongs we have done them.

When I slide in my victims’ blood or it splashes back on my robes of white, I curse them for
making such a mess. But I have the grace to forgive my enemies the harm that I do them, so
long as they don’t spot that it is I who did it.

We hate those whom we wrong. So it’s just as well that none of us sees how much wrong we
do. But we see just enough to make us as nasty as can be.

33 We justify the wrongs we do by doing more

I loathe some people because I have done them so much harm, and others because I lack the
power to do them the harm that I wish.

We don’t forgive people for the first hurt that we do them. And then we prove how right we were
to do it by doing them more. ‘By aggravating a wrong,’ Hazlitt says, ‘we seem to ourselves to
justify it.’ Our indignation with them excuses the wrongs that we do them. And when we wrong
them a second time we grow all the more indignant with them. But timid souls pity those whom
they wrong, so that they won’t have to see how much they have wronged them.
POLITICS

Contents

Democracy

Change

Power of illusion

Individual and state

Democracy of greed

Creative state

War

History

DEMOCRACY

1 Democracy
The seven deadly virtues of democracy are liberalism, individualism, consumerism, humanism,
technomania, universalism and nationalism. These will end up overturning all the restraints that
make life possible.

Democracy swings back and forth from a condescending universalism to a craven relativism.

In our consumer democracies all politics is performed as a series of fierce wrangles over small
differences.

No one now dares fault democracy itself. And we don’t dissent from the government line unless
to object that it ought to be more democratic.

In a monarchy the king or queen may have held unchallenged sway, but the state itself was
weak and limited. In a democracy there are a host of checks on governmental power, but the
state is strong and omnipresent. ‘Nothing is strong in a democracy,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘save the
state.’

2 Liberty, equality, fraternity

The french revolution bore a monster with three heads, democracy, which promises too much
liberty, socialism, which imposes too much equality, and nationalism, which enforces too much
fraternity.

Liberty sets a limit to equality. Equality puts a halter on liberty. And fraternity does away with
both. Liberty and equality form a toxic compound. And when mixed with fraternity they form an
explosive one.

Individualism stunts the individual. Populism corrupts the people. And nationalism degrades the
nation.

3 Liberty and the love of power

A state thrives by the liberty of its citizens which will soon rip it apart. And it must strive to free
them from its own might, which is the one force able to secure their freedom.

Our love of freedom is no more than our infatuation with our power. We don’t want freedom for
ourselves, but dominion over others and all the earth. And we are happy to destroy them and
the earth and ourselves to get it.

We each think that the right kind of regulation is the sort that will leave us free to do as we like,
while banning others from doing what they like.

With true freedom comes responsibility. But we want the kind of freedom that allows us to act
irresponsibly.

4 The dangerous freedom of democracy

Man was born in chains, but everywhere he has been set free.

Freedom is not a gift of nature. The human condition does not condemn us to be free. It is
capitalism that condemns each of us to act as a free consumer, loosed from all the old trammels
which would hold us back from soaking up its overproduction.

In the next hundred years the masses will prove how woeful they can make their plight with no
need of gods or great men to prey on them. They will at last be free to do just as they please.
And they will use their freedom to pull down the sky on their own heads.
The freedom that America is so keen to share with all peoples is the freedom that would force
them to be like americans.

A liberal state is one that hosts more parasite lawyers than productive engineers.

5 Freedom of the press in democracy

Free speech is a right, but free thought is a duty. And we much prefer to assert our rights than
to fulfil our duties.

A democracy needs free media to tell its citizens what they think.

Mass media, it seems, were not stupid, ephemeral or trivial enough. So capitalism had to come
up with the internet and social media.

Shame is one of the casualties of democracy. The people has no shame, and it will flock to
leaders who mirror its own shamelessness.

A society made up of shameless self-admirers will place no value on privacy. And there’s no
place for shame in our age of publicity, self-promotion and self-righteousness.

The more we optimize the conduits of communication, the more we degrade their content.

We now insist on our right to know. Yet we seal our eyes to all the bad news. ‘Prophesy not
unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.’

6 Equality
Nature seeds superiorities. But the state singles out which types it will water and cause to grow.

We need to hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal,
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, because it is so evident that they are
not. A self-evident truth is one that lacks all evidence. People are not equal. They are
incommensurable. And on any scale by which we can measure them they don’t come out equal.
And what rights has nature, our creator, endowed us with? It snips our thread capriciously, has
not made us free, and mocks our pursuit of happiness.

7 Equal in conceit
We are all born equal in conceit. And so we are obliged to avow that we are all born equal.
‘There are no grades of vanity,’ as Twain points out. We have each been apportioned the same
sum of it, to offset the manifest disparities of our talents and fortunes. Conceit cuts us off from
others, and yet is common to us all. It makes us think we must be extraordinary, but it is one of
the most ordinary things about us. It is the great leveller, which clips us back to equality while
congratulating us on our uniqueness. Each of us now has an entitlement to the security of being
equal and the vanity of feeling special. If I weren’t so like others, I might not feel so sure of how
different from them I am.

Now that we are all equal, we each have to compete feverishly to show that we are an inch
more equal than our peers.

8 Equal by shared superiority

Take away rank and superiority, and equality goes too. The members of one group are equal
only by virtue of their shared difference from other groups. ‘Inequality of rights,’ as Nietzsche
notes, ‘is the condition for there being rights at all.’ Equality results from the enforcement of
ranks, differentiations, layers, gradings, tiers and hierarchies. And now the whole human
species is equal because it is cut off from all the rest. A class of beings comes to be coequal by
asserting its own rights over those that are lower than it. And it maintains its own equal rights by
refusing them to all the rest, and this is what it calls justice and fair-dealing. It constitutes itself
as a class by severing itself from all the others.

Each successive age is sure that it has set up a perfect justice, since it has enlarged the caste
that is equal and therefore empowered to mash all those that are below it.

9 Class in democracy
The middle class makes the future of a state, the working class will make no more than its future
middle class. The bourgeoisie is the sole revolutionary class, as capitalism is the sole system
that is continuously revolutionizing itself. But the proletariat is no more than the obsolete tool of
one of its phases.

There is one drive that unites the members of the proletariat, their shared resolve to climb out of
it.

The middle class watch politics and vote for a party as the lower class watch sport and shout for
a team.

10 Capitalism is the end of class war

The class struggle is not the cause of historical change. It is one of the accidents of the
superstructure and not an essential part of the economic base of society. Marxism was part of
ideology.

Capital is hyperactive. It can’t stay still, but circulates so rapidly, that though it piles up deep
inequalities of wealth, it dissolves stable class structures. Class is one of the solid things that it
melts into air. By disaggregating individuals, by breaking down privilege and primogeniture, by
putting an end to discrete rights and duties, by opening all careers to talent and education to all,
by permitting estates to be sold, by cutting off family continuity, and by disrupting all relations, it
puts an end to fixed and permanent castes. It is the last phase of the demolishment that had
been going on since mediaeval times. And so there is no ruling class in capitalism, because
there are no classes at all.

Human beings had to be equalized, so that capital could grow unhindered. And each had to be
freed to act as a unit, so that all could be made subject to the rule of quantity.

National feeling takes the place of class solidarity, since this is what capital can use to
consolidate the state.

11 Aristocracy and democracy

The old aristocracies were the realm of form and quality. Democracy and capitalism are the
realm of matter and quantity.

A true aristocracy is self-selecting. How did the children of Israel come to be the chosen seed, if
not by choosing themselves?

An aristocracy is an invaluable institution made up of worthless individuals. An academy is a

worthless institution made up of notable individuals.

Monarchy was the narcissism of one man or woman. Aristocracy was the narcissism of a select
few. Democracy is the narcissism of all of us. Hence it is that much more voracious and
invincible.

12 The voracious present of democracy

We presume that the only people who matter are the ones that are alive now. But all the people
who matter are long since dead. And we are the hungry ghosts who haunt this world of
voracious mediocrity. We ‘but live where motley is worn.’

As human kind grows more unified in the present, it is more and more cut off from all its many
pasts.

The ravening majority of the hour outvotes the select majority of the ages. The living are like the
rich and well set-up, free to tread on or neglect the dead, who are as defenceless as the poor
and despised.
13 Democracy eats the future
‘People will not look forward to posterity,’ Burke warned, ‘who never look backward to their
ancestors.’ And an age that lives for nothing but the future will wreck the world for those who
come after it. Posterity is always in the right. And democracy will prove how wrong it was by
leaving no posterity. But it won’t care, since it will have had its day of repletion. Democracy is
the narrowest and most wolfish oligarchy that has ever been. It excludes the true majority, that
of the past and the future, those who are gone and those still to come, the earth and its tutelary
gods. It disenfranchises all but the iron cohort of the here and now.

Democracy has cancelled our compact with all those who will come after us. It devours the
future to stuff its own insatiable maw. It lives entirely for the present, and won’t make a thing that
will outlast it. The present presumes that the ordinances of the past have no right to bind it. And
yet it usurps the right to eat up the inheritance of the future.

14 Fraternity
We are all brothers and sisters. Why else would we hate each other so bitterly? Fraternity is a
fratricidal virtue. It tells you who your comrades are, so that you can band with them to slaughter
the aliens who are not. It takes for its byword, as Chamfort said, ‘Be my brother, or I kill you.’

If it’s true that the one who has wronged me is still my brother, then it’s no less the case that my
brother is always the one who has wronged me.

A people has common fears and hatreds, but only private hopes and loves. So capitalist states
stand in such danger of being torn apart by their competitive greeds, that they can be kept
whole only by their shared fears and loathings of enemies at home or abroad. The market
needs to keep the people greedy, and the state needs to keep them fearful.

Every nation, like each one of us and our whole species, is sure that it is exceptional yet central,
unique yet indispensable. Tell it that it’s the chosen race, and you are sure to have avid
listeners.

In order to win the people’s hearts, you have to give them an enemy to hate and a pretext to
love themselves more. And this is not hard, since they’re so ready to do both.

15 Nationalism
The nation state is the most fertile ground that capital has found to grow in. And we are so much
the robots of capital that we assume it is the natural form to foster our freedom and happiness.

The nation state was a tool of producer capitalism. Globalism is a tool of consumer capitalism.
And though the world will grow more and more globalized, it will never be internationalized.
A nation, even more than a person, owes its character more to the ebb and flow of events than
to the so-called spirit of its people.

Races have seemed so distinct because there is so little difference between them, that they had
to invent a lot of customs to distinguish themselves. And then they called these their nature.

Modern states have not evolved organically through the centuries. They have been forged by
monetary interests and welded close with cables, roads and railways with a view to promoting
trade. Most european states are artefacts forged by nineteenth century nationalism. And most of
the rest are leftovers from nineteenth century imperialism. The spider of empire sucked the life
out of its victims, and then deposited in it the poisoned eggs of nationality.

Nationalism does not promote the real national interest. It panders to a false national vanity.

16 Love of country, hatred of its people

Nationalism is an assertion by the nation’s most worthless citizens of its most worthless traits. It
is maintained most vociferously by those who add least to the lustre of their nation. The same
self-infatuation that exalts the mob self in the individual exalts the mob identity of the nation.

Nationalism does not bind the citizens to one another. It binds them as servants to the state.

Nationalism unifies the state by dividing its citizens. It sets each against the other in mutual
suspicion, resentment and contempt.

Patriots feel that their country would be perfect, if only half its citizens were hanged or
guillotined.

Nationalism is a cancerous growth of decrepit nations in their second childishness. It is the

frenzy of adolescent minds in a senile polity.

What a blessing, to have been born in a land that holds out no temptation to patriotic pride.

We venerate the flag at the same time as we vandalize the land.

17 The social bond

Society is held together not by truth but by lies, not by love but by jealousy, not by charity but by
avarice, not by justice but by rivalry, not by courage but by cowardice.

Society stays at peace because each of us agrees to keep in check our hostile intents, since we
know that the harm that others could do us is far greater than the small sum of good that they
might wish to do us. We feel grateful to no one more than to the torturer who slackens the knife.
So why is it we are not more grateful to death?
A shared resentment links a stronger bond than a shared love, since it is forged from our lust for
power. We love singly, but we loathe in common. We are united by what we hate, but we are
divided by our desires.

What unites us most deeply is our shallow selfishness. And what we share with others is a
brittle compromise with their wants and fears. If we weren’t so egoistic, we would have much
less in common with others.

CHANGE

18 All change in democracy

The citizens of a democracy want everything to change. But they want it all to change in the
same direction that it’s going, since it all seems to be going so well for them. ‘They like change,
but fear revolutions,’ as Tocqueville said.

We don’t mind if we’re on the road to nowhere, so long as we hope that we’ll get there quick.
We can’t stop now, or slack our pace, or go back. So we have to go on and on, faster and faster
to our doom.

We have to stake all our hopes on change to set the world right, since change has sent it so
wrong.

A society can’t reach its maximum velocity till it has been horizontally flattened by equality.

Our overstuffed and unabashed age boasts that it can jettison the old ways and yet still profit
from the past.

Now that the world is spinning so fast, it alters more slowly than ever. It has so much
momentum, that it can’t change course.

19 Reforming democracy
People come to accept change not by theoretical arguments which prove its rightness but by the
accomplished fact that it has already been made. Our love of change is itself a kind of inertia
and surrender to the current state of affairs.

Timid people lose hope when affairs don’t alter, but they grow apprehensive when they do. They
hate and fear change. Yet they like to be always tinkering with a few things, just to shake them
up. ‘Daily, they alter, change, and renew things of secondary importance, but they take care not
to touch fundamentals,’ as Tocqueville wrote of the citizens of democracy.
Some people can’t bring themselves to make slight reforms till they have had great ones thrust
on them. They dread innovations which they adapt to with ease when they come.

20 The state feeds on crisis

All that we learn from dealing with our crises is to tighten our control over all the earth, which will
make our future crises so much more dire.

A crisis can change everything except how we think, since we scarcely think at all. Each fresh
emergency elicits the same old reflexes of thought.

We can think of no better way to meet an unprecedented threat than to deploy our old schemes
of thought. The left are sure that state planning will do it, the right trust in free enterprise and
initiative. Progressives think we need more progress, and the pious that we need to go back to
God. Technocrats prescribe more technology, and humanists want to reaffirm human values.

The state grows in size with each crisis that it confronts, and gains with each loss that leaves
society weaker. All crises, be they wars, plagues or recessions, make the citizens more abject,
clamorous and dependent, and the state more paternalistic, overweening and intrusive. And the
state has no need to force its citizens to yield up to it their freedom. The citizens beg it to take it
from them.

Threats to our common life might make us pull together for a short time, but they leave no
enduring sense of solidarity. We soon revert to our old habits, and they tear us apart and make
us all the more self-involved.

21 Revolution
A revolution is neither a rupture with the past nor a return to it. It does not change the course
that a society will take. It’s an unshackling of the forces of production from the obsolete political
structures which are holding them back. It does not lay down a new road. Rather, it drives a new
vehicle so that it can go faster to the same goal. It is a change in velocity, not in direction. It
does not touch the economic base of its society. On the contrary, it is the economic base
restructuring its social and political arrangements. It smashes the moribund forms that stand in
the way of the full development of its already operating productive forces.

It may be that society can be changed only by a revolution in the human soul. But the human
soul could be changed only if there were first a revolution in society. It is just because the
human heart is as it is that the world is on the brink. But no change in the human heart could
bring it back.
Bourgeois reformers plan to end the abuses by which they have profited. And bourgeois
revolutionists plan to end the liberties with which they have made free.

22 Radical and conservative

A true conservative should be, like Montaigne, jovial but not hopeful, and sceptical but not
despondent.

Each camp is sure that it has history on its side, conservatives because they are striving to pass
it on intact, reformers because they have learnt from its blunders, and incendiaries because
they are fulfilling its iron law of change. Radicals assume that they can throw off the yoke of the
past, reformers that they are ameliorating it, reactionaries that they can bring it back, and
traditionalists that they can hand it on unscarred. But it will form the future in ways that none of
them can foretell or control.

Conservatives are sure that the world was in a good way up to the time when they were young,
and that it’s only since then that it has all gone to pot. When they think that they are harking
back to the pristine past, they get no further than their own childhood. And like all lovers, they
have to misunderstand the past which they think they love.

An autocracy that tries to regenerate, such as the France of Louis the sixteenth or the Russia of
the tsars or the catholic church, will shortly crash, as Tocqueville showed. But it won’t crash
because it tries to reform. It tries to reform because it has long been doomed to crash. But at
first it may grow more repressive, though for the same reason and with the same results.

23 The reactionary
Reaction is the politics of despair. And so it is the one point of view that fits our desperate times.
But it’s also the one stance that we lack the courage to take up.

Reactionaries are despairing radicals. They know that only root and branch change could save
the world, and that it’s too late for that.

There is now nothing worth conserving. So a reactionary must first of all be a revolutionary. How
else could we retrieve the past but by seizing the future? ‘What is tumbling,’ Nietzsche says, ‘we
should still push.’ It would only be by pressing onward that a state could go back and recuperate
its old health.

The past was better than the present, not because it was a state of perfection, but because it
was wise enough to see that no perfect state is practicable.
24 The paradox of reaction
The paradox of reaction. No doubt the past ought to serve as the great guide of the present. But
since the past has shaped the present, and the present has gone so wrong, it would be mad to
look to the past as a guide. The reactionary must hope for a clean break from the past, but that
would be the most catastrophic thing of all, if it could be done.

The past has made us what we are, and it forbids us to return to it. It has shaped us as the sort
of beings who can only go forward.

Reactionaries hate change so much, that they pin their hopes on returning to the past, when
change had not yet wrecked all that was good. And that is the one change that it is not in our
power to make, and which would send the world on a worse course than ever.

25 The fragility of tradition

Nothing is at once more robust and more fragile than tradition. It is self-perpetuating, and
continues by dint of its own continuity. But then the least interruption from outside can bring it
down. And once it crumbles to dust, nothing can bring it back to life.

There’s no point trying to reintroduce communitarian and traditionalist values as one option in a
system of self-determining individualism. ‘Tradition,’ as Johnson said, ‘is but a meteor which, if
once it falls, cannot be rekindled.’

By the time we find how much we need roots, they have been cut through and can never be
regrown.

It’s fatal to dig at our roots, just because they are so thin and shallow.

Our roots seem deep because the soil they grow in is so thin.

All the customs and institutions which in a traditional culture serve to keep up the old ways, such
as religion, family and the state, in an innovating one help to tear them down.

When we let go of our few irrational first principles, the world rationally goes to hell. We are
sensibly sustained by our deranged delusions. ‘Banish sagacity, discard knowledge,’ Lao Tzu
says, ‘and the people will be benefitted a hundredfold. The sage rules by emptying their hearts
and filling their bellies.’

POWER OF ILLUSION
26 The power of illusion
Knowledge may be power, but they gain most power who know how to use the ignorance of
others to bend them to do their will.

When illusion collides with illusion, the blood that they shed is real.

The real world is a battlefield of furiously competing illusions. It is a realm of illusion because it
is a realm of power.

‘Truth,’ Heidegger said, ‘is that which makes a people certain, clear and strong.’ On the
contrary, if they were ever to stumble on the truth, it would make them doubtful, confused and
weak. Strong illusions impart some of their own strength to those who hold them.

Those who crave power must fool their dupes so as to get their hands on it. And those who
have no power must fool themselves as a sop for failing to get it. The one thing denied to the
powerful is the freedom to speak or to hear the unvarnished truth. But this is one more privilege
that their power has won for them.

Their schemes prosper so suavely, that hustlers don’t doubt that it serves you right when they
take you in. The fox scorns the chickens for having been ensnared with such ease. And
powerful people are contemptuous of the schmucks they exploit.

27 The power of interests in democracy

Interest is power, and illusion is power. And the most astute place-hunters know how to multiply
people’s self-interest by their illusions and how to put both of them to use to serve their own
ends. Politicians convert the interests of others into their own supremacy, as capitalists convert
the wants of others into their own wealth.

Power is acutely vulnerable to friction. So those who have it must learn not to use it needlessly.
Like the gods, they resort to coercion only when they can’t gain their ends by fraud and
dissimulation. Lies that are not buttressed by force rule precariously. And force that is not
underpinned by lies soon falls down. Dominion undoes itself by being too hesitant or too harsh
to no purpose. Totalizing states soon fall apart, because they are spendthrifts of their own
might. Democracy lasts longer because it is more frugal.

A political party, like a bird, has two strong wings and a very small brain.

Power corrupts people by enabling them to give rein to their base will. And powerlessness
corrupts them by coercing them to compromise their high principles.
28 Playing to the crowd
Both dreamers and hardheads have no doubt that their worldview will soon be proved true when
it wins the hearts of the majority.

Intriguers, such as Nixon, steal the people’s love by being hated vociferously by the right
enemies. They know that if they make enough of these, they will make them all the friends they
need.

Few things are more ticklish to control than public opinion, since few things are more easy to
manipulate. Like the surf, it is soon whipped up since it is all on the surface, and it’s blown this
way and that by the least flurry of wind. And now that it can be so minutely quantified, we are
more in its grip than ever. The crowd is persistently demanding but cheaply impressed.

The United States ended up with the worst of both federalist centralization and hillbilly
jeffersonian populism.

29 Flattering democracy
What two prescripts must all the people’s tribunes heed? Woo the rabble’s truculent self-regard,
and gorge the gaping jaws of its greed. How could they hope to win the public’s trust, if they
don’t start by flattering its judgement? No one, said Tocqueville, ‘whatever be his eminence, can
decline to pay this tribute of adulation to his compatriots.’

We live in an age of mass swagger and mass flattery. Common people are now too proud to
court those in power. But those in power must stoop to fawn on those below them. They bow
down to the electorate the better to tie its hands. The day that Burke feared has come, when
rulers act as ‘flatterers instead of legislators, the instruments, not the guides, of the people.’
Kings and queens used to thank the Lord for enduing them with humility. Demagogues now
thank the mob, which clamours to be grovelled to the whole time. It refuses to be fooled till it has
been flattered how shrewd and discerning it is.

30 The demagogue and democracy

A populist politician is ready to do the right thing so long as it’s popular, and won’t do the
unpopular thing except when it’s wrong. When they have the courage of their convictions, it’s
others that will be sent off to die for them.

The demagogue rides into the new Jerusalem on a scapegoat.

Hypocrisy is one of the gifts of the true leader. Sincerity is one of the ploys of political-brawlers
and populists.
The demagogue has to tell the public stupid lies, so that it will believe that he is as smart and
honest as itself.

A demagogue fans the crowd’s fears, so as to fire up its more malevolent resentments and
craving for power.

In order to lure the people to give up to him their freedom, the demagogue need only tell them
that there is a sinister minority plotting to seize it from them.

Mendacious leaders feel sure of their own frankness when their followers answer their glib
frauds with a commensurately glib faith.

Some people rush to submit to a tyranny so as to stop others stealing their freedom.

31 The Caesars of democracy

Democracy robs the populace of the self-determination which they need if they are to act as
good participants in a democracy. By rendering them mild and compliant, is it readying them to
be offered as helpless prey to a coming god of blood? It is the benignant dictatorships that are
the most degrading. They don’t confiscate our freedom by force, but lure us to give it up of our
own volition. As Tocqueville wrote, the caesarism that democracy might lead to ‘would be more
widespread and kinder, it would debase people without tormenting them.’ In our sheep’s
paradise it is the sheep who swathe the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so that they can feel safe that it
won’t eat them.

Brutal tyrants paved the way for democracy by consolidating the power of the state. And now
democracy may be preparing the world for kindly tyrants who will give way to all the people’s
childish whims.

In the past, when the population was young, the despotism that democracy had to fear was that
of schoolmasters and nannies. Now the population is so old, that the despotism we have to fear
is one of doctors and nurses. And both of them are at once strict and coddling.

The state used to make serfs of its citizens by brutally repressing them. Now it does so by
benevolently indulging their wants.

32 Pretending to persuade
Trimming politicians use the currency not of belief but of personal trust. They don’t strive to
change your views but to hitch your self-interest to their cause. They know how to win your vote
even when you don’t believe what they say. Their aim is not so much to convince you as to
flatter you that they need to. They make do with facades, since they know that nothing in this
world has more force or substance. All they ask is that you should pretend to have faith in them,
since they are merely pretending to persuade you. And we don’t care what lies they tell, so long
as we feel sure that they won’t hurt us. We are too shrewd not to allow their frauds to fool us.

Rabble-rousers economize not only with the truth but with falsehood as well. They are so skilled
in manipulating appearances, that it’s rare that they need to tell a lie. ‘The best liar,’ as Butler
wrote, ‘is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.’

A leader who has the brains to see what needs to be done won’t be fit to persuade the public to
do it.

33 Tartuffe at the ballot-box

The public demands to be lied to. And the first lie that it wants to be told is that it wants to be
told the truth. As Plato said, it is the most incorrigible of all sophists. One of the hardest jobs for
a lying politician is to keep pace with the pious dissembling of the public. It is so self-righteous,
that it leaves them no alternative but to act like prigs and charlatans. It tutors them to mimic its
own hypocrisy, and then reviles them when they act like hypocrites. Having elected them to lie
to it, it then rails sanctimoniously when it finds that they have done so. And it votes in one more
rascal whose lies it hopes will yield it more loot.

Cunning politicians know that the best way to trip up their opponents and rob them of the
people’s trust is to lure them to blurt out the truth.

The public expects its leaders to keep up the most scrupulous standards of tartuffery. They
might not act like whores if we didn’t urge them to it like avid lechers.

We are smitten with those candidates who protest that they won’t act like slimy politicians, till
they refuse to bribe us with all a politician’s oily enticements.

34 The democracy of righteousness

We have turned the world into hell, and so the politicians that we deserve are devils.

Our leaders must flatter us that we do our best at all times. But we do the least best that we can
get away with. And yet we do go as straight as we have to in our race to snap up as much as
we can. And most of us are ready to do the right thing once it’s too late to be of use. We won’t
wake to the horror that our greedy dreams have made till it’s too late to put a halt to it.

In order to set in train great evils, a malevolent leader need only unleash the evil inherent in a
nation. But in order to do great good, a leader would need to deceive, cajole and fight the
nation.
The public is so sanctimonious and yet so voracious, that its representatives can’t afford to be
too nice in the methods they use to lead it to do the right thing.

The people makes its leaders as bad as it needs them to be. And leaders allow the populace to
be as bad as it wants to be.

You can count on the people in their intermittent fits of disgust with the lies of politicians to flock
to the most impudent knave to save them.

35 The pretence of good intentions

In their efforts to seduce our prim pretences, malign leaders have to talk finer than they mean to
act, and well-meaning ones have to talk worse.

A democracy is a marketplace of competing lies, in which the majority sits in judgment on which
ones best seem to flatter its self-regard and feed its self-interest.

Governments now act both more equitably and more destructively than individuals. We want
them to deploy on our behalf the lucrative brutality which we dare not use and to mouth the
showy virtues which we are too mean to pay for. We deem that groups or nations make
interests innocent. And we are proud to pursue in the mass schemes and stratagems that we
would blush to own up to as private citizens. The nation knows no shame. As Cavour remarked,
‘What scoundrels we would be, if we did for ourselves what we stand ready to do for Italy.’ But
fetterless individualism now grants to each of us the right to act as recklessly as a mob.

INDIVIDUAL AND STATE

36 Rights and democracy

We must act as if we all had the same rights, since we quake to think what we might do to each
other if we did not.

Global capital spreads universal rights and values, so that it can circulate more rapidly round the
world. Individual rights were not invented till capital had need of a large market of individual
consumers.

How stridently people now clamour for their rights. And how contentedly they lived without them
for thousands of cruel years.

The social contract is not a pact made by the people to protect the rights of all. It is a deal made
by property-holders to protect their goods from the predations of the propertyless.
A regime of human rights is better at extending the rights of those who already have some than
at protecting those who have no rights.

37 The system shapes the individual

The individual does not shape the system, the system is prior to the individual and shapes it.

Capitalism must atomize individuals, the better to aggregate capital.

In order to solve the problem of production, factory capitalism had to mould its workers as a
globular mass. But in order to solve the problem of demand, consumer capitalism has had to
split up the middle class into diverse units.

To the end that the world might be globalized, each of us must first be individualized. Once we
have been freed to choose, we all pick from the same stock of homogenized commodities of the
world market. ‘Variety is disappearing from the human race,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘the same ways
of acting, thinking and feeling occur in every corner of the globe.’

The individual is one of those illusions which have had such disastrous effects in the real world.
‘An imaginary cause,’ Gibbon wrote, ‘is capable of producing the most serious and mischievous
effects.’ But though we may have found out that the self is a fiction, the ego is as real and as
fierce as it ever was.

38 The individual, the market and the state

People do not shape the economy as they wish. The economy fabricates the sort of people that
it needs in order to keep it whirring. They are not the cause of the kind of economic system they
form part of. They are one of its effects. And the ultimate product of mass capitalism is the
individual consumer, shorn of its past, its roots, its regional links, its ethnic identity and its
corporate memory, free to move unencumbered through the wonderland of the world market, in
its orgy of getting and spending. It’s this that makes for the limitless proliferation of wants and
the limitless multiplication of profit.

In a system of free choice each choice entrenches the system, and no choice could change it.

The system can leave its citizens free to choose what they want, because it has formed them as
consumers that want the sorts of things that the system wants to give them.

Where each of us is free to choose, no choice makes a difference, and the course of the future
is fixed by the system of choice.
Capitalism has changed our sense of self. We are no longer what we recall of our past through
our memories. We are far more the self that we project into the future through our hopes and
desires.

Individualism will steadily grind down the world’s finely graded diversity to oblivious uniformity.
By liberating all our manifold desires, it will make the lush world the same everywhere.

39 The atomized individual and the centralized state

Now there is nothing but the atomized individual and the centralized state. There is no
obedience or allegiance to what should lie between them, no fealty to class, creed, clan, guild or
locality.

The market eats away the commons from below, and the state stamps on it from above.

The modern state exists to serve the greed of the individual. And the isolated individual exists
only to add to the power of the consolidated state.

Between the boundless greed of the individual and the boundless force of the state the green
earth will be pounded to a mash.

Every failure of the state, as much as every success of the state, makes each of us more
dependent on the state.

40 The state against the people

A people loses its identity as it asserts its nationality. ‘Where there is still a people,’ Nietzsche
said, ‘it does not understand the state and hates it.’ But now that there are no distinct peoples,
all that we know or trust is the state. And now that jews have a state like the rest of us, they are
at risk of becoming as oafish as the rest of us.

Why do people who have been bludgeoned by the state, and have seen all the havoc that the
state can cause, put their faith in a state of their own to keep them safe?

Distinct peoples had to be pulverized in order to turn us all into a mass of individuals, who could
then be aggregated in unified states and co-opted into the world market.

As the community grows more atomized, the state comes to be more centralized. And as the
state comes to be more centralized and standardized, it compels each of us to grow more
uniform.

The state used to be a small part of society. Now society is a small part of the state.
41 Individualism shrinks the individual
Individuals are all that matter, since they alone give birth to great achievements. But regimes
are all that matter, since they alone breed great individuals.

Fine capacities flourish only where foul injustice stunts most fine capacities. Preeminent
individuals are reared by states in which a privileged caste has the sole charter to make
individuals. Strong individuals are made by strong forms, laws, castes, customs, traditions and
authorities. And where these are decayed, the individual will be as weak as they.

Where there are only individuals, there will be nothing but mass.

Mass individualism spawns an infestation of narcissists, but few individuals. As Kraus wrote,
‘where every scatterbrain has individuality, individuality becomes scatter-brained.’ We think that
the individual is so precious because we each have our share of individuality. But individuality is
so precious because the real individual is so rare. And now that there are so many billions of us
on earth, there is not enough individuality to go round.

The human race now contains so many zeroes, that its value comes close to infinity.

The system of mass individualism caters to the mass part of each one of us, and starves the
best and most individual part.

We have the greedy individualism which will devour everything. But we lack the generous
individualism that could create anything. We live in the epoch of the indiscriminate ant hill.

42 Totalitarianism and democracy

Totalitarian states outlaw or draught all the forms of civil society. Democracy, which sets up
personal desire as the sole canon of value, leaves them to die of neglect.

Totalitarianism is the birth throes which nations go through when they try to modernize too fast.
Or it may be the shortcut that undeveloped countries take to grow into liberal market ones. It
makes use of the machinery of the state to smash the intermediate framework of civic society so
as to leave nothing but fragmented consumers.

Despotism and fundamentalism are two harnesses which help to keep a state strapped together
so that it won’t disintegrate while it’s hurtling towards modernity.

Democracy panders to the optimistic egoism of greed. And totalitarianism panders to the
pessimistic egoism of fear. And an agitator who knew how to yoke these dual passions would
soon be unassailable.
43 The paradox of pluralism in democracy
The more we tolerate differences, the fewer differences there will be to tolerate. As we make
room for personal differences within the state, we will flatten the abiding differences between
states which make for dynamic cultures. By trying to show respect to differences we raze them.

Intolerant societies keep alive the diversity between cultures. Tolerant societies which allow for
the free intercourse of peoples and ideas reduce the globe to an undifferentiated mass. The
ages of great diversity have been ages of great intolerance and great inequality.

When we can all get to know other cultures, there will soon be no other cultures left to get to
know.

44 Freedom of thought in democracy

Freedom of thought is just freedom of choice in the realm of opinion. We don’t want to waste our
time thinking our own thoughts, but we are jealous of our right to pick out our views from the
ones that are on display in the marketplace of ideas. Most of us make use of the freedom that
society gives us to think as we like by not thinking at all.

In a tyranny all are forced to think the same, and in a republic all are free to choose to.
‘America,’ as Tocqueville wrote, ‘is a country where they have freedom of speech but all say the
same thing.’ Where all views can be voiced, we all grasp that truth is the one thing that no one
wants to hear.

People ought to be free to think for themselves, but no regime will do more damage to the earth
than one that gives them the right to do so.

45 The fruits of intolerance

Thought thrives best where it has less than total licence. ‘Freedom of thought and spiritual
freedom grow best under absolutism,’ as Ibsen said. But the state now sanctions its citizens to
speak as they wish, since it knows that it can trust them all to think alike. ‘People,’ says
Kierkegaard, ‘never use the liberties they do have, but demand those that they don’t have. They
have liberty of thought, they demand liberty of speech.’

When lawgivers censor artists for moral or political ends, they free them from ministering to
moral or political aims. Censorship has hitherto been the sole contribution that the state has
made to art. It has served as the shears which prune and preserve art and stop it from going to
seed. Now everything is permitted, and nothing is possible.

Great writers are safely secretive yet dangerously indiscreet. They keep up the front of the
herd’s everyday decencies, but indecently strip bare its seamier truths.
46 Utopia
The state can’t make its citizens happy, but for most of time it has made their life unspeakably
grim. The rare outbreaks of justice in world history have led to reigns of terror, as projects of
mass welfare will end in mass wretchedness. When flesh and blood presumes that it is made for
heaven, it is sure to make for its own flawed self a hell on earth. Utopias at least remind us how
much worse our life might have been.

We deem a good society to be one that would prize our own metier at a higher rate. In a
philosopher’s utopia philosophers reign as kings, and in a dentist’s utopia dentists do.

Human kind has spent as little effort imagining its utopias as it has to make them real. It’s as
mindless in planning them as it has been merciless in policing them. They are all as dull and
predictable as they are vain and impractical. We have too much obsessive fantasy not to go on
projecting them, yet too many unruly cravings to confine ourselves to them.

A utopia works as an atrocious engine of correction on those who, unlike its founders, are not
yet fit for it.

DEMOCRACY OF GREED

47 The immaculate majority of democracy

Under mass rule the majority is blessed with an unimpeachable innocence. Not the least
offence is to be laid at its door. These days the multitude must be fawned on for all its fake
virtues and exonerated from all its frank crimes. Like our sycophancy and our sentimentality, our
indignation has now been democratized. All our ills must be the doing of some nefarious
minority. As Tocqueville said, the common herd ‘lives in the perpetual utterance of self-
applause.’

The herd is always wrong, even when by some fluke it turns out to be in the right once in a
while. Even if it hits on the right conclusion, it will be for the wrong reasons. Fickle in all but self-
flattery, it will be retracting tomorrow what it is espousing today. ‘Surely the people is grass.’ But
we now know that the majority must be right, since the majority says so, and even the minority
bows to its high good sense. Truth is for the few. But the many feel sure that they are the truth.

To be out of step with the herd is the beginning of virtue.

48 The democracy of greed

Democracy has redeemed greed, and christened it as the one virtue that all are obliged to
practise. Greed is the irreproachable democratic vice, and the sole democratic virtue. ‘For the
many,’ as Aristotle points out, ‘are more eager to make a profit than to win honour.’ Each of us
now has a right to seize as much as we can, and a duty to grab more than we have. Greed, in
the guise of the work ethic, is the first duty of the citizen in a democracy. It is now our wants that
lead us to cleave to our liberties. We wage wars to make the world safe for plutocracy. The sole
freedom that most of us care for is the freedom to get and spend.

Bygone epochs used to feast the rapaciousness of a small favoured class. Our own calls all of
us to share in the spree. The moderate greed of the multitude will chew up far more of the earth
than the monstrous greed of the few.

The old patrician states put the long glory of the few above happiness. Our new democracies
put the instant greed of the many above happiness.

Democracy is a get-rich-quick scheme which has bankrupted civilization and beggared the
earth.

Republican virtue sprang up as a tall tree with shallow roots, which was soon dug out to plant
the squat but hardier bush of democratic greed.

49 Capital rules in democracy

Capital makes the climate of democracy. The state makes only its weather. The people may
reign, but capital rules. And democracy is the eunuch that oversees affairs in the palace of
capital. As Balzac wrote, ‘it is not Louis Philippe who reigns, but the five franc piece.’ And so
political deliberations are attempts to gauge which course of action capital will give its assent to.

The ruling power in capitalism is not a class. It is capital itself.

The system may have an interest which its beneficiaries do not share. No boss wants to pay
high wages, yet capitalism needs each boss to pay high wages, so as to keep up the demand
for all its goods. And though capitalists may favour a small night-watchman state, consumer
capitalism needs one with a colossal regulative and redistributive apparatus.

The middle class is the beneficiary of capitalism but not its master.

The ruling class may be sitting in the first class carriage, but the train will take them where
capital wants to go.

50 Democracy is the tool of capital

Individuals need a strong state to soothe their fears, since capital has snapped the bonds of
society which used to keep them safe, while the state needs greedy individuals to finance all its
largesse.
Capitalism will degrade the globe to a vast workshop to stock a vast shopping mall. And
socialism will reduce what is left to a vast sickroom. The right would burn up the earth as an
unholy offering to liberty and material self-interest, and the left to equality and moral self-conceit.

51 Democracy and demand

Because capitalism was so successful in solving the problem of scarcity, the whole world had to
be turned into a consumer free-for-all, to soak up its surplus goods.

Consumer capitalism has solved the problem of scarcity, while evading the problem of ennui, by
keeping us unsatisfied, so that we will go on consuming.

Capitalist states have lost the will to fight the wars which might solve their periodic crises of
over-production by stimulating aggregate demand and removing excess supply. The welfare
state was one means they used to take the place of war. Now they have to depend on debt to
do it. And soon they may have to count on manmade natural catastrophes.

The welfare state is a cow of gold, dispensing day by day the milk of human kindness from its
distended udders.

52 The greed of left and right

Our grand struggles for justice are mere squabbles over how to divide the spoils won by our
injustice. The factions in a democracy are cartels contending to snatch the most loot to portion
out to their members, the left to those who have not earned it, the right to those who have no
need of it.

Conservative insist on their right to keep on consuming in the careless way that they’ve grown
used to, which is the very thing that has turned the old world on its head. They aim to conserve
the economic structures which have torn apart all the things that would have been worth
conserving. They want nothing to change, so they might be free to get and spend in the same
way that is bound to change the whole world.

Thinkers on the right have to fool themselves that they can preserve the old forms of society
when its whole base is revolutionizing itself. And thinkers on the left have to fool themselves that
they can direct the course of change when it is the needs of capital that mould it.

Conservatism is a symptom of the disease of which it claims to be the cure.

Collectivism does not do away with the capitalist lust for gain. It merely redistributes it.

Capitalism is more contagious than communism, as greed is more addictive than envy.
53 Unrestrained democracy
Not freedom but restraint, not equalizing but subordination, not fraternity but the solidarity which
links one generation to the next. These alone might have saved us. But since we are too
uncontrollable to put up with them, we have no hope of being saved at all.

To bring down the system would require not hope and audacity but restraint. And restraint is the
one thing that the system does not allow. Personal unrestraint is one of the system
requirements of capitalism and democracy.

A democracy is able to do everything but check its ungovernable greed. Its animating principle
is lack of self-control. The people has won the right to rule itself, but has lost the strength to
restrain itself.

54 Democracy unbound
As Burke wrote, ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put
moral chains on their own appetites.’ But the sole kind of liberty that we now crave is that which
breaks all the chains off our own appetites. And civilization has come apart, not, as Freud
claimed, by too much repression of our indwelling instincts, but by too much indulgence of our
competitive greeds.

For the last two centuries democracy has drummed into our ears that we are mature enough to
be free. So it’s too late to put a check on our childish desires, now that they have caused such
giant havoc. It grants a limitless licence to beings who lack the will or capacity to curb their
limitless cravings.

The state used to try to set bounds to the greed of its citizenry. Now its sole task is to feed it.

55 Democracy and capitalism the opiates of the people

Capitalism does not work by ruthless domination and repression. It works by irresistible
seduction and eager surrender. It does not make the world of scarcity, self-denial and thrift
which Marx berated. If it did, it would do far less harm. It makes a world of plenty, possibility and
self-indulgence, which will drain all life from the earth. And this is why it has no need of a unified
ideology. It is able to deliver in this world what old states and their cults could only promise in
the next.

The opiate of the masses is now capitalism itself. But the drug does not calm us. It is an
amphetamine which keeps us jigging its St Vitus dance.

Capitalism is the most ruthlessly real system, and yet it turns the real world into gaudy but
empty images, which it then sells back to us as premium consumer experiences.
Capitalism does not dehumanize human beings. It humanizes the earth. That is, it turns it into a
machine to feed our desires.

56 Emancipated to be slaves of greed

All the liberators of the previous two centuries, who crowed that they were sabotaging
capitalism, were in fact fortifying it, by enfranchising more and more of us to get and spend.
They were doing the work of the system which they hoped to bring down. They untied us from
the restrictions of all the old authorities, only to bind us to the tyranny of our own desires. Greed
makes all the revolutions. But it drapes itself in the tricolour of equity to lead them.

The producer phase of capitalist accumulation called on the puritan virtues of thrift, self-denial,
prudence and self-control. Now the consumer phase of excess needs the vices of
extravagance, self-affirmation and self-indulgence.

Capitalism makes use of progressive politics by freeing oppressed groups to act as producers
and consumers. All those who think that they are subverting the regime are helping it to
revolutionize the relations of production.

Mammon is a jealous god. It won’t rest till it has untethered all of us to buy and sell, and has
snarled us all in the net of the world market.

57 The freed slaves of democracy

Now that people are free to do what they want, they have no choice but to work as hard as they
can to get more of what everyone else wants.

It was the sledgehammer of avarice that broke the slaves’ manacles, ‘not,’ said Tocqueville, ‘for
the sake of the blacks, but for the sake of the whites,’ or more accurately, for the sake of capital.
They were sure to be emancipated, once their taskmasters learnt that they toil more compliantly
when they have been loosed from their fetters. Liberate them, and they labour as productively
as robots. ‘The work done by free men,’ Adam Smith points out, ‘comes cheaper in the end than
that performed by slaves.’ Slavery was abolished, not because it is unjust, but because it proved
uneconomic. The market had no use for it. Profit needs employees and consumers, not slaves.
And the law had to put a stop to child labour because extended adolescence is one of the
conditions of consumer capitalism.

The latest miracle of the market has been to turn consumers into producers of data and then to
use this to sell its goods to them.

These days, when all of us have sold our souls as willing slaves, we are indignant that there
were once forced ones.
58 Degenerate democracy
All things go to seed in the rank air of democracy. All forms of democracy are bad, and they get
worse the closer they come to its pure form.

In a democracy the great problems are not dealt with till they are at length taken out of the
hands of the people. But the people won’t rest till they have pulled down all the institutions of
democracy which make them free. And the legacy of every leader is to weaken democracy by
yielding to popular whims, while undermining republican institutions.

Democracy has debased progress as it has debased all that it has touched. In the past
philanthropists hoped that humankind, unfettered and right-thinking, would one day rise to a
moral perfection. Now the most glorious goal we can aim at is to get rich.

Happiness degenerates in democracy. It began as the rich flourishing of our highest faculties.
But only a small elite could keep up such an arduous calling. So first the enlightenment replaced
this with the pursuit of happiness for all. Then democracy and utilitarianism lowered it to a mere
succession of pleasant sensations. And now mass capitalism markets it as a premium
consumer experience. The wider it is spread, the shallower it gets.

CREATIVE STATE

59 The creative state

It takes a whole culture to breed one or two spendthrift generations, and a whole generation to
breed half a dozen choice souls, and half a dozen souls to make a few masterful books,
buildings, theories, symphonies and statues. But now that we have each been taught that we
are unique, none of these half dozen will be made. All ancient Zion toiled to write one book. And
the whole of heaven heaved to bring forth the Quran.

People used to be stifled by the material squalor which they lacked the means to escape. Now
they delight in the spiritual squalor which they have chosen.

All epochs are spiritually impoverished. But the great ones have enriched their heirs with works
which redeemed their destitution of soul.

60 The creative class in democracy

The ruling class lends a state its order, and the middle class lends it its force. A society grows
pregnant when its old lordly forms are fecundated by the unresting dynamism of the
bourgeoisie, which is invigorated by its new freedom and by its ancestral animosities. Most of
the finest art has been brought forth by states in which a hereditary military caste was giving
place to a new mercantile gentry.

The upper class ought to rule, since it is good for nothing else. When the merchant class rules,
it makes itself good for nothing at all.

Artists and thinkers rise out of the middle class to rebel against the middle class.

61 Creative violence
Civilization sprang up as an accident of brutal patrician despotisms. Democracy has now torn it
out and supplanted it with commerce and kitsch.

Civilization is shaped by essential violence and superfluous grace. It weds sophistication to

savageness, to breed a turbulent but abounding creation. And it mates the force of instinctual
energies with the force of constraint and organization. It thrives close to violence, as the most
fertile loam sits on the slopes of volcanoes. ‘Build your settlements on the inclines of Vesuvius,’
urged Nietzsche.

Civilization did not count the cost of its own making. It was the spendthrift of human capacities.

‘We can conceive of nothing great,’ Nietzsche says, ‘which does not involve a great crime.’ You
can tell the great seminal periods by the reek of charred corpses from their uprisings and unrest,
invasions, intrigues, pogroms and witch-hunts, rapine, persecutions, conspiracies, crusades,
butcheries and liquidations. Would Europe have been reborn in the renaissance, had it not been
waked by gunpowder, seditions, usurpations, assassinations, schisms, demographic slumps,
depressions, inflations, dynastic disputes and epidemics? ‘Their crimes conspired to make ’em
great,’ as Mandeville wrote.

62 Sterile democracy
Past civilizations were hard like a diamond or the claws of a jaguar. Ours is hard like a rock drill
tearing up the earth. Previous epochs were realms of force. Ours is the realm of mass.

The sweet works of imagination, whose creation and contemplation make life worthwhile, were
framed when life for most people was not worth living. And now that we have made life worth
living for most people, we have lost the power to frame the sweet works which make it
worthwhile.

It’s not by freedom but by repression that human kind gains the power to make what is of real
worth.
63 Creative inequality
‘The sole live societies,’ Claudel wrote, ‘are those that are energized by inequality and injustice.’
We can’t eradicate misery by imposing equality. And by seeking to do so we will only sterilize all
excellence. So we must choose between large achievement and a shrunken justice. There will
be no grand art or thought where there are no gross inequalities. It takes a ton of societal
repression to set free a few artists to make art. We surrender to a levelling sameness, and so
lose the gift for freewheeling imagination.

Exorbitant wealth corrupts the state. But deplorable inequality may stimulate its highest
energies. Vast and murky earnings form the muck in which the things of the spirit flower. They
were all bedded in the foul mire of usury or extortion. But our once fecund culture has made
itself a eunuch for the kingdom of Mammon’s sake. It lacks the sap to make anything but
money. It smelts the gold of genius to coin the small change of huckstering innovation.

64 Meritocracy, mediocrity and democracy

The merit that meritocracy pays so well is the sort of competent mediocrity that can be put to
use to fill the present need, which stifles true merit.

True merit is flattened and cooped by the conditions which make a meritocracy, its compulsive
tabulating and bureaucratic gradations. A meritocracy opens the field for all sorts of talents,
barring the few that are worth nurturing. If you hope to make headway in one, you must be
extraordinarily good at being average. You must excel at being second-rate. As Tocqueville
said, ‘They strain their faculties to the utmost to achieve paltry results, which soon cannot fail to
narrow their vision and restrict their powers.’

Meritocracy cheapens real merit by rewarding mediocrity so exorbitantly.

In our meritocracies we now mistake success for merit, as in the past they used to mistake birth
for merit. In feudal states the talentless were born at the top. But in a commonwealth they must
grope their way up to it. In days of old, as Shaw said, only martyrs and kings could win fame
without the need to earn it. Now anyone can.

The old aristocratic states were the dominion of pride. The new meritocratic states are the
dominion of greed. They give rise to mediocrity in all but money-making, hustling and haggling.
‘There is not a single american,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘who is not eaten up with the desire of
bettering himself, but you meet virtually no one who appears to cherish great hopes or to aim
very high.’

WAR
65 Altruism at war
War is the one grand altruistic act that has pervaded the whole course of our growth.

The same obedience that makes dutiful citizens in peace makes diligent killers in war. ‘It is,’
Brodsky says, ‘the army that finally makes a citizen of you.’

Solidarity can be mobilized on a vast scale only where it is motivated by aggression against a
common enemy. So people will spill their blood in large numbers only if it gives them the chance
to kill those whom they have learnt to look on as their foes.

66 War the acme of civilization

War is not an aberration from civilization. It is its quintessence. Civilizations make war, and war
has made civilization. They are both structurings of energy and violence. Their patron deity is
Minerva, the goddess of order and the mind, not Mars, the god of chaotic savagery. She sets up
hierarchy, subordination, efficiency, discipline, inventiveness and state power. Only those
species, such as ants, that have cities, federations, agriculture, specialization, organization,
territorial demarcations, intricate modes of communication and complex communal codes, will
wage war as well.

Cultures have warriors, civilizations have armies. Tribal cultures fight skirmishes, more
advanced ones fight wars.

War is, as Heraclitus said, the father of all. Pacifism won’t cut its throat. It will only castrate it.

A state that can’t make war won’t make much else. Those who lack the daring to destroy will
lack the courage to create.

67 The end of war

A world in which we have made all things safe would be one not worth protecting. As Franklin
said, those who trade liberty for security have forfeited their right to both. But we will be sure
that we have grown surpassingly wise and good when we are all of one mind that we have no
principles worth fighting for. And most of us are happy to trade other people’s safety to keep our
own liberty, and other people’s liberty to maintain our own safety.

Those who judge that no cause is worth dying for will soon find that they have no cause that is
worth living for.
68 Democracy at war
Democracy has taught dictators that even the masses are worth exterminating. War used to
slay only the combatants, who were a small cadre of highborn men. Now it massacres vast
conscript armies and civilian populations as well. Mass persuasion makes all of us worth
deceiving. And mass warfare makes all worth slaughtering. ‘The wars of the peoples,’ Churchill
warned, ‘would be more terrible than those of kings.’

In our quest to bring peace to the earth, we will gradually give in to a global despotism.
Governments that pledge to make their citizens secure from all hazards will soon have them
consenting to be serfs. By endeavouring to render fear needless, we will make bravery otiose.

The second world war began abjectly with the appeasement of one tyrant who had just annexed
half of Europe, and it finished triumphantly with the appeasement of another.

69 The art of war

The aim of the art of war, like the art of rhetoric, is to make the lesser force the greater. Out of
slim differences it spins decisive advantages. It turns your vulnerabilities into strengths, and
your enemy’s strengths into vulnerabilities, correcting your own weak points and capitalizing on
your foe’s.

To win allies is better than winning wars. And to refuse to give battle may be the best defence.
‘To subdue the enemy without a fight,’ Sun Tzu says, ‘is the apex of skill.’

All inherent advantages imperil you. A moral advantage that you can’t convert to force is no help
at all, and you will waste more of your means to guard it than it’s worth. Defence yields a real
material assistance and not a sham moral one. If you win, you feel no need to prove your cause
legitimate. And if you lose, it will soon have sunk from sight. ‘The loser is always in the wrong,’
as the spanish proverb has it.

70 Might makes right

No victorious war seems ill-advised or unlawful. Even the losers, if they get a sound enough
thrashing, grant that those who beat them must have been in the right. Justice rides with the
conquerors. The god of war absolves all winners. A clear victory blots out the worst wrongs, and
gives a sanction to the most vicious creeds. ‘Successful crimes alone are justified,’ as Dryden
wrote.

Victory proves nothing. But that’s why people crave it. It sets them above the need to prove
anything.
A stonyhearted tyrant knows that might makes right, a mealy-mouthed one loves to bleat that
right makes might. If this were the case, then the powers that be would indeed be ordained of
God, and the downtrodden would have no claim to redress. Since power is the one thing that we
worship, we cling to the superstition that right must bear some relation to it, be it as its cause or
as its effect. Power is our one god. So we view its mere assertion as an irrefutable proof that its
cause must be just.

We trust that right will triumph, because we are sure that triumph shows to us what is right.

It suits us to believe that right makes might, since we have no doubt that all the right is on our
side.

71 Internationalism
The growth of political institutions lags behind the problems that they are required to solve.
When Europe had need of the nation state, it was still torn apart by local feudal warlords. And
now that the world needs supranational powers to deal with global threats, it still has to make do
with outdated nation states. The world is always in such disorder, because its social and political
structures are so far behind the economic conditions which are dismantling and rebuilding them.

72 The original sin of empire

An empire is the murder of the cultures that it conquers, and the suicide of the civilization that
hopes to suck life from them.

How righteously we now condemn the evil of colonialism, yet how tightly we cling to all the land
and booty that it gained us.

Conquistadors and colonists have drawn the map of the world in the blood of the conquered,
who are now all afire to spill more of their blood in order to redraw it.

To explore the world has been the first act in exploiting it. ‘To find a new country and to invade
it,’ Johnson said, ‘has always been the same.’

Colonies were the pulsating tumours by which the cancer of capitalism metastasized round the
globe.

All settler societies are wrong from the start. They were conceived in sin, and brought forth in
iniquity. Their original sin is their seizure of a land that they have no right to, irrespective of the
good or ill that they have done thereafter.

Australia was set up as a penal colony for petty thieves by pious men who had just stolen a
continent. It is a comical country burdened by a tragic past and threatened by a dark future.
73 Righteous empires
All empires are as moralistic as they are brutal. They place their trust in violence and
providence, which have put the weak in their power. ‘The strongest poison ever known,’ Blake
wrote, ‘came from Caesar’s laurel crown.’ Ruthless aggressors take it that they owe their
hegemony more to their piety than to their might. They thank God that he grants his favour to
those who use it for his glory. ‘Not unto us, O Lord.’ Thus Cicero said that though each nation
overleapt Rome in some feat, it had conquered them all by its godliness. The romans were the
dullest people, self-righteous, self-pitying, incurious, smug, covetous of dainties but careless of
beauty, soulless technicians and administrators not imaginers. So they of course thought it their
duty to lord it over the world. Now we are all romans.

A long-continued crime, such as the outrages of imperialism, comes in time to form the very
bedrock of law and the state. Time, power and numbers suffice to absolve any illegality.
Democracy can justify any wrong by a plurality. It has legitimated colonialism by sanctioning
those states in which the settler population grew to outnumber the native one.

Now that the old colonial states have ceased to rape and plunder their colonies, they have
turned to lecturing them on how far they fall short of the fine principles they have given them.

HISTORY

74 Crisis makes the leader

Great leaders in history twist the interests of emerging castes to their own ends. Each is half
self-convinced messiah and half ham showman. They rise up at times of crisis, to unite
burgeoning interests, or to sever strong interests from outmoded structures. They can’t change
which way the wave of events will go. But they do increase its amplitude, deepening its troughs,
though not heightening its crests.

Nations are not great because they have great leaders. They breed great leaders once they
have grown great.

Napoleon was a relic of the antique noble type which the new world brandished as a battering
ram to break down the old. Tyrants drive the locomotive of liberty and progress. Too bad they
use corpses to stoke its boiler. And they mince flesh and bone to sawdust which they use to
stuff their own reputations. ‘A man like me,’ as Napoleon tells us, ‘does not fret much about a
million men.’
75 A great leader is a middling mind
A great man or woman of action is a middling intellect in the service of an excessive ambition.
They are play-actors who know how to stage-manage their effects. Napoleon may have been
the only one to have had a first-class mind.

Politics is not complex or deep, but it is so impossibly involved, that only a second-rate mind can
master all its twists. All it skill lies in the number of balls that have to be juggled.

The great man is the iron tool which the iron laws of history use to shape events.

Great men and small accidents cause great carnage, but they don’t change the course of
events.

The laws of history care no more for individuals than the laws of physics care for atoms. They
control them, but feel no solicitude for them.

76 Hero and crisis

Some heroes call up a crisis, and some crises call up a hero to confront them. A bloody
catastrophe brings out great men, as the blistering sun brings out maggots in carrion. They have
the good luck to arrive on the scene at the very worst time.

War is the poetry of history, peace is its uneventful prose. A leader who lacks a war is like a
poet who has not yet found the great theme on which to build a lasting fame. Like a taper in
daylight, they would be hard to piece out in the absence of its dark background. They are
matches which need a cataclysm to strike flame from. And what do they care how many lives
the blaze might singe? Had Lincoln not been embroiled in the civil war, he might have turned
out to be no more than a wily temporizer.

A great leader is more an accident of time and place than an affirmation of character. In the
great events of life chance must use the tools it has to hand to get its work done. But in art and
science it must find a genius to do it.

77 The school of history

Books of history distract us from the lessons they might teach. By piling up the fine dust of facts,
persons and places, they prevent us from discerning its most basic patterns. And by
concentrating on hinge events, they pretend that it might have come out differently, if a few
circumstances had been altered.

If events take place once only, then history can teach us nothing. And if they happen over and
over, what need is there to study more than one or two of them?
People do not make history, history makes people. This is why there is no point trying to learn
from history.

The human race is not a single being with a heart awash with good intentions which can learn
from its blunderings by summoning them to mind.

History and experience teach people to grow prudent, not to be wise. They guide them how to
get what they want, not to want what they ought.

History is not philosophy teaching by examples. It is ideology obfuscating by examples.

History keeps a school for cynics.

I like to read history, because it gives a nobody like me the chance to sit in judgment on the few
men and women who were somebody.

78 The rupture
Marx was not enough of a historicist or materialist. The laws of history are not universal in space
or time. Capitalism has made a complete break from all epochs of the past, as great as the
break from tribal cultures to civilized states. It has reshaped all aspects of the superstructure of
the state, laws, customs and mores, the family, civil society, and religion.

Capitalism is at once the culmination of history, a total rupture from it, and its end.

79 Causes
The sole question that matters in the study of history is what sorts of forces are causative. But
this is the one question that historians seem unable to ask. Yet they all write as if they knew the
answer, and that nothing could be more clear.

It may be that human kind makes its own history, but not till history has made it.

The only changes that make a real difference are those that take place independent of human
will, agency or direction. And though we may be able to alter events, but we can’t alter the
forces that shape them.

We impute events to trivial and transitory causes, because we see no more than the trivial and
transitory effects.

The world is right to judge by the crudest and most superficial criteria, since it is by being crude
and superficial that things and people gain success. ‘In analyzing history,’ Emerson advised, ‘do
not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.’ And it is the deepest and most
real causes that are the most superficial of all. But ideas, being the deepest things, have the
shallowest effects, though we are so shallow too, that we take it that they must have the most
profound ones.

Events are not quite so superficial as to be changed by empty symbols. But people are
superficial enough to believe that they are.

In order to make sense of the springs of world events, a deep mind must vulgarize itself.

80 Ideas do not change the world

Ideas do not change the world. They send it spinning faster in the grooves in which it’s set. And
the only ideas that make a difference now are inventions. The motor car has changed the world
more than marxism.

We pay lip-service to our creeds, which don’t change even our own conduct, and then we
declare that ideas change the world.

Ideas are not the cause of big historical events. They are not even the cause of big historical
ideas. Yet they still rouse a lot of fake feeling, and spill a lot of real blood. They provide the
costumes and play the music that events march to, but they don’t choose the road they will take.
Like the thunder of history, they may make a big noise, but they have no lasting effects. At most
they serve as pretexts for those who would have done wrong without them, and who have no
lack of them in any case.

Events are effects, not causes. And ideas are not even events.

81 The impotence of ideas

Thoughts that come on doves’ feet do not guide the world, in spite of what Nietzsche claimed. It
is only the world of thought that they guide. But of course the thinker mistakes that for the world.

The renaissance was not a rebirth of paganism or hellenism. It was a new birth of capitalism.

A dictator starts out as an intellectual, and shares the intellectuals’ vanity that there is nothing
more dangerous than an idea. And so he shows his respect for them by putting them in gaol.

The powerless have no weapon but their inflammatory words to fight their oppression by the
strong. And the strong use these words to prove that they need to keep oppressing them.

82 The end of ideology

Capital doesn’t care what you believe, so long as you keep buying and selling.
Capital holds all the tools to shape the superstructure of the state and its ideology. But it has no
need to, since it can thrive under all sorts of regimes. It can do its work as well in a one-party
dictatorship as in a democracy. But it needs the state to be centralized and the citizen to be
detached. And so all things now tend to these twin ends.

Ideology in capitalism is not essential and foundational. It is practical and functional.

Democracy needs capitalism in order to keep its citizens happy and compliant more than
capitalism needs democracy for capital to thrive.

83 Morality and economy

The moral code of an age is not made by its ruling class. It is the one required by its economic
system.

No society could be governed by a slave morality. The moral rule that took the place of the
brutal and chivalric code of the middle ages was not a christian slave code of altruism, guilt,
asceticism and resentment. It was the code required by capitalist accumulation.

The principles of a moral reformer such as Wilberforce do not triumph till the economic system
can use them to give fresh impetus to its productive forces.

84 Cut off from the past

The study of history is a sign of our divorce from the past. And the historical sense did not grow
up till the new age of capital had made a total rupture from all its pasts.

History has come of age in an epoch that is cut off from the past. So even if it could teach us
any lessons they would be of no use to us.

History’s tide turns so fast, that those who take it at the flood are soon left stranded.

Now that history is more than mere lore or legend, it has nothing to teach us. And when it has
come to form a science, we won’t learn a thing from it. A society that lives by immutable custom
has no history, only mythology. And a state that can recall its past has lost it a long time back. A
traditional culture is one that is controlled by a past which it can’t remember. History is the
legend which is engraved on the tombstone of tradition.

It is only because we live in the future that we have built up a usable past. But since we are off
In the future, the past is of no use to us.

85 Flattered by the past

The smugness of times to come will mock the smugness of our own.
The complacent present asserts its highhanded jurisdiction over the past by presuming to learn
from it. The one lesson that we have gleaned from history is that we are now free of the past
which has shaped us, and that we can shape the future as we wish.

History is the bad conscience of humankind, from which we draw the unlikely lesson that we
must be illimitably perfectible.

86 The poison of the past

Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. But so are those who can recall it. And
those who have pored over its registers will best know how to reprise its crimes. The monsters
who plan to perpetrate a future holocaust could cull as many hints from the past as those who
aim to prevent one. Men and women of goodwill go to the school of history to find out how to
fight tyrants. But the tyrants graduated from that college long ago. While well-meaning citizens
are labouring to learn from history, the mad and malignant are already hard at work making it.
As A. J. P. Taylor wrote of Napoleon, ‘Like most of those who study history, he learnt from the
mistakes of the past how to make new ones.’

Those who claim to recall the past are mad to kill each other to impose their own side’s version
of it. As much harm has been done by remembering the past as by forgetting it. Those who
believe that they remember the past are condemned to rewrite it.

87 Repeating the past

History is what we argue over while the past is finding new ways to repeat itself.

We recall the past for a purpose, and our main purpose is to learn how to thrash our enemies.
And that is how the past repeats.

Orwell claimed that ‘who controls the past controls the future.’ But a democracy has no need to
control the past. The past is dead and done with, and all are too dazzled by what’s to come to
care what it was like.

People have long memories for things that never happened.

88 Fables of the past

People try to recount events, but all they do is reconstruct them as fables. Yet they trust that
when they do so they grasp what they mean. But they only falsify them, though they do grasp
what their falsifications mean. Once an event is turned into a story, it is lost to truth for good. But
it may survive as a narrative long after it has been killed as a fact. If we live by telling our
stories, it’s because they are lies. And if we are the sum of the stories that we tell, then there is
not one word of truth to us.

In order to make the past useful, you have to misunderstand it.

Nature, the past and experience are dumb. It is we who put in their mouths the things that we
want them to teach us. And we choose the stories that will teach us what we wish to hear. The
deep precepts taught by the daughters of memory rehash the latest cant. Anyone who thinks
that the past instils a simple schoolbook code of right and wrong will be too simple to glean a
thing from it.

Leaders now spend their term in office failing to make any history and their retirement in trying
to rewrite it.

89 The memory of catastrophe

We need exemplary catastrophes in history as well as in our own lives. And each age needs its
own catastrophe to prove its prejudgments. The eighteenth century, disputing divine providence,
had its Lisbon earthquake. And the twentieth century, disputing human melioration, fastened on
the holocaust. The shoah, which was so prosaic in its operations, has come to stand for us as a
terminal and sublime poetry.

We have lived through too much savage history to find our way back to the green world’s
savage innocence.

How softly the horrors of history tinkle when they happen, but how deafeningly they re-echo.
The nightmare of history may take a generation to seep into our dreams and poison us. How
belatedly the sons and daughters learn to be haunted by the spectres of what their parents lived
through. The world had to wait twenty years to feel the shock of the holocaust. ‘Late resounds
what early sounded,’ as Goethe wrote.

90 A history of the future

The United States is what the whole world is now or is on course to become, a republic of
hucksters, pacific and bellicose, jittery and bullying, shiny new and already rusting, cold-hearted
and maudlin, wide-eyed and wised-up, populist and plutocratic, coordinated and disorderly,
conformist and exhibitionist, regimented yet anarchic, bumptious and epicene, just being born
and a long while dying, a light to the nations and an abomination, a dustbowl flowing with milk
and treacle, puritan and lewd, a giant blinkered by its own sanctimoniousness, rich and in debt,
globalized and parochial, self-intoxicated and self-doubting.
The United States is not a country but a plague, the pox americana. It has infected the globe
with the fever of its venal optimism, so well-meaning and so self-serving. It is a land of optimists
who live in terror of some enemy which they themselves have conjured up. The union may have
grown great had it been content to stay small. It chose instead to swell to a colossal continental
empire. The statue of liberty is its fit symbol, gigantic, brassy and hollow, a miracle of
engineering and a monstrosity of taste. It fulfilled its manifest destiny by betraying its founding
principles. How was the frontier of pioneering self-reliance paved over so soon to make the
sale-yard of huckstering self-promotion?
THE END

Contents

Imperial species

Nature’s end

Greed

Happiness

Justice

Freedom

Equality

Enlightenment

Technology

Progress

IMPERIAL SPECIES

1 Progress and collapse

The end of all flesh is come before us. But we are too swept up in our greed to see what’s in
front of our face. Look on the dead earth. This is our work. This is what our hands have made,
and we find it all very good. Here is the fruit of progress. But a dark time is on the way. We can
see it close at hand. But we have to shut our eyes to it, since we don’t care to stop it, as we trust
that it won’t come till we are gone. From now on the end of the earth ought to be the starting
point of all our thinking. But this is the one theme that no one can bear to think of.

The human race has as bright a future as all the old master races, which thought they could
spread their righteous rule over the benighted globe.
2 Our lethal resilience
It is our own invulnerability that has made the earth so fragile. Nothing can kill us, and so we are
bound to kill it. Fire one year, flood the next, but we come through it all with heavier pockets and
lighter hearts.

We will need all our resilience to get us through the havoc that our resilience will cause. And as
we grow more resilient, we will live in a constant state of emergency.

We can live through any disaster, so why should we care if we make the earth unliveable for all
the species which are not so resilient?

What does not kill us makes us willing to kill all that might get in the way of us staying alive.

We no longer need to adapt to our environment. We know how to adapt every environment to
our own needs, and in so doing we will lay it waste. And the only one that we won’t be able to
will be the paradise that we have shaped for our own use.

If a thing needs to be saved, then it must be well past saving.

The suicide of our species will come too late to save the earth.

3 Do we deserve to survive?
Each generation will grow more predatory, more restless and more distracted than the last,
more rootless and more plugged-in, more disembodied yet more in thrall to its gross cravings,
more solipsistic and more connected, more helpless to quash the giddy wishes that will wreck it,
too weak to save itself, and not worth saving.

Our predominance will prove that we lacked the wisdom to know how to wield it. Human kind
will soon die, but not till it has shown by all its brutal and sordid triumphs that it does not deserve
to live.

Having pillaged the planet so heedlessly, why would we deserve to live through its jaunty
holocaust?

Once human kind has gained the power to indulge its least whim, it will at last get exactly what
is coming to it. But how it will squeal when it soon gets what it deserves.

Having put nature and art to the torch, the one decent thing we could do now is to throw
ourselves on the pyre.
4 Our infatuation with progress and power
We gauge our own power by how heavily we press on the earth and by how much room we take
up in it. Why would we want to touch the ground lightly? We want to make it feel our full weight.
And we are proud that we can force it to yield so pliably to our brutal manipulation. Our self-
importance grows with our girth.

We used to be exasperated by the helplessness which hemmed us in, now we are awed by the
might which will bring us down.

All the things that add to our power bring us nearer to our end. And all that we now care for are
the things that add to our power.

Having ruined the earth by our power, we hope to repair it by finding ways of using ever more
power. And we now have so much of it, that we provoke the very threats that we are so afraid
of.

5 Progress and our doomed omnipotence

Our last idol will prove to be the exterminating godhead that we have made of our own
omnipotence.

Our homicidal kind, unyoked from all its oppressions, has set itself up as the sanctimonious
autocrat of the wide earth, which it will keep on ravaging till it rebels.

‘All men,’ as Defoe wrote, ‘would be tyrants if they could,’ and now each tame feeder can. The
aim of democracy is to raise each one of us to the greedy beatitude which despots alone used
to enjoy. Any leader now who dares to interfere with our tyrannical whims must be a tyrant.

Our omnipotence will soon reduce us to impotence. And our pitiless arrogance will leave us
abject and self-pitying.

Having sent the gods to their dim graves, we will soon flex our godlike might by abolishing all
the rest of life. And so we will die alone in omnipotent desolation.

Our machines lend us a divine power which we make worse use of than any devil could.

When people have at last got hold of the power to achieve any end they want, they will use
every end as a means to get more power, and that will be the end of them. They will soon have
procured a might as limitless as their desires, and they will use it to lay waste the earth.
6 The progress of the imperial species
We are an imperial species, and every place on earth is now ripe for our exploiting. The empire
of human freedom and power will be the last and most extortionate empire of all. And it will soon
go the way of all empires, and will die by its own overreach. Our domination of nature will leave
us more vulnerable than ever to its deadly force.

By using mind to control matter, progress will at last extend the dominion of brute matter to all
things of the spirit.

Prior to entering the promised land, the chosen must first show that they are fit for it by
subjugating or liquidating the sub-humans who by some oversight are in possession of it. ‘Thou
shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew
mercy unto them.’ And now we are all the chosen. And the whole globe is our Canaan, which
we must clear to make room for our sacred race.

As soon as nature came to be part of human history, it ceased to have a future. And though we
now have a more modest view of our place in nature, there will soon be no place for nature in
our world.

The most noxious invasive species on every continent has been the white race.

7 Colonizing the galaxy

Having rendered this accursed orb uninhabitable, we dream of forsaking it and infecting the rest
of the solar system with our taint. And having wrecked this earth by colonizing all four corners of
it, we plan to save our ravening breed by colonizing the galaxy. Once we have turned this Eden
to a garbage dump, we will quit it to found our paradise among the constellations. We reach for
the stars, and drag down the sky on our heads.

Having turned this paradise to a lifeless desert, we hope to settle some lifeless desert and turn it
to a paradise.

Having killed off all the lesser breeds of life on earth, we sweep the cosmos in search of the
superior ones which will be more worthy of our intercourse.

We act like earth’s spoilt brats, sulkily set on mangling it if it won’t disgorge all that we demand.
We will wear out the old earth in our vain striving to slake our thirst for unstopping novelty. This
planet is our plaything. We will break it and scrap it and get a new one.
8 Our frantic progress will kill us
We may be doing the best we can, but if that’s the case, it would be better if we gave up and did
nothing at all.

Nothing can save us, since nothing can stop us. We all spin like tops, knowing that if we slowed
down, we would totter and fall. The earth can’t be saved, since we can be coaxed to do better
but not to do less. And there’s no money to be made from persuading people to stay put and be
content with what they’ve got. We would rather do anything at all than do nothing. And we would
rather run mad than slow down. ‘If a soldier or labourer complains of working too hard,’ Pascal
proposed, ‘try giving them nothing to do.’

We are all getting so much out of life, that we don’t aspire to do better, and can’t bear to do less.

We think that we will be saved when we have got more of the things that we crave, freedom,
growth and machinery. But these are the things that we need to be saved from by the things
that we recoil from, repression, restraint and simplicity.

NATURE’S END

9 Progress to the end

Our relations with the virgin earth began as repeated and aggravated rape, and will soon end in
a murder-suicide.

Human kind was set on committing suicide from the first. All that it lacked was the means. And
progress supplies it with no end of these. Nothing now could save the earth from human kind or
human kind from itself.

Tradition was a cult of the dead. Progress will prove to be a frenetic cult of death.

Our war on nature has entered its triumphal phase. All that remains is to mop up the bedraggled
remnant. But all our victories will prove to be pyrrhic, and one more will be enough to break us.

A few hundred years of hectic progress will soon put a stop to four billion years of patient
evolution.

Any kindness that we show the earth will merely drag out its agony.

The earth was doomed, the day that the first crop was sown. We have been living in the end
times since the beginning.

Civilization makes progress by devising the innovations which will speed it to its end.
Civilization was the brief phase that we forced nature to pass through on its way to becoming
garbage.

10 Our nature will end nature

In order to put an end to nature, all we need do is stay true to our own nature. God help any
cause that’s so weak that it has to rely on human nature for its success.

The little that is left of our own nature will soon make an end of the little that is left of the rest of
nature.

The indomitable human spirit will soon beat down all that stands in the way of our self-
destruction.

We talk as if there were no form of life on earth but our own, and soon there won’t be. In a short
time the whole globe will be humanized. And soon after that it will be dead.

It is said that the solution to our problems lies in the human heart. But that’s part of the problem.
The human heart is programmed to prefer technocratic solutions.

Since nature has doomed each of us to die, why should we care if we blast it with a universal
death?

We are so cut off from nature, that we dream that we want to go back to it. And now that we
have wrecked it beyond repair, we hope soon to restore it to its pristine purity.

11 The wild and the tamed

We are genially reducing the earth to a vast labour camp and a vast death camp. We cram it
with breeds that live and die for us, while fecklessly extirpating the rest. So we hold out to the
beasts an unenviable choice, feed us, amuse us, or die. But we will pamper the tame remnant in
zoos and kennels as our near equals, once we have rid the world of all the untameable ones.
And the only wild things that will survive are those that learn to scavenge off our refuse.

We love wild nature, now that we have tamed and gutted it. And what tender moments of
communion we will share with it, as we squeeze the life out of it.

We picture the world as a garden, because we assume that all the things in it are made for our
use.

By the time that we learn to live at one with all living things, they will all be dead.

We might not quite succeed in emptying the globe of all life, but we will at least fill it with the
worst sort. Having killed off all the wolves and lions, our fate is to be devoured by vermin.
The wild beasts were a benediction to us. But we have been nothing but a scourge to them.

Nature is a slum which we have bulldozed to make way for our gleaming new city of progress.

12 Progress to a virtual nature

As the green world goes to rack, instead of cherishing its last frail traces, we more and more
hanker for the synthetic and the virtual. Our devices add to our dominance, while distancing us
from real life. By the time that we put an end to the real world, it will have so long faded from our
view, that we won’t so much as remark its passing. We will be rocketing too fast for the report of
its perishing to reach our ears. And we will haunt like white ghosts the death agony of this
tormented globe.

We are too rapt up in documenting and photographing our own fabulous lives to perceive that
we are killing off all life around us. Our machines are gnostic angels which will soon deliver us
from the toils of this earth.

The world was never real for us. And never have we been so absorbed in the world as we are
now. But the world that absorbs us is not the real world. It is the thin but vivid world of our
fantasies which we scroll through on our screens. And soon we will empty the earth of all the
kinds of life for which it was real.

The camera replaced art with a gaudy yet mechanical realism. And now it is replacing the real
world with a thin image of itself.

13 The fiction of nature

Wildlife is now just one of the synthesized fictions which we are fond of viewing on our screens.

In books what we like is tragedies that end happily, as Howells said. But in life we are
manufacturing a paradise that will end in devastation.

Now that nature is long done with, in the wake of each natural disaster that we cause we lament
the loss of pristine nature.

We have to hope that stories will save us, since we want to keep on doing the things that we
think make good stories of our lives. And all these spell bad news for the earth.

We have to act as if we could save the earth by telling stories, since all the plain facts make it
clear that it is doomed.

GREED
14 Greedy apocalypse
Our avarice is preparing for us a humane and prosaic armageddon.

We have drawn fire down from heaven, and we will use it to burn up the earth. Our promethean
greed will put out the stars, and poison the pure air.

We prefer to be rich hirelings than poor and free. We refuse to submit to a voluntary poverty. So
the maimed and broken earth will soon force us to submit to a compelled one. Human kind will
live on as a residue of harried scavengers, roaming in a vast red desert, preyed on by
implacable nomadic bandits.

Our greed for more and more life will soon make an end of all life. Our age of barren affluence
will soon give place to a far worse age of barren havoc.

15 Natural capital
Democracy and capitalism work as unerring counters to register and indulge worldwide cupidity
and solipsism. So they are sure to wreak on us our doom. They are steadily grinding down the
planet. But since we can’t steel ourselves to give them up, we have to put our trust in them to
save it. And so they will be brought down not by a proletarian revolution but by the earth which
they are oppressing. Their eradication won’t be the mere overthrow of one class by another but
will spell the elimination of our whole kind. Capitalism will kill the planet before a downtrodden
caste can rise up to kill it.

Is human kind a tool that capitalism is using to wreck the earth? Or is capitalism a tool that the
earth is using to rid itself of human kind?

Capitalism does not raise up its own gravediggers by consolidating the proletariat as a class. It
digs its own grave by scarifying the face of the earth.

As Marx wrote, ‘No social order ever comes to an end before all the productive forces for which
there is room in it have developed.’ And all the colossal forces set in train by the needs of
capital won’t have developed to the full till they have devoured the whole earth.

16 Progress will eat the innocent earth

Our innocent greed will soon eat up the innocent earth. It is the beasts that know not what they
do, and so they are bound to fall as prey to us, who know all too well.

The world belongs to us. So we must have the right to smash it and snatch the small shard of it
that we want. This earth, pure and unprotected, is just the quarry to tantalize our bullying greed.
But as Faulkner prophesied, ‘The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.’ We
have shown the land no justice. So it will soon show us no mercy. It will visit the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of us who hate it.

The all-consuming gods of silver and gold are unifying the globe in their frantic worship. We do
homage to earth’s maker by ravaging what he has made.

How many Edens did we have to desecrate, to found this barren paradise of consumers?

17 More will be less

The law of nature is growth. But we will wear out nature because we have found an unnatural
means to an unnatural form of growth.

People have to keep growing richer, so that they can pay to repair the earth which they have
wrecked to grow so rich. But they are too greedy to stop and fix anything.

Money and machines will brutalize the earth before they have time to soften and civilize us.

Our social drive to compete exceeds our natural urge to survive.

Human kind is entering on the golden age of Midas. Its lust for more will doom it to lose it all. It
will stop at nothing to get all that it wants, and so nothing will be all that it will get.

By making more of everything, we are bound to make everything worse.

18 Electrifying the planet

Human beings are animals that have learnt how to harness forms of energy other than their own
food. And so we cease to live in the present, and migrate to a future of restless accumulation.

When we can generate all the clean, cheap, renewable power that we want, we will burn up the
earth faster than ever, though in an impeccably sustainable way.

What steam was to producer capitalism, electricity is to consumer capitalism. It supercharges its
buying and selling. And so we, its willing dupes, lose interest in anything that does not run on
electricity. And we will have to turn the earth into a vast dynamo to provide us with more and
more of it.

What a profusion of physical inputs it costs to keep a disembodied mind running. The future of
humanity is a sum that doesn’t add up.

The world began with God’s creation of light, and it will soon come to an end now that we have
learnt to use electricity.
19 No restraints to progress
We must choose between self-restraint and self-destruction. But the choice has already been
made for us by the system of which we are a part, which will destroy us by removing all our
restraints.

The fatal syllogism. Human kind could be saved from annihilation only by restraining itself.
Human kind will not brook the least restraint. Therefore human kind cannot be saved from
annihilation.

Our species is out of control. It would rather kill itself than control itself. And the sole kind of
restraint that it will put up with is the one that promises more self-indulgence in the future.

We are wrecking the earth because we can. And we won’t stop because we can’t.

Our desires are so unnatural and immoderate, that only ignorance and repression can keep
them within the pale of nature.

We are too weak to resist our cravings. But we will be bold enough to ransack the whole globe
in our rage to feed them.

Our collective illusions used to hold us back. Now the atomized dreams of our greed lash us on.

Any species or society that rises above subsistence won’t stop till it has devoured the earth.

We are willing to squander our lives but not to scant our fidgeting desires.

We now have the means to end ourselves, and we lack the restraint to save ourselves.

20 Plenty and progress

Scarcity was an economic challenge. Plenty is an ecological disaster. Scarcity kept us in chains.
Plenty gorge us till we burst.

Having been so long oppressed by famine and scarcity, we are now merrily oppressing the rest
of creation to snatch our brief day of plenty. The old dreams of abundance will soon come true
as a nightmare of squalid planetary immiseration. As private greed produces collective
prosperity, so now collective prosperity gives rise to global carnage.

The first and only one of God’s commands that we gave heed to was to replenish the earth and
subdue it. And by doing so we wrecked the rest of creation.

Mass consumerism is ravaging the planet. And all we can think of to repair it is to consume in
more benign ways.
The only solutions that we have for our global problems are the slogans of the same global
greed that is poised to end us. And the best course that we can think of to save the planet is to
mouth the catchcries that are urging us on to wreck it.

Democracy auctions the land’s extorted plunder to pay for its brief heyday of luxuriance.

Human kind is so prudent, that it will bankrupt even inexhaustible nature. Prudence will waste all
its vast resources more thoroughly than prodigality could have done.

21 The diseases of progress

In the past people used to be prey to the diseases of want, but from now on they will be prey to
the diseases of affluence. They lay out vast sums of money and ingenuity to treat illnesses for
which there is no cure. But they are too lazy and self-indulgent to avoid the conditions which
they so easily could.

To find cures for the diseases that shorten human life is to feed the disease that is devouring all
life.

How droll to watch a culture that is killing itself and the earth from too much love of life wring its
hands over a suicide or euthanasia here or there.

22 Those who love it will destroy it

We love life so much, that we won’t hesitate to kill all of it, just to tear one more bleeding hunk
from its flank to feed our hunger for it.

The natural will to live makes unnatural monsters of us all.

Our frantically life-affirming society will force a final ruin on the earth. It clings to life while
hurtling on to a destruction of its own making. It is those who love life that will soon bring it to its
unlovely end. We clench it so tightly that we are crushing it. We love this life that is killing us,
and we are killing this life that we love.

The ride has never felt so fast and exhilarating as now when we are rollicking downhill. And woe
to anyone who would dare to put a brake on our hard-driving haste.

We shall perish as the helpless casualties of our own insuperable compulsions.

The young wreck the world to snatch their cut of it. And dotards wreck the world since they will
soon be departing it.
23 Life feeds on life
We are sure that we have everything to live for. And so we won’t scruple to kill everything in
order to go on living.

How thoughtful of God, to have set in train five mass extinctions, in order to make way for us, so
that we can unleash a sixth and final one to end all life for good.

God at last found out that the most deadly force in the universe is life itself, and that a form of
life that is aware of its place in the world will leave no place for all the rest.

Human kind cannot fulfil all its capacities without destroying itself and all the rest of life.

24 Loving nature to death

Only a being that lives at a safe distance from nature could love it.

In order to enjoy the simple and natural, you need to have the wherewithal to live out of range of
their unpleasantness.

Our preference for a planet teeming with life may be a mere prejudgment in favour of what
piques our interest because it is like us. And it’s a preference which we in our destructive
perversity are doing our best to frustrate. Life is a mere local infestation on an out of the way
planet. Earth is no more beautiful than Saturn or Mars, but we will make it quite a bit uglier. It is
a dung heap, and we are the maggots that make it writhe.

25 Our ugly desires

We are recreating the plentiful land in our own worst likeness, flat, wasted, withered, sere and
stunted. Soon we will have made it as ugly as our heart’s desire.

We will devour all that is fresh in our frenzy to feed fat our stale desires. And our ravening
inanity will eat up the round earth in order to fill itself.

The world with which we will smother the earth will be as dull and heavy as concrete, and as
slick and light as plastic.

People don’t know what they want, but they will despoil the dappled world to grab as much of it
as they can. Their schemes are as mean as they are peremptory and rapacious. For such small
bait they will chew up the multitudinous world. They harpoon great whales, to whittle their bones
to make walking sticks.
Our mean desires will soon drain the broad earth of its unfailing bounty. We swarm like a
battalion of ants on the carcass of some great bull. Yet when the carrion earth wriggles with
twelve billions of us, it will seem to us more alive than ever.

The last dark day will dawn on mortals still dreaming of plunder and scrabbling to wring some
reckless profit from the gangrened earth. They will be too busy rummaging the corpse to grieve
for the life that they have murdered.

Our society acts like a lunatic, barrelling along, ranting incoherently, wild eyes fixed on some
non-existent goal.

26 The wreck of perfection

To flee their personal torments, people feel that they have the right as a species to scourge the
planet. They will turn the earth to a hell, to air-condition their private inferno.

We will make the worst of everything by scrabbling to get the best for ourselves. Each of us is
so bent on bettering our own small nook, that together we will flatten the round globe. In order to
make our own little life charming, we will make the lush earth desolate. And we will smash it to
smithereens in our madness to make our own puny and broken lives whole.

We can’t so much as tend our gardens without poisoning the soil. All of us can now claim our
place in the sun, though we may find it a bit too hot for our liking. As Emerson exclaimed, ‘What
a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would.’

HAPPINESS

27 The rapacity of happiness

The search for happiness is a grand pretext for the untrammelled indulgence of our greed.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for us spell death, bondage and woe for the earth. They
are the ideology of an age so caught up in accruing the means to freedom and happiness that it
will never live free and happy. And we bring misery on the earth in our mad chase after
happiness which leaves none of us any happier.

We have strip-mined the earth to manufacture the small and disposable article of human
happiness.

This earth is dying, and we are having a high old time doing all the things that are killing it. ‘They
joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.’
We all wring our hands over the ruin of the earth, while we all go on doing the things that are
ruining it. There’s more money to be made and more fun to be had from wrecking the planet
than from repairing it.

The life of hectic consuming which now seems to be the sole kind worth living will soon put an
end to all life.

Progress has provided all of us with more and more deluxe substitutes for joy.

28 The age of destruction

We subsist in a brief interim of frantic happiness between the end of universal misery and the
dawn of universal destruction. We have had the best of it, and it has not been much good. Our
prosperity has hoisted us an inch above the ground for a brief term. But its loss will bury us a
mile below it for all of time. We will presently be more forlorn than ever, ground between our
ancient afflictions which we can’t evade and our gluttonous new appetites which we can’t get
our fill of.

By seeking to cure their chronic woes people will turn them into acute and fatal ones. They will
fall victim to the frenzied remedies that they take up to heal the wound of their being. They are
so eaten up by their discontent, that they have resort to a manic hilarity which will eat up all the
world.

Nothing now will change, and it will all keep on getting worse. Life will soon revert to a fevered
gloom more black and miasmal than it’s ever been.

All our good days are done, our bright dawns have waned, their freshness has faded, their dew
has sweated off in our glaring neon. ‘For the world has lost his youth, and the times begin to
wax old.’ The best of life is over before it’s even begun.

29 The happy earth, the frantic world

The woes of our unblessed race have for so long weighed the earth down. Now its convulsive
gaiety is set to burn it up. ‘And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth
that is under thee shall be iron.’ This globe has for millennia been sodden with our agony. Now
we will scorch it to stoke the flame of our joy.

We, who can never find happiness, will badger the happy beasts to extinction by our vain
schemes to reach it one day. The earth, caked so thick with our misery, will soon smother all the
more carefree kinds of life. We will kill them all off to snatch a brief joy that we would not feel in
any case. We will lay waste the whole earth to get our hands on things that are wasted on us.
People won’t balk at emptying the earth of all life in their rage to fill their own small lives with a
minute more of tawdry fun.

The long-suffering earth won’t last through a few more centuries of our scramble for happiness.

Human kind now rockets so fast, it trusts that it is approaching escape velocity from the miseries
of the earth and time. But it will burst into flames and crash before it reaches it.

30 The greatest unhappiness of the greatest number

The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number will inflict the greatest misery that
the globe has ever had to bear. It is a ruthless juggernaut which pays no mind to how much life
it will crush under its adamantine wheels. It costs a ton of irreparable animal wretchedness to
squeeze out one gram of our brief felicity. And it takes a regime of global oppression to make a
local human emancipation.

We seek the happiness of the greatest number, but only of that small class of beings who
matter because they are of the same species as ourselves.

31 The real cost of the mirage of happiness

People won’t hesitate to put an end to the earth for all time, in their rage to snatch a mite more
of what they will lose so soon. The last two hundred years have shown how little joy they get
from gaining the whole world. And the next two hundred will prove how much it will grieve them
to be reft of it.

Our day of prosperity will cost the earth, and we won’t scruple to force it to pay the price. We will
trash it to tighten our grip on a gladness which we would scarcely feel.

Happiness is a mirage. But we will turn the lush earth to a desert in our fury to make it real. Our
shiniest dreams will melt the earth to a dark shadow. We will never bring in the millennium, but
we will incinerate all living things in the attempt. As Baudelaire wrote, ‘the cannon booms, limbs
whizz hither and yon, one can hear the groans of the victims and the howls of those officiating at
the sacrifice. It’s human kind in search of joy.’

We befoul the innocent air with the stinking discharge of our industrialized jollity. And now that
we are cut off from our roots, why should we mind how we blight the soil?

People presume that nature grants them the right to be happy, yet they callously gouge from it
the mere right to live.

JUSTICE
32 Destructive justice
The earth will be laid waste, not by war but by peace, not by poverty but by plenty, not by
ignorance but by ingenuity, not by repression but by liberation. It has more to fear from our good
angels than from our bad ones. The more tame we grow to one another, the more savagely we
hack and mangle the earth.

People are doing all the good that they can, and it will soon have put paid to the earth.

We are the salt of the earth, and we crust it so thickly, that we will soon kill it.

Malice slew its multitudes, but virtue will bring death to the innocent earth.

33 Progress to justice
Our love of justice, which sets us above the rest of the beasts, grants us a warrant to wipe them
out.

Our sense of justice grants that we owe duties only to the class of living things that are like us.
And so it will help to empty the earth of all the rest that are not like us.

People assume that they will have attained a state of supreme justice, when the meek members
of this one species have ceased to prey on one another and have joined in harmony to prey on
all the rest.

Humans are bound to stamp out nature, because they see that they are part of a polity, but not
that they are a part of it. They feel that they have a slot in a rapacious economy, but no home in
a broader ecology. What kind of contract could they make with the earth? And how could they
owe a thing to the animals, which don’t have the means to enforce their debts?

The meek who are to inherit the earth should surely be the sinless beasts of the field, and not
the unrivalled but perverted predator mankind. But our meek breed will have wiped them out
before they can claim their bequest.

34 The monster of progress

There’s no need of bad people in order to mess up the earth. All that’s required is plenty of good
people, and there’s now more than enough of them.

We are transfixed by the spectacle of moral bogeymen and horrors. So how could we see the
nest of everyday blameless greeds that are poisoning the ground beneath our feet? We love to
wring our hands at moral abominations such as the holocaust, since they keep our minds off the
philanthropic holocaust of nature which we are all at work on right now. And we scare ourselves
with monsters, so that we don’t have to see that the monster is us. We don’t have the guts to be
afraid of ourselves as we ought. Or we don’t have the sense to see how much we have to dread
from our own power.

Our selfishness will crush the earth beneath its boot, but our good will couldn’t save it. So intent
are we on obliterating it, that by acting in unison we will do so the sooner.

Our heaven on earth will soon have us praying for death or else glad just to drag out one more
day of crippled life.

35 Sanctimonious terracide
Our species hopes to get away with planetary murder. If it succeeds, this will show that it is an
exception to nature’s laws, as it always thought. And if it fails, this will be one more proof that
nature is unjust.

Our extermination of all living things won’t put the least dent in our moral self-satisfaction.

What chance did the innocent animals have against such righteous devils as us?

The planet is not safe from a species such as ours which holds that it was put here to save it.
Who will save the earth from a species that spawns so many saviours?

We are well-intentioned devils. And the earth won’t be good enough for us, till we have turned it
into a perfect hell.

Each of us would balk at doing the least wrong, and yet we are all colluding in the most
monstrous wrong that could be conceived.

36 Progress to utopia
We are sure that we will someday land in utopia, once we have got through the storm that our
progress has whipped up. And we will have just cemented in place the copestone of our new
Jerusalem when the end time comes to pluck it down on our heads.

We boast that we are the stewards of creation, while we rack it like fiends of destruction. The
human race claims to be the gardener, but it is the locusts come to devour the garden. ‘The land
is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness, yea, and nothing
shall escape them.’

Our moral progress makes our material progress all the more lethal to those species that lack
our gift for moral progress.

We glory both in our justice which has loosed all humans from their thraldom, and in our power
to bind the whole planet to do our will.
The devil wished to put an end to life. He knew that he could not make us any worse, so he
improved us, and that did the job far better.

37 Our self-applauding rectitude

When human beings have ground to chaff all their fellow forms of life, they will tell poignant
stories to weep for their own plight and how they have been forsaken and to boast of how
heroically they struggled to save them. How they will pity themselves for having been deserted
by all that they have so pitilessly killed.

The dead earth, which we have plastered so thick with our smug moral fables, would present a
fine moral fable of its own, if there were a soul left to read it.

We are so full of our own rectitude, that we will feel no guilt when we have emptied the earth of
all living things.

Though we make the worst of everything, we won’t stop believing the best of ourselves. We are
such scrupulously moral creatures, that we don’t just want to ruin the earth, we want to be
applauded for our fine motives as we do it.

We will bring nature to its opprobrious end in a festival of self-congratulation. And our
recessional will be an anthem of booming self-satisfaction. Our species will keep on extolling its
good intentions right up to the point when they bring down the curtain on the disgraceful farce.

38 No one to blame
Everything that each of us does will help to bring ruin on the earth. But nothing that any of us
does could help to save it. And there’s no need to stop, since none of us will be called to
account for any of it. ‘Collective crimes make no one answerable,’ as Napoleon said. The one
thing that all will agree on when the end of the world comes is that someone else must have
been to blame for it.

Each of us is happy to do what we know we can get away with. And since all of us are doing it,
each of us knows that we can get away with it.

How would the animals judge us? Who cares. Kill them all, and don’t give them the chance.

A species that is sure it will one day ascend to live in a pure realm of ends will reduce the whole
planet to a sordid tyranny of means. We will entitle several billion egos to act as if they were the
ends for which the earth and all living things serve as a means.
39 The irrelevance of good intentions
We preen ourselves on our nice distinctions of right and wrong. But they are nothing weighed
against our brute physical impact. We fiddle with our fine moral discriminations, and meanwhile
our material might goes on callously decimating the earth. The gross consequences of our acts
will far outweigh their exquisitely judged motives. Our good intentions blind us to the great evil
that we do.

Never have we been more ready to do our duty to the natural world. And never have we been
wiping it out at such a rate.

The first law of our moral code is to do no harm. Yet the harm that we do by living our
irreproachably moral lives is far greater than any harm we could do by acting immorally.

Human power now has so few limits, that human motives and intentions are of no effect.

It makes no difference now how benign our views might be. In the world market we are all mere
consumers. And the righteous and the unrighteous will work as one to suck the earth dry to its
last drop.

Our evolved ethical codes will prove less effectual than the instincts of a parasite, which at least
has the sense to keep its host alive.

The human race with its greeds and gods has dropped like a slow asteroid on this sad planet.
This will be the sum of the moral significance of our incorrigibly moralizing breed.

FREEDOM

40 The progress of freedom enslaves the earth

Why would the rest of life rejoice at the reign of carnivorous human liberty? Every extension of
human emancipation has come at the cost of the enslavement of the earth.

Democracy has freed our species to lord it over the earth.

Human liberty has bound the earth in chains. What has cut us loose will make an end of us, but
not till we have used our surly freedom to make an end of all the earth.

The truth that has made us free has made the earth a slave.

We don’t doubt that once we are free to do right, we will cease to do wrong. But when we are
free to do as we like, we will have got so much power, that whether we do right or wrong will be
all the same.
The world is overpopulated with other people’s children. And it will be wrecked by other people’s
greed.

41 The havoc of freedom

Freedom has no content. If it did, it would not be free but determinate. And it will empty out all
the world trying to fill itself up. What we are free to do we are bound to do. And what we do once
we are sure to do over and over.

As Pascal said, it is not good for us to be too free. Or it is not good for the earth which groans
under the weight of our freedom. We deem that each of us should be free to get what we want.
But what we want will tear from the rest of life the bare right to draw breath.

What hope could there be for us, when we have to look for our rescue to the very powers that
have brought us to this brink, freedom, democracy and technology?

We mock those doomed peoples in ancient times who redoubled their vain offerings to their
idols when they had failed to save them. But how much stupider are we? Capitalism, technology
and democracy are killing us, and we count on them more and more to save us.

In the past we cursed our servitude. Soon we shall have cause to curse our freedom.

42 The curse of choice

Freedom of choice is the sole kind of enfranchisement that we now set any store on, since it is
the sole kind that capitalism has need of. And all our choices work to one end.

The car is the prime symbol of our personal freedom, and one of the chief tools of our species’
enslavement of the globe. First it helped to wreck the city, the matrix of civilization, and now it is
helping to wreck the natural world. And don’t we all love our cars more than we loved nature or
civilization?

The system of rational choice leaves us no rational choice but to maximize our own utility at the
expense of all other living things.

The net effect of all our discriminating personal choice will be an indiscriminate obliteration.

In our age of self-admiring individualism we love to cheep that each of us can make a
difference. And this is exactly what each of us is doing by every free act of getting and
spending.

The belief that each of our choices can help to save the earth is part of the ideology of the
system of choice which is ravaging it.
43 The wrong of rights
Human rights seemed at first to be no worse than a benevolent fiction, till we turned them into a
terracidal fact. They do more damage than human crimes, since all rights are the one right, the
right to consume and to subdue the earth.

Human rights make earth’s oppression. We now exult in our inviolable rights with the same
assurance that sovereigns trumpeted their divine right to rule just in time for their anointed
heads to be chopped off.

Humans will wreck the earth not by the wrongs that they do to one another, but by the rights
which they arrogate to their whole species.

Nature deals with each one of us as the nazis dealt with the jews, subjecting us to pointless and
excruciating experiments before it kills us. ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless,’ as Lao Tzu says.
‘They treat the ten thousand things like straw dogs.’ And we now do the same to nature as a
whole. We grant our own kind a fictitious troop of rights so as to make war on her.

We solemnly debate the duties that we owe to the animals, at the same time as our sheer
numbers are shoving them off the edge of the earth. To confer rights on them would be to add
insult to injury by pretending to make them part of the regime of liberal individualism which will
soon do them to death.

44 Progress and individualism

Each of us knows that we have far more to gain from our own greed which is sure to wreck the
world than from the collective self-restraint which might save it. And each nation state knows the
same.

Individuals are casualties of nature’s care of the species. And the whole of nature will be a
casualty of each individual’s care for itself.

The liberty of each will lay waste the inheritance of all.

In the past the state bore down hard on the individual. Now the individual partners with the state
to bear down hard on the earth.

A species each of whose members has a chance to flourish is destined to eat up all the rest.
Where each of us is such a big winner, the one loser is bound to be the earth.

Each of us is too important to die, and we are all agreed that the whole human race is so
precious that it has a right to kill the earth to keep on living.
How could we say there is no progress, when each of us sees a proof of it in our own
fantastically successful life?

The innocent freedom of each of us will make the brute power of all to squeeze the life out of
the earth. And the sum of all our individual rationality will add up to an ecocidal madness.

EQUALITY

45 Equal to oppress
Equal rights for all will rape the globe far more brutally than the lusts of the few. When they have
ceased to dread the wild beasts devouring them, the lambs will feel safe to nibble the pasture
bare to the dead root. A few billion sheep will chew up much more than a pack of wolves.

The earth will be baked to ash not by the blaze of some grand enterprise but by the brushfires of
ten billion low desires.

Democracy grants to each of us a patent to the overbearing voraciousness which in the past
grandees alone were graced with. It is the human will free and equal to lord it over the rest of
creation. We treat nature as great landowners dealt with their vassals. In Tolstoy’s words, ‘I sit
on a man’s back, choking him and forcing him to carry me, and yet assure myself and others
that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means, except by getting off
his back.’

46 Gang of equals
Democracy is one more syndicate of gangsters, hustling to bag as much loot as it can and get
out before the crash comes. It will lay waste all that it has inherited, and squander all that it has
stolen. But it will still dare to boast of its benevolence in enabling each class to get rich on its cut
of the spoils. It is indulging its brief prerogative to devour all that is too weak to fight back, the
past and the future, the memory of the dead, the blackened planet.

From the earth’s point of view, democracy is no more than the exchange of a few bloody tyrants
for a few billion.

Democracy mows down all life to clear a path for its marauding greed. It claims every right for its
own, and abrogates all its duties to the rest of creation.

All great things have been the work of elites. But the humblest of us will have a hand in
democracy’s crowning work of world destruction.
47 The progress of the one equal species
There is only one class now, the class of all human beings, who are free to work the indentured
earth till it gives out. The few used to club in oligarchies to stomp on those beneath them. Now
we gang together in democracies to pillage the subjected land. Inequality cut off one class from
the next, equality cuts off the whole of human kind from the rest of life.

Now that the franchise has been extended to all classes of beings that matter, those that don’t
have it don’t matter. And so we are free to ride roughshod over their interests.

All of us now know that we are born equal because we all belong to the one species that is
superior to all lower grades of living thing. And we know that they are inferior, because they are
too weak to wrest our privileges from us. We are all equal because we are biologically separate
from the rest of the beasts. And this separateness gives us the right to enslave or to eliminate
them at will.

48 The injustice of altruism

The more freedom for us, the more bondage for the earth. The more wealth for us, the more
poverty for the planet. And the more justice between the members of our own species, the less
justice there is for the rest of the species. And the more widely power is dispersed among us,
the more of it there is to press down on them.

We are all now so well-intentioned and cooperative, and we each bring our modest faggot of
kindling to add to the common bonfire that will burn up the world. All that we do adds fuel to the
conflagration.

Our egoism would not have wrecked the earth so thoroughly, if it had not been helped by our
altruism. And our folly would not have done so much damage, if it had not been armed by our
ingenuity.

We can pity a dying animal, yet we go on inflicting such dire injuries on this dying planet.

49 Our ravenous solidarity

We work as one to smash the whole earth, so that each of us might seize our own shard of it.
By cooperating so closely, we will screw up our sanctimonious ravenousness to a murderous
predominance. We will kill all the lesser forms of life by kindness to our own.

We are strangling the land in our close fraternal bands. Our solidarity has multiplied by many
times the destructive force of our selfishness. Altruism is the egoism of our self-infatuated
species, and our pacifism is its jingoism. And they both arm us to make war on the earth with a
more brutal effectiveness. They are the oil to grease the engine of greedy capitalism which is
pulverizing the land.

When the human family has learnt to live as one, it will be free to eat up all the rest of life. And
when the whole of our kind leagues in brotherly love, it will work with one accord to kill off the
rest of the beasts that are not its kin.

Our prophets have always looked to the great day when the lion would eat straw like the ox. But
we can’t be expected to eat straw. So we will kill all the lions and eat all the oxen.

50 Making peace to make war on nature

The nations now toil so resolutely for their greed, that they lack the vigour to wage big wars. And
they won’t resume, till their insatiability has sharked up all that is worth wrangling for, and has
left nothing for them to loot. But we are yet to see how nice they will be to one another once
their candy and toys have been torn from them. They may turn cannibal again, when they have
chewed through the rest of their fodder.

We are too prudent or too nerveless to put an end to ourselves by violence. So we will use
what’s left of our vigour to do it by our greed.

We have made peace with each other, so as to make war on the verdant world. Like the
romans, we cause a desolation, and call it concord. Peace now wrecks the globe as war once
did. The age of destruction will dawn the day that we call a halt to all conflict. It will roll out to the
accompaniment not of martial trumpets and drums but to the merry blare of pop tunes.

The old nation states laid waste continents from time to time. The new solidarity of the human
race will lay waste the whole planet for all time.

51 No cause worth fighting for

Millions have died to defend a false idea of their country. But we won’t check a single one of our
desires to conserve this common earth. We were always willing to kill foreign peoples to assert
creeds that we didn’t quite believe in. Now we don’t scruple to kill the whole of creation to get
things that we don’t even want.

Humans now feel sure that no cause is worth fighting for, but the least of their wants is worth
ransacking the entire earth for. They have thrown off the baggage of beliefs in their sprint to get
rich.

We shrink from the name of nihilism, while we are grinding the earth to nothing.

Mass suffrage has taught us that where there is no vision the people flourish.
ENLIGHTENMENT

52 From dark superstition to deadly progress

We have woken from our morose superstitious dreams to an enlightened devastation, which will
have a fiery but unilluminating end. When we threw off the chains of superstition, we didn’t free
ourselves to seek the truth, but bound ourselves as slaves to toil for our avarice. Our ignorance
gave way not to the reign of wisdom but to a mad scramble for lucre.

The age of reason set up human progress in place of divine providence, and so we will
anticipate a god-sent apocalypse with a godless one.

In the world’s fresh sunrise, when there was still an earth, everyone saw spirits and wonders.
But they were not enchanted, but haunted and tormented. So the enlightenment, which rose like
a dawn, has now blazed into a noon of rapacious mayhem. Now that our eyes can see what’s
real, we will leave nothing real to see.

How this bright globe began to go dark, when our benighted race grew enlightened. We use our
reason to light the way for our greed. Having suffused the earth with such a gleam, how could
we see that it is an emanation of hell fire? ‘To light the streets by setting fire to houses,’
Lichtenberg wrote, ‘is a bad form of illumination.’

53 Dark enlightenment
The diffusion of knowledge will run as the scout in the van of worldwide wreckage. ‘Now nothing
will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’

Knowledge makes the world seem more unreal, and we will use our technical knowledge to
annihilate it for real. Our spectatorial knowledge reduced the world to a play of shadows. And
now we will use our instrumental knowledge to tear down the playhouse.

Knowledge fails to stop us from going wrong. It helps us to profit so much from it, that we can
keep on going wrong in the same way. Or else it finds us worse ways to profit even more.

The course of events in a technocratic age exemplifies the cunning of unreason in

accomplishing the most chaotic and destructive ends by the most orderly and rational means.

For all our prudence, we will lose everything. And for all our greed, we will end up with nothing.
For all our wiliness, we will prove the dupes of our own shallow desires. All our dexterity won’t
solve a single one of our problems. And all our enlightenment will plunge the earth into
darkness. For all our generosity, we will leave nothing for those who come after us. And for all
our creativity, we will do away with the whole of creation.
Never has the light seemed more dazzling, but never has the future been so dark.

54 The ravages of knowledge

Our knowledge killed the gods, and our machines will kill the earth.

We can’t know a thing without destroying it, once we get it in our power. But we will succeed in
destroying our own kind without ever having known who we are.

Knowledge has now so ravaged the world, that not even the old reliable stays of prejudice and
stupidity could save it. The spread of knowledge will soon snuff out the light of life.

Ours is the sole species that can take in the beauty of the world, and all we have done is to twist
it out of shape. We can see the whole, the glory and the meaning, and we will smash, darken,
deface and disorder it, in order to get hold of the ugly and empty scraps that we crave. On our
banners we write the lie that truth is beauty, while we reduce the earth to an ugly mess.

Once we gained the know-how to get to the moon, we were bound to put an end to the earth.

55 Knowledge no progress
The future, as Wells wrote, will be a race between education and catastrophe. But each will
nudge the other to speed up, and it will end with them crossing the finish in a dead heat.
‘Knowledge,’ said Cioran, ‘having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us
inexorably to our ruin.’

The same greed that lured us to explore the globe will soon goad us to wreck it. Navigators
were the advance guard of empire, as information is now the advance guard of the exploitation
of the whole earth.

Science is the champion of human liberation. And by emancipating all our energies through its
knowledge, it has enslaved the whole globe to our desires. Art was the lackey of tyrants and
obscurantists. But it did no harm, because it held no sway.

We will soon find that to know nature and to kill it are two steps in the same process.

56 Saving ignorance
Our progenitors were saved from ruining the land as we have done not by their wisdom and
innocence, but by their nescience and incompetence. They had no choice because they lacked
the means. And we have no choice because we have so many of them. We are no more vicious
than they were, just more successful. And they knew too little to make as much of a hash of
things as we have. ‘If we possessed one granule of knowledge,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘there would
be no restraining us.’

Our wise ancestors would burn down a forest to catch a deer. Now we will burn up the whole
globe to get what we want.

Gods and creeds used to help keep the earth free by oppressing and stupefying us. Now like all
the rest of our illusions they urge on our avarice and self-assertion. They help us to do more, go
faster, get richer, and wreck the earth.

Till now the coercive sleights of established custom, superstition, usage and bigotry have
stopped us from exterminating all that lives. Our rapacity used to be hobbled by our ignorance,
now it is sped on by our ingenuity.

We can be held in check only by illusions. But all our illusions now tell us that nothing ought to
hold us back.

Natural ignorance is the one thing that might have saved us. But all we have is the unnatural
kind which does even more harm than our knowledge.

57 Confronting our condition

Humans don’t want to face their real predicament, since they can’t bear to undergo the shock
treatment it calls for. And even if they dare to put their finger on the symptoms of their disease,
they still can’t bear to admit its real cause, which is too many people and too much growth.

We can’t steel ourselves to deal with our real threats, which are growth and overpopulation. And
so we have to waste our time failing to deal with second-order threats such as climate change.

There are two kinds of optimists. The first are loath to take the cure, and so claim that the
malaise is not real. The second accept that it is real, and so must pretend that the cure is on
course to work. They deem that if the disease is dire enough, there will be some miracle cure.
There are those who must shut their ears to the bad news, because they don’t want to change
how they live. And there are those who are willing to listen to it, but still don’t change their life.

Our condition must now be terminal, since we have to steer our thoughts from our real dangers
by fretting about things that are no threat to us.

Since we have outgrown our innocence, we need to cling all the more to our illusions, so as not
to see the ruination that our knowledge will bring on us.
58 Addicts of hope, junkies of progress
Our despair would wear us out, and our hope will wear out the whole earth. When there is so
much hope in the world, you know that it’s time to despair. There is no future for us, now that we
have all turned into the hopeless addicts of optimism. The best we can hope is that it will kill us
quick.

Could a misanthrope wish for our race a more sombre doom than the one that its own bright
hopes are preparing for it? But our pessimism can’t guess how bad our optimism will make the
time to come.

The devil’s hopes must be riding high, now that hope is in the saddle on earth.

So long as there is hope for our species, there’s no hope for all the rest.

It is no longer fear that we have to fear. It is hope.

People will turn the earth to a hell, since they can’t let go of the hopes which they trust will make
it a paradise.

When people feel hopeful, they go shopping.

59 Progress to despair
Despair is our last, best hope. Too bad there is no hope of our ever despairing. And it would be
too optimistic to trust that even a dose of despair could heal us now. Our plight is so hopeless,
that all we have left is hope.

We would rather kill the earth with our hopes than save it at the cost of our despair.

Despair may be defeatism, but hope is collaboration with the system that jeopardizes the planet.
Despair, people say, would lead to paralysis. But that might be just what we need, when our
frenetic hopes have left the earth half-dead.

Gramsci urged us to keep up an optimism of the will and a pessimism of the intellect. But it is
because our incorrigible optimism of the will does so much damage that we need a pessimism
of the intellect. And yet we still don’t have the clear head or the courage for such a pessimism.

60 The swindle of optimism

Our rapacious optimism will make this the most exciting time to be alive, since we doubtlessly
won’t leave a morsel for those who are so unlucky as to come after us.
The future that our optimism will bring about will be an apt chastisement for our deluded and
arrogant hopes. But we trust that the chastisement won’t come till we are gone, and that it will
be others who will suffer it.

Optimists trust that the costs of their hopes won’t run fast enough to catch up with them.

Hope is the steam that keeps the turbines of consumption spinning, and we think we can heal
the planet by generating more of it.

The twittering optimism of experts who ought to know better tells us that it is high time to have
done with hope.

We know too much to hope, and yet we know so much that hope is all we have.

When people chirrup that it’s never too late, you can bet that it’s been too late for a long time.

The whole of human kind will soon be like girls and boys on christmas eve, too keyed up to
sleep for excitement at the good things that are in store for it.

61 Delusion is our last defence

We conceal the nihilism of our actions beneath an optimism of the intellect and a sentimentalism
of feeling.

To solve our global problems we have recourse to a personal optimism that fuels the frantic
buying and selling which is the principal cause of all our global problems.

In the past our hopes served as a harmless haven from our inescapable disappointments. Now
they goad us to get and spend as much as our hands can grasp. They used to deny reality. Now
they drive us on to devour it.

We will have to use all the sleights of our optimism to get through the terminal havoc wrought by
our progress. And we will need to make our songs and movies cheerier and more affirmative
than ever, to lighten our spirits as we bring the earth to its dark close. Our best days are in front
of us, we have to keep chanting as we go down into the black pit that our hopes have dug for
us.

It’s a good thing we have all our technologies of happiness, since all our technologies make us
so unhappy.

How much hope we will need to call on to keep sifting through the cinders, when optimism has
burnt up the earth.
62 The god of humanism
When half-gods go, we are free to give our full devotion to the real idol of our greed.

Humanism is the collective egoism of our species. It is the creed which gives a charter to our
domination of the earth. And the age of humanism is an age of humanity dehumanized by the
ingenious devices of its own making.

When sovereigns set up their religions, the poor had good reason to tremble. And now that
humans have set themselves up as gods, the land has reason to tremble. Having shed the
shining gods which we made to reflect our glory, we now worship our own selves, naked,
unhampered and almighty. Humanism will be our last idolatry. And we will immolate the
smouldering planet as a burnt offering to its insatiate deity.

Human kind’s realization of its essence will shortly precede its non-existence.

As patriotism is the egoism of a people, humanism is the rapacious and sanctimonious egoism
of our whole species.

63 The suicidal deity of progress

Each god has tried to bring an end to all flesh. The old ones wished to put a stop to life, but
were too weak and decrepit to do it. And the new humanist one does not want to, but it can’t
help itself. It will prove how far it outranks the old ones by finding a way to wreck the earth which
they made. Marx dubbed it ‘the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.’ Humanity is
a god powerless to save itself from the mayhem wrought by its own power. And humanism is
the gold leaf encasing the monumental clay image of Mammon which we all bow down to. And
we will turn the earth into a burning fiery furnace for all the lower forms of life that don’t join in its
worship.

There’s no need to refute humanism. It will soon come to an end with the human race for whose
domination of the earth it served as the apologist.

64 The last generation

God tried and failed to wipe out all life. We will succeed without even trying.

We have at last come of age, and can do all that we want by our own hand, even put an end to
ourselves. Our machines will soon complete God’s work of sweeping us off the earth.

Our species is too busy committing suicide to learn how it should live. It is madly intent on killing
itself, though it is squeamishly averse to dying any other way.
The humanity that humanism sets on high is the one generation now alive. It cares nothing for
its long heritage which it will lay waste for its own brief gain.

The face of the earth now swarms with ten billion extortionate demigods, sure of their own
sanctity and determined not to be balked or delayed in the least of their sordid desires. We deify
our own will, and won’t scruple to desecrate all that dares to stand in its way.

The sole hope for the earth is that people are now too selfish to be selfish enough to have
children.

65 The sacred species

Our blessed species is a curse to all the rest. And we profane the face of the earth in order to
propagate its holy strain. A form of life that is sure that it is chosen will stop at nothing to sate its
unholy cravings and spread its stain over the clean earth. To call our species sacrosanct is to
sanctify voracity.

A species that is sure that it was made in the image of God is bound to remake the whole earth
in its own image.

Say that life is sacred, and you blaspheme nature, whose first and final sacrament is death. Life
lives by preying on life. So if all living things were sacred, life would not be viable. And since our
single species has got it fixed in its head that it is sacred, it will soon make life unviable for all
the rest. When we say that life is sacred, we mean that our human life is sacred. And so we
keep piling up the corpses of the rest of living things.

A species whose members think that they have souls that will never die is bound to kill all the
rest of life that is not so endowed. Since we are the sole form of life fit for heaven, we will make
life on earth hell for all the rest that are not.

TECHNOLOGY

66 The progress of marauding technology

Our technological precocity has spread our sway over the earth. But we grudgingly hug justice
to our breasts, and refuse to extend it to the rest of creation, since it is too weak to wrest it from
us. Our humane amelioration will merely crank up our mechanical preponderance to a more
lethal pitch.

Our cooperation and resourcefulness are provisioning our brutishness and unwisdom with the
tackle which they will use to crush us.
Technology brings us permanent global problems by devising temporary local solutions. And
progress is a piecemeal reclamation which will lead to a general ruin.

Science now shows us how bad the future will be. And technology gives us the tools to make it
still worse.

Human beings will die as slaves to the devices which they hoped would make them free. They
have to pretend that the earth can be saved by their machines, since they love their machines
more than they want to save the earth.

67 The mechanical enablers of our greed

Technology has loosed our greed from its physical bonds, and capitalism has loosed it from its
social bonds. Humans use their gadgets to control the wild earth, so that they won’t have to
control their own wild cravings. They have to keep driving automation to add to their power,
since they are too weak to resist their wants. It will act as the perfect detonator for their
incendiary greed.

Our machines are the servants of our desires, and will be the masters of our destruction.

Technology is a noxious fume which science exhales when it reacts with utility and greed.

The road to hell on earth is paved by good inventions. Each accursed device piques our
rapacity and will hasten our perdition.

The same greed that has pricked us on to invent our machines will prevent us from repairing the
ruin that they will let loose on us. Soon they will be smart enough to do anything except clean up
the mess they have made of the earth.

The might of our machines will lay bare the squalor of our desires as they enrich us before they
end us.

All societies risk becoming like the slaves by which they live. And since our menials are
machines, we will grow ever more like them, more clever, efficient, fast and inhuman.

68 Our means will bring us to the end

We will grind the earth in the mill of our ingenuity.

As we perfect the means, we lose sight of the goal or degrade it. We flatter ourselves that we
are perfecting the world, when we are only perfecting the means that will be the ruin of the
earth.

We progress by getting better at the tasks that will make the whole world worse.
Progress finds out more and more intricate routes to send us off course.

We are ingenious enough to cure all of our ills, save those brought on us by our own ingenuity.

Our inventiveness has put into our hands all the power that our doltishness will use to do us to
death.

Technology has lavished on us all the tools and toys to keep us physically and mentally jittering
yet sedentary and oblivious. It gives us the means to go so fast that we don’t have to stop and
think where it is that we are going.

We will silence the chorus of nature, the better to hear the idiot burble of our gibbering devices.

69 The machine-minded utopia

Human kind gave up aspiring to a moral utopia an age ago. But we still look forward to a
mechanized one, which will heave into our lap all the trash that we crave. We count on our
machines to manufacture the millennium for us. But our prostheses will degrade this god-hated
globe to an airless plastic paradise. Our Eden will be a moronic funfair, buzzing, thronging,
garishly lit, blinking with devices and distractions. The human race will die not from truth or light,
but from their shabby reproductions, mindless data and mercenary technology.

Convenience is one more name that we give to our power. And we all now have at our beck
such a mass of small cheap conveniences, that there’s no hope for the earth. Each day they
make life easier for our own kind, and more impossible for all the rest.

All our time-saving devices prove that we have lost the patience to live in the instant.

PROGRESS

70 Progress and the disease of time

Progress is the acute stage of our diseased attitude toward time.

Progress disowns the past, devours the future, and reduces the present to a transit camp en
route to some paradise that is forever out of reach.

People used to cling to their old ways because they did not know where they came from. Now
they push on with their new ones because they don’t care where they are taking them.

Progress makes each age worse than the last, too smug to look back to the past, and too
greedy to leave any scraps for the time to come.

Progress trains us to live in the future, where we can wait for progress to arrive.
71 Progress drags us out of the present
Never have we been more caught up in the present, and never have we been less present. We
can’t live for today. But we will burn futurity to cinders so as to live in opulence the day after
tomorrow.

Beings who feel that they deserve a place in paradise are sure that they have a right to kill all
those that don’t, so as to grab their bliss right now.

The present is a slum which we have to clear so that we can build the shining towers of the
future.

In order to gain the power to dominate the planet, which no other animal has, we had to give up
the power to enjoy it, which every animal has.

It’s just as well for the animals that they live in the present. They don’t know the doom that lies
in wait for them at the hands of a species that lives in the future.

72 Progress destroys the past and tries to learn from history

Progress has taught us that we can make a better future by learning from the mistakes of the
past. But progress has made the present so different from the past, that the lessons we draw
from it are not of the least use.

We used to be condemned to repeat the past. Now progress has brought us up to date, and we
are condemned to repeat the present.

Progress is the process by which civilization spreads round the globe now that it is dead.

73 Progress must have no stop

‘Progress would be wonderful,’ said Musil, ‘if only it would stop.’ We can never reach the end at
which we aimed, because we have to keep on the move. And since the world can’t stop
improving, it will soon have to stop altogether.

Progress perpetuates itself by compelling each of us to join in its march. Since the world is
getting better each day, our first duty must be to swim with its tide and help push it on. To stand
aloof is to be an enemy of the human race.

If progress goes on for ever, then it fails to reach its goal. But if it does reach some destination,
then the future will one day cease to be an improvement on the past. It must tend towards some
end, but it must never have a stop. And since progress can never come to an end, the earth and
all its life-forms will have to.
Pessimists fear that progress is so fragile it might come to a dead halt some day. If only it could,
there might be a limit to the damage it will do. But it’s racing downhill, and gathers speed as it
goes. It can’t reverse, and it will end in a violent crash.

Progress is bound to wreck the better world that it has made as soon as it makes it, so that it
can make an even better one.

74 Instant progress
We fail to deal with our long-term threats because we are so harassed by our short-term ones.
By palliating the symptoms, we give the disease time to spread and grow more deadly. And by
ignoring our long-term threats, we make our short-term ones more acute and more urgent. As
Pessoa said, ‘a reformer is a person who sees the world’s superficial ills, and sets out to cure
them by aggravating its more basic ones.’

Technology throws up problems worse than the ones it solves. And then by solving these it
stores up still more intractable problems for the future.

75 Progress comes at the end

Progress seems like a new beginning, but it is the beginning of the end.

Progress is not the birth pangs of a new world. It is the fever convulsing one that is near its end.
It is the last stage of the delirium that leads to death. As Baudelaire said, it is ‘the grand heresy
of decrepitude.’

76 We are consumed by the future which we are consuming

The hungry present is consumed by the future, which it is hungrily consuming.

People want to make a future that will be better than the past. But they want to have this better
future for their own use right now.

Those who stand by the old ways feel sure that they are coming to an end with them. And those
who cheer on the future think that the world is just beginning with them.

The world has grown old under the weight of a species that wants to make all things new.

Each day progress makes life more unliveable yet more impossible to leave. There’s always
some new device that we have to hang on for.

Patriarchal societies were prisoners of a past which was no more than a myth. And progressive
states are prisoners of a future which will prove to be no more than a dream.
77 The summer is past
Now that people set no value on time, they can’t bear to wait for anything. Everything is urgent,
but not one thing is present. The more they make it all speed up, the farther they get from their
goal. They live as if it were all makeshift, transient and provisional, and yet they are never in the
moment. How could they take the time to build a secure foundation? They are in too much of a
whirl to lay up what they might need in the future.

We fear that if we don’t speed up, it will soon be too late. But we are going so fast, that it’s
already too late.

We live as if in the aftermath of some great event which never came to pass. ‘The harvest is
past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’

Progress will prove to be our most self-destructive superstition.

78 Progress to perdition
Progress is the defeat of life by the machine, of insightfulness by inventiveness, of grace by
utility, of ends by means, of civilization by technique, of wisdom by power, of love by lust for
gain. ‘The more the human race advances,’ as Flaubert said, ‘the more it is debased.’ It perfects
itself by the inch, and is corrupted by the mile.

Progress has unchained our predacious breed from the natural checks which have stopped any
single species from killing all the rest.

There can be no doubt that we are progressing. How else could we account for the vastation
that we have made?

In order to wreck the world, all we need do is persist in the projects by which we hope to perfect
it.

The wave of progress which has raised us so high and carried us so fast will soon dump us and
break our necks.

Progress will make the future so much better than the past, why should we care how bad it will
get?

Progress is the process by which each generation proves that it is worse than the last, and
makes the world worse for the next.
79 No improvement to progress
If progress could ever give us what we want, we would have no need of it. We have to keep
improving, since we can never find satisfaction.

In this world of endless improvement the one thing that doesn’t get any better is progress. Its
costs continue stubbornly to mount up, while its benefits are subject to the law of diminishing
returns.

The people used to be roused to aim at great things by being told how hard they were. Now
they have to be assured that they won’t cost them a cent, and they still don’t want to do them.

If we are to improve, we must be able to measure our improvements. But the things that can be
measured are not worth improving in, and the things worth improving in are those that cannot be
measured.

A noble taste knows that more means worse. But progress has taught us that better must mean
more.

80 The swindle of progress

Progress is a swindle which the present perpetrates on the future. It makes each one of us a
free rider on the age to come.

Progress keeps us in its thrall, since its benefits are tangible but delusory, while its costs are
covert but real.

We seem to be making progress, so long as we can keep on shifting its costs on to the future.

True progress would be the sacrifice of small present gains for the sake of some great future
good. But our sham progress is determined to grab these small present gains for itself and
leave the future to pay the cost.

Progress is a cheque which we make out to the future, and then cash and spend for our own
use. Pity the heirs of progress, who will be left to pay off the debts of our wild spree.

The future would be right to curse us for the woes that our progress will let loose on it, though it
will no doubt be too swept up in its own progress to feel them.

We see the fires on the horizon, and we dart straight for them, sure that they are the beacons of
progress.
81 The deadly addiction of progress
Progress has infected us like a virulent pestilence. We would rather die from it than be healed.
But it will spare us its worst horrors by terminating us. A utopia is an inferno which soon burns
itself up. But progress won’t peter out till it has burnt up the whole globe. It is our last and most
lethal addiction. We gladly give up our real good to keep it on the go.

The world is so evil, that in order to make it worse, all we need do is cram it with more of the
junk that it has. And that is what progress does.

Progress makes us more smug but more unsatisfied.

We have shrunk to the hungry junkies of progress, mad for our next fix of technology to solve all
our problems.

Progress has so addled our brains, that we look back on the havoc it has caused as one of the
mistakes of the past which progress will soon put right.

Progress is the cause of most of the ills for which it claims to be the cure.

82 The earth and the world

In the louring evening of the world we still have such sights to charm us. But the green earth will
go dark, before we learn to see the beauty it abounds in. We have no eyes to see the loveliness
of the earth which we’ve been blessed with or the ugliness of the world which we have made.
The world is a wondrous place, but not for much longer.

Each generation will palm off on the next a better world and a worse earth. Each day the world
gains at the expense of the planet. Our worldly hearts will be glad when they can chew up the
earth and not need to taste any dirt. All the things that have been a boon to us have been a
bane to it, our wealth, machines, human rights, and our manic pursuit of happiness.

As the world becomes more free, more rich, and more enlightened, the earth grows more
enchained, more poor, and more bleached. The human race has swallowed the earth and
vomited up the world. The earth so innocent, the world so tainted.

83 Salvation by annihilation
Ours is the one indispensable species, since it alone has been tasked with the mission to kill all
the rest.

Far more effectually than any Buddha, we will soon grant all life a lasting release from the cycle
of birth and death by snuffing it out for good. So our cruel breed will bring a merciful deliverance
to the earth that it has persecuted so unmercifully.
Life is an evil machine. And our consciousness has cranked it up to such a pitch of restless
frenzy, that it will soon break its springs. Our wisdom has not found a way to make the wheel
stand still. So our avarice will set it spinning so fast that it will burst into flames. Our noisy kind
will soon bring a dead quiet to the deafened globe.

Nature is a monstrous whirring clockwork of cruelty and futility. And the life of the beasts is a
lethargic nightmare from which we have awoken to appalled consciousness, resolved to electrify
the world, so that no one need dream again.

The world is set on its path of annihilation. So it may be that everything is for the best after all.

Climate change will act like chemotherapy on our cancerous species. But first it will kill off the
body that we have ravaged.

84 Correcting the mistake of life

Sentient life may be the universe’s grand mistake. So it has raised us up to blot it out. Mankind
was the last angel that God made, the angel of death to scythe his rank creation. God the
destroyer has commissioned us to crown his work by restoring the earth to its pristine
lifelessness, or at least to a festering clod crawling with eyeless grubs and maggots. And the
appalled earth will make use of our meddling kind as the engine to unload it of its freight of
misery. This planet won’t be glad and light again, till it has been disburdened of our desperate
and oppressive band. Is the peaceful moon mocking the earth for having to tote such a weight
of heaving wretchedness?

If our species has a purpose on this orb, it must be to wreck it. It will stay on it just long enough
to wipe all the rest off it. We will leave it denatured, sanitized, deodorized and disinfected.

Human kind is not the meaning of the earth, but the meaning of human kind may prove to be the
end of the earth. ‘Man,’ is not, as Nietzsche claimed, ‘a rope stretched between beast and
superman,’ but it is with such a rope that we will strangle the planet.

85 The end of us
God could find no other way to do away with our insatiate race, and so he sent us progress.

Life can’t go on as it is. So we have set progress to work, to make sure that it won’t.

The wheels of our discontent have to rotate more and more rapidly as the runaway train of
progress speeds up. Modernity accelerates all our projects, not least our self-destruction.

People will stop at nothing to make the present better than the past, and so they will make the
future worse than both.
Progress spurns the claims of the dead, but it will soon make them the sole cohort worth
envying.

The world may not look so grim as I paint it. But it’s progressing at such a frantic gallop, that it
soon will. Progress will make the future the best of all times not to be alive in.
WE DON’T THINK

Contents

Unthinking reed

Indifferent to ideas

Belief

Diversion

UNTHINKING REED
Few of us are able to think, and still fewer care to. ‘Man is a thinking reed,’ as Pascal said. But it
is a thinking reed that would go to any length so as not to think, and which would soon split if it
tried to. There are so many tasks that the mind is good for, but reasoning is not one of them.
Stupidity is its element.

People are so unused to reflecting, not because they find it so hard to do it, but because they
find it so convenient not to. They have a mine of plans and pastimes to take its place, or whose
place they don’t want it to take.

When people try to think, they patch up plausible truisms from their deep-dyed errors.

Thinking is our glory. So why to our shame have we made it so hard? Though we have no wish
to do it, we hold its fruits in high regard. It’s filthy and boring work, but we prize the gold that it
yields.

Our ideologies bind us so indissolubly together because they work in tandem with our
unwillingness to think.

Our age is sure that it has big bright ideas, because it prints them in big bright letters on
billboards and banners ten foot high.

What a fate, to live in an age of second-rate minds, and not have the brains to rise to their level.
1 We would rather talk and feel than think
We like to talk as much as we hate to reflect. I must speak before I think, or I would never have
a thing to say. Trollope shrewdly sketched a man who ‘half thought as he spoke, or thought that
he thought so.’ I feel less than I feign, and I think less than I ought.

Most of us know what we think before we think. I speak before I feel. I feel before I believe. And
I believe before I think. And often I feel because I speak, and believe because I feel. But
because I speak, feel and believe, I have no need to think.

‘In speaking,’ Trollope wrote, ‘grand words come so easily, while thoughts, even little thoughts,
flow so slowly.’ We dawdle behind the truth, because we are too quick to speak and too
reluctant to reflect. ‘It’s where a thought is lacking,’ Goethe said, ‘that, in the nick of time, a word
turns up in its place.’

We don’t let truth get in the way of our style. But don’t we let all the rest of our wants get in the
way of truth?

‘We all do no end of feeling,’ as Twain said, ‘and we mistake it for thinking.’ We prefer to feel
rather than to think. But we prefer to think that we feel rather than feel in good earnest. Thinking
is hard. Feeling is easy and far more gratifying.

Most people had far rather retell common fallacies than find out uncommon truths.

2 Thinking is superfluous, stupidity is thrifty

Thinking is a surplus activity. And a thinker is one who thinks uneconomically. Most of us pick
up all the opinions that we need with no need of thought. But a thinker thinks long and
laboriously to earn a few needless insights.

Some people will go to great lengths to seem original, short of thinking for themselves. They
ham up their quirks, but take no trouble to find new truths.

We are appalled by the thoughtlessness of those who fail to embrace the notions which we
have embraced with no thought.

People fervidly long for illumination, and they will do all that they can to get it, except think. They
prefer to gain their opinions by any means other than reflecting for themselves. And they are
keen to acquire new facts, so long as they can keep to their old ways of acquiring them.

Most of us think that knowledge is best got by whatever means we reckon we’ve got ours, be
that by experience, research or reflection.

Stupidity may pass for shrewdness, so long as it has luck on its side.
We have a limitless capacity not to dwell on what doesn’t tend to our own profit and yet to
meddle in what is none of our business.

INDIFFERENT TO IDEAS

3 We believe on a whim
People choose most of their views by mere aesthetic whim.

People are deaf to the melody of some ideas, though they may grasp their meaning quite well.
‘Most faiths,’ says William James, ‘are bred from an aesthetic demand.’ The haphazard
unshapeliness of quantum mechanics repulsed Einstein. What bard does not feel that rhyme
proves more than reason?

I choose my beliefs with no more thought than I would a favourite football team, but I cling to
them with the same ferociousness.

4 Ideas are a social currency

We shape our convictions not so much as a picture of the world but as a glue which we use to
keep ourselves in one piece and to bind us to our tribe. They are aimed less at the things that
we think of than at the people that we talk to.

Our personal beliefs are products of our social practices.

Our need to believe is a pale shadow of our real and deep need to belong.

People are loath to part with views which they have not pondered enough to make their own.
They go to great trouble to fight systems of thought which they scarcely grasp.

Like most of what we prize, speculation subsists in this world of mirrors mostly as a mere double
or simulation of itself.

Most people don’t think, since they can’t see the people round them doing it, and so they can’t
mimic them. But since they can see and replicate their views, they have no shortage of
opinions.

5 ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith’

If people believe in truth, they do so not because it is true, but because others believe it. It’s
their fellow flesh and blood that they have faith in, far more than the vaporous fabulations that it
dreams up. So they plant their trust in a religion, not on the strength of the reasons they have
found to think it true, but on the strength of the trust that they see the rest of the world puts in it.
Most of us catch ideas by contact with close-by infected bodies. ‘Our faith,’ says William James,
‘is faith in someone else’s faith.’ And even our doubt is faith in someone else’s doubt. Our minds
are too weak to keep up a single opinion on their own without the concurrence of those round
us.

If you can hold fast to your own standpoint when no one else agrees with you, you must be
either a sage or a crackpot.

We get our opinions, like our clothes, readymade, mass-produced and cheap.

We get our precepts by borrowing them from others. So we feel that we prove them most
conclusively not by grounding them in logic but by cajoling others to take them up in turn. It is by
converting others that we convince ourselves. But we ought to have the modesty or pride not to
try to bring others round to our own point of view.

6 We assert ourselves through our ideas

I cling to my convictions as I do to my wonts, not because I give them so much thought, but in
order to assert who I am. A belief is a more or less sincere pose meant to affirm our own being
in the eyes of the world.

Believers don’t care much whether or not there is a god, but they will stop at nothing to impose
on others their own kind of god.

Our willingness to assent to a creed far exceeds our capacity to believe it.

How few pains people take to seek out the truth, yet how much pride they take in pronouncing
what they have made up their minds it is.

Would we care for truth itself, if it gave us no vent to hold forth on it? ‘Wisdom and the good
things of the mind,’ Montaigne says, ‘seem of no account to us if they are not paraded before
the approving eyes of the world.’ Seneca said that he would give up the grant of good sense if
he had to keep it sequestered. ‘Is all your knowledge nothing,’ asked Persius, ‘if someone else
does not know that you know it?’

I take up my creed on impulse, since it is no more than a creed. But I argue for it vehemently,
once I have made it a part of my self.

How did we end up with so many illusions but so few beliefs? Our ideas are a small subset of
our illusions, most of which are too personal to form real ideas.
7 Stupidity claims to think
People claim to think so much, they in fact think so little, yet they set such a high value on
thinking. Why do they shy from what they claim to do so zealously? Why do they set such store
on what they are so loath to do? And why do they prize so dear what yields them such sparse
pay?

One mistake which all thinkers make is to assume that most people care for ideas. They sound
as if they were speaking of some legendary species, which lived to think, and for whom
thoughts were meat and drink, and truth a matter of life and death. Thinkers like Valéry may
confess that ‘cognition reigns but does not rule,’ but only intellectuals with their head in the
clouds would ever dream that cognition even reigns.

8 We are indifferent to ideas

Most people have no interest at all in general ideas. The sole thought that fills their minds is
their schemes of greed and fun. They never get so close to thinking that they need to go out of
their way to avoid it. It’s clear which are the great questions, because they are the ones that
most people never ask themselves. And yet they never lack for a ready answer to them.

In most minds sports hold the place that intellectuals think ideas do.

Unlearned people are too shrewd to be intimidated by ideas. All that they have seen of the world
shows them that these count for nothing in it.

Some people are too ignorant to know how little they know. But most don’t even care.

BELIEF

9 The stupidity of opinion

We treat our opinions as a carefree holiday from the exacting rationality which our weekday
schemes foist on us.

I collect opinions like a hoard of rubbishy keepsakes. They are all I have to show for the
decades and regions that I have idled through. Most people contribute to the conceptual
economy by circulating borrowed notions, but they turn out no new ones of their own. ‘We think
as we do,’ Butler said, ‘mainly because other people think so.’ Our minds orbit in a closed loop
of rattling platitudes, which we couch in current clichés and fill out with a padding of unrelated
anecdotes.
Few of us think, yet we all hug our obsessions and convictions. Even when I don’t know quite
what my views are, I am still in no doubt that they must be right.

Most people have no general ideas, but they still have enough opinions to send them as far off
course as if they did.

If vain opinions and flattering hopes were taken out of our minds, Bacon says, they would turn to
‘poor shrunken things, unpleasing to themselves.’ If we cleared them, we might find out what
cheap junk clutters them.

You need opinions like small change to deal with the demands of day-to-day life. And who
wants their thoughts to do more than that? They are the dust flung up by our careening greed.

10 We believe without understanding

With what certainty people ground their lives in a sophistry which they have made no effort to
examine. And how glibly they will bet their souls on a creed which they have not gone to the
trouble of understanding.

Faith is a substitute for understanding rather than a spur to it. Most beliefs don’t have reasons
but causes, and those not overly deep ones. People cling to their faith, because they have
never taxed their minds to grasp what it means. And they take pride in spouting opinions that
they don’t understand. ‘There are,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘few who do not hold a lot of things which
they would, if they put them to the test of close inspection, find they did not comprehend.’ They
sign up to a creed without penetrating nine in ten of its articles.

If we gave more thought to our beliefs, we might find that we don’t much believe them. ‘Most
people,’ Montaigne says, ‘force themselves to believe, having no idea what real belief would
mean.’ They will assent to a thesis sooner than devote serious thought to it. They believe not in
order to make sense of the world, but so that they won’t have to, just as others doubt for the
same purpose.

A sect must profess a welter of dogmas which make no sense at all, but which train its
congregants to yield without demur to superstitious explanations.

11 We believe without believing

People don’t understand a great deal of what they believe in, and they don’t even believe in a
great deal of it. They believe less than they think they do, but more than they understand. Their
faith is what they believe they believe in. And most of us believe in much less than we believe
we do. ‘Religion,’ as Twain notes, ‘consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he
believes in.’ Faith is a respectable shared form of delusion and insanity, which most of its
votaries only dream they suffer from. It enables them to take up and act out a creed that they
don’t quite grasp or believe. We must make our choice between no faith and bad faith.

The fraud that faith perpetrates is not to claim that there is a god, but to tell us that we believe in
him. Most people’s faith is no more real than the things they think they believe in, as their love
turns out to be as fake as the being that they think they love.

Because we have faith in so little, we can bring ourselves to lend our faith to nearly anything.
Our self-interest will suffice to heal our unbelief.

12 The stupidity of habit

Most of our habits are more thought out than they seem. But most of our thinking is more
habitual than it seems. Much of what I appear to do by rote I in fact do by express though
routine intent. And much of what I reckon I think intuitively I in fact think by rote.

People assume that they do so much from habit because they reflect so much from habit. It
rules how they think far more than what they do. They allow torpid routine to fence in their
meditations, and unresting self-interest to thrust them on to act.

Habit is a kind of thrift, and what we wish to skimp on is the work of the mind. Most of our habits
of thinking are makeshifts which save us from the need to think. Our habits of conduct free us to
act without the need of reflection. And our habits of thought enable us to get and keep opinions
without the need of reflection. So we even think without thinking.

Some minds run with clockwork regularity on rails laid by a maniac. They are dependable and
efficient, but inflexible and misguided.

Stupidity is so much more tenacious than intelligence, if only because it takes such pride in
repeating itself.

13 Belief hardens into stupidity

By the time that we are of an age to think, most of us are bursting with so many opinions, that
we have no more need to, and would scarcely be able. ‘We pick up our ideas,’ Lichtenberg said,
‘at an age when the understanding is at its most unsound.’

We take up tenancy in our small house of thought when we are young. And then instead of
broadening it, we spend the remainder of our life bricking it up as a thick-walled prison.

The doctrines that are drummed into our heads when we are young keep such a hold on us, not
because we think about them for the rest of our lives, but because we don’t think about anything
much at all. ‘Most people grow old within a small coop of notions,’ Vauvenargues said, ‘which
they have not found out by their own efforts.’ Their views set so hard in their heads because
they never stir them up by thinking about them.

At the expiry of forty years of intrepid speculation, most philosophers still hold at sixty the same
viewpoint that they did at twenty.

DIVERSION

14 Slothful stupidity
We are too restless or too idle to think. But we are too slovenly and skittish to do nothing. Our
indolence whirrs so frenetically that it looks like a kind of animation. We have the roving lethargy
of those who can’t keep still. ‘The shiftless,’ as Vauvenargues says, ‘are always anxious to be
doing something.’

‘Mankind,’ as Johnson points out, ‘have a great aversion to intellectual labour.’ Mental sluggards
are thrust on by a physical restlessness. Their stir and hustle is the mark of the torpor of their
minds. The faster you rush, the more indolently you reflect. And the sole purpose for which we
now think is to find some way to go faster.

A thinker such as Pascal claims that people can’t bear to stop moving because they would start
to think. But they don’t wish to think because they would have to stop moving. Their physical
activity cloaks the lassitude of their minds, though so does most of their mental activity. I’m so
fond of travelling because it gives me things to chat about without requiring me to think.

Streams are not shallow because they run so fast, though they may run fast because they are
shallow.

15 Diverted from thinking

Pascal says that we seek diversion so as to be spared from brooding on our comfortless state.
But a fish doesn’t swim so that it won’t have to fly. We feel no call to brood on our dire plight,
because we are so caught up in our hunt for distractions. Yet if we weren’t caught up in our hunt
for distractions, we still wouldn’t brood on our dire plight.

How could we break the grip of our diversions, when we are diverting our minds not from
exploring but from the void, not from our groaning misery but from our gaping nullity? We need
work and fun, not to decoy us from the profound fact, but to pad out our shallow vacuity.

Most people’s minds are too vacant to bear up under the vacancy that thinking would force on
them.
Those who are proud of leading such full lives are in too great a rush to have any but hollow
ideas.

16 The stupidity of impatience, the impatience of stupidity

People are in such a hurry that they take the most meandering way in all that they do, since
they won’t spend the time to find a more direct one.

Three fourths of the thinker’s work is waiting. And this is one reason why we don’t want to think.
Thinking is a war of attrition, in which mass and endurance count for more than brilliance and
daring.

‘Leisure,’ Hobbes wrote, ‘is the mother of philosophy.’ Thought thrives by boldness, but dies by
impatience, which is, as Kafka says, the one cardinal sin.

I lose my time by scurrying so fast. I am stupefied by my own speed. Move briskly, and you
have to keep your mind on how you move. Loaf, and you’re free to let it wander where it will.

Most discoverers don’t start right, because they start too soon. They begin to build their house
of thought before they have laid the groundwork. Commencing in air, they never reach the light.
They would have done well to heed Lec’s admonishment to ‘Think before you think.’

I’m so impatient that I never have time to start on my true work.

Truth, if you ever do see it, is a smudge which you glimpse in your peripheral vision as you
zoom on to grab what you don’t really want.

17 ‘The idiot questioner’

When critics ask how a bold mind works, why do they all come up with the same stale reply, that
it doesn’t nose out fresh answers but asks fresh questions? Questions are what you make of
your patrimony. Answers are what you make of your own best gifts. A fine rejoinder may form
the most fruitful queries. ‘To ask the hard question is simple,’ as Auden wrote, and jesting Pilate
proved. A probing retort mocks Blake’s ‘idiot questioner, who is always questioning but never
capable of answering.’

I mistake my own horizon for the farthest rim of the world. I trust that I have hit on the one field
where all that has gone before needs to be corrected by my own inquiries or where corrections
count. We take it that our intellectual responsibility ends where our own questions end. But for
most of us it has not yet begun. We each lift a small square of the sheet of unreality, to catch a
peek of the inch or two of the truth that lies adjacent to us.
The best method would work like a mechanism to turn out answers which modify the
mechanism so that it can ask further questions.

The seeker’s task is to fill a capacious why with an adequate because.

Glib people reword deep questions to chime with their own glibness, and then plume
themselves on answering them with such easiness.

18 The abyss and the shallows

We bob up and down like corks on the surface of life. I skim along where the world has strewn
the tinselled refuse which I want to scoop up. We feel borne up by its unfathomable depth. But
it’s our own lightness that keeps us afloat.

The world is a depthless abyss. It is all gulf, and we are all shallows. It is a labyrinth with no
centre.

The deepest truth about us is our shallowness.

Not even suffering abysmally cures us of thinking superficially. Life weighs us down, but fails to
deepen us. It doesn’t grow. It thins out as it gets longer, and has less to show us as it gets
darker. Though it leaves us heavier, it makes us no more profound. As we grow up, our world
dilates, but our minds stay as small as ever they were.

Our shallowest traits stay with us through our most profound afflictions. Pedants will remain
pedants in their worst crises, and will come out of them with their pedantry undiminished. And a
fool on the point of death will still be playing the fool.

Even real agony must wear the clothes that it has to hand. And these may well be too small for
it, and leave it looking ridiculous.

19 Superficiality and stupidity

Some of us are emptier than we appear on the outside. Even our innermost qualities don’t go
very deep. Go as far down as you may, what do you meet with but one more exterior and front?
How many break their necks when they plunge into the sea of truth and find it so much
shallower than they guessed. But some of our thoughts may reach farther down than we judge,
since we leave off before we get to the bottom of them.

Nothing is so shallow that it can’t touch us deeply. And what is deep will scarcely touch us at all.
You don’t glimpse how shallow some people are, till they dredge up their deepest beliefs. Most
of our visceral convictions don’t go even skin deep. They are as thin as the paper or the blinking
screens from which we filch them.

A few mouldy crusts and parings of prejudice are sufficient to keep most souls from starving.
And the most feathery stuffing is enough to fill our light and hollow hearts.

An idea must be very shallow to lodge deep in the human mind. And the most superficial beliefs
are the most enduring and tenacious.
THINKING

Contents

Curiosity and courage

Enlightenment

Speed

Darkness

Wonder

Experience

Consistency

Education

Reading

CURIOSITY AND COURAGE

Each day that you spend on earth should be an adventure in thinking, where every hour, as
Wordsworth wrote, ‘brings palpable access of knowledge.’ Thinking is the disease, more
thinking is the cure.

1 Thinking about thinking

A good inspiration shows you a new thought, a great one shows you a new way of thinking.
However wide the range of topics they may treat, the way of thinking of most thinkers is quite
cramped. It is a uniform army deployed on multiple fronts.

The hardest thing to think about is thinking itself. It’s more difficult to grasp how you do an easy
task than it is to do a difficult one. And, as Wilde wrote, ‘it is much harder to talk about a thing
than to do it.’ Napoleon can’t tell you how to win a war. ‘I have fought sixty battles,’ he said, ‘and
I have learned no more than I already knew after the first.’ Descartes, who meditated more
incisively than anyone on how to think, announced that if you accede only to what you know to
be right then you won’t go far wrong. Coleridge’s bland recipe of ‘best words in best order’
would turn out uninspired verse.

Do we ever think more dully than when we analyze genius, or more stolidly than when we
speculate on the impassioned mind?

2 Thinking through method

There is no single method. We need a whole spectrum of them, to suit each tenor of mind, topic,
faculty and style. And there is no technique that can teach you how to reason. The best it might
do is show you how to mend the ideas that you have found out by chance or by unguided
persistence. Descartes’s Discourse on Method demonstrates that there is none.

When writers try to unpack how they make their fictions, they make one of the most implausible
of their fictions. And when they try to expound the procedures of a daring mind, they demurely
set out their own. But when they try to set out their own, don’t they get them quite wrong?

It takes so long to get to know a thing, because you have to spend so much time first learning
what sorts of things might be worth learning and then learning how to learn them.

3 The mind is the child of the external codes in which it works

The human mind is the product of the abstract codes in which it alienates itself. So the deepest
thinking is neither conscious nor subconscious. And great thinking is not unconscious but extra-
conscious. It goes on outside the mind in the medium that begets it, be it numbers or words or
paint. The mind is the womb which the medium must make pregnant.

If our inner life weren’t dyed through and through in colours from outside, it would be too dull to
make out.

Our inner self is the most superficial part of us. Our self does not start as an inner core and
grow outwards. It starts outside us as a cloud of practices, habits, customs, codes and
prejudices, which at length form a more or less unified mass within us. And the most powerful
minds are those in which these external codes have reached their inmost core and rewired all
their circuits.

Dreams and the unconscious are so stupid because they put us in touch with our inmost selves,
stripped of the forms of language, custom and artifice which give them value.
4 The collective mind
The collective unconscious is as worthless as the personal unconscious. It is the collective
consciousness, which takes shape in forms, customs, language, music, culture and tradition,
that is creative.

It is from the collective mind that we must draw the forms and materials that we need if we are
to think for ourselves.

5 Idle curiosity leads us astray

Some people itch to learn new things, so long as they have to flap about to learn them and not
sit motionless where they are. So what they end up with is a mishmash of busy, pushing
information, and not a sanguine wisdom. They don’t love truth so much as the rush and ruckus
that they make to find it out and show it off.

Most of our searching deflects us from discovering truths that are worth knowing. It immerses us
in trifles, gabble and small talk. If curiosity were the force that fuels our desire to know, we
would get no further than gossip. Real thinking begins where curiosity leaves off.

There are many things that it is better not to know than to know, as Aristotle showed, and these
are the sorts of things that most curious people are so keen to know.

When you’re thinking for your life, you need more than mere idle or professional curiosity to
drive you. But most of our curiosity is merely professional or idle. What we long for is to hear
some snippet of information that we can use for our own ends or some tattling banter to regale
our drowsy minds.

Curiosity is one of the antennae that pick up the signals from all the trash that might attract us.

6 Thinking to some purpose

How much I fail to see, because I’m not looking for it. And how little I find, since I stick to the
same old track. In order to see, you must be looking. But if you are looking for a thing, that’s all
you will find, and you will miss most of what’s worth seeing. How could you hope to make a
great breakthrough, if you aren’t urged on by a purpose to make it? But if you are urged on by a
purpose, you won’t swerve from the narrow passageway that it marks out for you. Having a
purpose makes you alert to everything except its own futility.

Now and then I notice how little I notice. And that’s about as much as I ever notice.
7 Curiosity is not thinking
Inquisitiveness, like avarice, always wants more, but more of the same. Most of us gawk about
like sightseers, and scoot through what all the world is well aware of. But audacious minds scout
like adventurers, to blaze their way to thoughts that no one else has dreamt of. Were they
merely curious, they could have learnt far more quickly what the rest of us know, rather than
labouring so long to reach a few unforeseen truths of their own. In the time that it took them to
track these down, they could have gleaned great sheaves of familiar facts.

Most children’s curiosity, like their cruelty, is just their unoccupied and aimless boredom on the
lookout for some new sport to titillate them.

Children keep on asking why, not because they are curious and want to learn, but for the fun of
teasing adults. If they thought the adults could give them the real answer, they would stop.

We are as credulous as we are curious.

Our curiosity, like the rest of our desires, is as insatiable in its appetites as it is petty in its
objects.

We may have a natural hunger to know, as Aristotle said, but in our information age we feed it
with the most unnatural stuffs.

8 Thinking the unfamiliar

You don’t begin to see a thing till you have seen it many times. But once you have seen it many
times, you can no longer see it at all. ‘We never see a thing the first time,’ as Pavese notes, ‘but
only the second, when it has changed into something else.’

You begin to see things fresh only when you cease to recognize them.

People need to be led like the blind to an unfamiliar truth. Then they finger it with their smutty
paws which they keep thickly gloved with their ready-woven notions.

Most of us have no wish to learn anything fresh. We just want to hear more of the sorts of things
which we have long known. ‘People don’t want to read anything except that with which they are
already familiar,’ as Goethe said. ‘What they want is what they know.’

9 Recognition cuts short thinking

Far from evidencing how widely our minds range, our readiness to make out correspondences
and similarities is often a dull reflex, like seeing shapes in clouds. ‘Very like a whale.’ Poets do
not see two objects as one. They talk about one object as if it were two. ‘One should work by
dissociation and not by association of ideas,’ as Renard wrote. ‘An association is almost always
commonplace.’

The artist must dare to show you a beauty that you don’t yet have eyes for. And so it looks to
you like ugliness. As Picasso said, ‘What is new, what is worth doing, can’t be recognized.’

People try to make sense of the unknown by the known, but what they know is a few dry
formulas and smug truisms.

We dismiss rarities as anomalies, and we pay no mind to what we see each day. ‘If the stars
should appear one night in a thousand years,’ Emerson wrote, ‘how would men believe and
adore.’

10 We find the truth not by courage but by restraint

The sole cowardice for which we can blame thinkers is their failure to think as far as they ought.
And if they do this, it’s not from pusillanimity but from haste to reach a conclusion and claim
their reward.

In order to reflect, it’s not bravery that you require but restraint. To reach the truth, you don’t
need to beat down daunting obstacles, you just need to withstand the world tempting you to
chase after its cheap allurements. Fear doesn’t hold us back from thinking. Greed goads us on
to do things that pay better. It’s our itching lust for the rest of life’s good things that keeps us
from uncovering the truth. I have nothing to fear from truth, but what do I have to gain from it?

11 Craving and thinking

Few of us think, not because we dread what it will get us, but because we crave what we know
it won’t, that is, profit and pleasure. Why would we want to hear the truth? It would stand in the
way of us having more fun or making more money. So the one sort of thinking that we do is
scheming how to come at what we want.

I don’t think, not because I’m afraid of what I might find, but because I want so many other
things so much. And I lie, not from trepidation but from the lust for gain. And if I tell the truth, it’s
not by mastering my fretfulness, but by embracing pride.

How could we spot large truths, when our eyes are on the watch for the least hook of
advantage?

12 Dying or thinking
The ideas that are worth dying for are not the ones that the state calls on people to die for. And
what they die for is not the idea but those in power who have no intention of dying for it.
People who have the brains to conceive new ideas are so rare, that they ought least of all to be
asked to lay down their lives for them.

It is people who have no ideas of their own that sign up to die for those of others.

13 Cowardice finds out the truth

Your cowardliness will teach you more than your courage could have done. For a thinker, to live
fearfully might be the next best thing to living dangerously. Timorous people sound life to the
core. They die so many times before their death, that they see more of life than the undaunted.
They are all the time peering through the pane of their disquiet on the watch for what might be
approaching to scare them.

Some people have been backed so far into a corner by their panic, that they have to turn and
face the truth. They shiver through in a minute more revealing moods than the stalwart do in a
month. They scan the rest of life with such nervous penetration, because they dare not look it in
the face. Since they have seen the truth up close, it’s pure luck that it doesn’t kill them.

Cowardly people, such as Hobbes, love to wield the cold steel of truth. In its armour they feel as
if they were dauntless and unafraid. They take revenge on the world which intimidates them by
venturing to stare down its most menacing secrets.

14 Thinking dangerously
Have intellectuals ever been so craven, or so proud of their pluck? They chirp that they roam
like nomads or exiles, when they are just cosily mobile careerists, a clique of tenured dissidents.
How many cautious and inoffensive dons boast that they are dynamite. ‘A roofer,’ as Sartre
wrote, ‘takes more risks than an intellectual.’

World-improvers argue that art ought to subvert prejudices, but only the ones of which they
disapprove. And they praise art for being disconcerting, but just so long as it’s their fusty
opponents that it disconcerts.

Some truths are too dangerous to be spoken. There will always be some firebrands who will
have the courage and consistency to act on the false inferences that they draw from them.

ENLIGHTENMENT

15 The nightfall of enlightenment

People’s brains did not open up to the world till the sixteenth century. Before that the best they
could do was to spin systems of abstract thought out of their baseless axioms.
The thinkers of the enlightenment promoted a naive credence in perfectibility, a facile
psychology, an impertinent universalism, an unreasonable faith in reason. They were drunk with
their hopes for the future, disdainfully disavowed the past, fomented rebellions which raised up
bloodstained despots, and championed a humanism which will bring ruin on the human race
and all living things.

Enlightenment hoped to inaugurate the reign of autonomy and ends. But it was the ideology of
the system that has subjected us to a tyranny of heteronomy and means.

Some writers, such as Voltaire or Franklin, grow great by endorsing the progressive platitudes
of their age, its rationalism, positivism, deism, tolerance, enlightened self-interest and faith in
human perfectibility. And some, like Balzac or Dostoyevsky, have grown great by assaulting
them.

16 Individualism
The melodramatic form of bourgeois individualism appears in the sphere of faith as revivalism,
in the sphere of art as romanticism, in the sphere of the emotions as rousseauism, in the sphere
of thinking as existentialism, in the sphere of the spirit as transcendentalism, and in the sphere
of ethics as byronism.

Catholicism commands obedience to a crooked human corporation. And protestantism incites

disobedience to all but the crooked human conscience.

We fashion our selves by our choices of the things we want. And yet we learn to want what we
do from the choices that others make.

17 Primal sanities
Some sages, such as Confucius, Emerson or Thoreau, provide a bracing course in mental and
moral hygiene but few new concepts. They are more a tonic than an aliment. They refresh us
rather than feed us. But our race has now grown so morbid, that we mistrust sound minds till we
have traced the spot where they ail. Goethe irks us as a person in rosy health affronts an
invalid.

18 Prophets of perversity
Since the age of reason we have had to rely for our saving wisdom on our holy or unholy fools,
the prophets of perversity, such as Maistre or Baudelaire, Blake or Yeats, Dostoyevsky or
Céline, Lawrence or Rimbaud. Poe was Dostoyevsky’s vaudeville or waxworks John the baptist,
which is a better thing than most writers. Yeats made the Psalms to Nietzsche’s new Torah.
The best guide through the chaos of the modern mind is Dostoyevsky. The best guide through
the chaos of modern society is Balzac. Nietzsche is the best guide through the chaos of modern
culture. And the best guide through the chaos of modern art is Yeats.

Cosmopolitan and cerebral northerners, such as Nietzsche or Lawrence, pine for the blood, sap
and verve of the savage, sun-drenched southland. They had far rather been ‘pagans suckled in
a creed outworn.’ So the drooping twilight yearns for the dawn, which it dreams still lies in front
of it, though it’s far back in a past that it can never return to. ‘The longing to be primitive is a
disease of culture,’ Santayana wrote. ‘To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of
anaemia.’ And vitalism is a late growth of an age that has lost its vitality.

To be against reason and the intellect, and on the side of blood, intuition and the life-force, is
one more trick of the overweening intellect.

19 Common sense the enemy of thinking

We call common sense whichever of our herd’s prefabricated notions we happen to concur with.
Einstein defined it as ‘the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen,’ as conscience is
the stash of moral claptrap that we pick up by age eighteen. And so half of the common sense
of a society is made up of its shared unquestioned superstitions.

What we know for certain we know by intuition. But what we know by intuition must be false. As
Valéry wrote, ‘What has been believed by all, in all times and places, has every likelihood of
being false.’ If you feel certain of a thing, you can be certain that you are wrong.

Common sense when sensible is not common, and when common is not sensible. Half our
truisms are not so much as half true. But all of our commonplaces are commonplace through
and through.

Common sense can grasp neither the perverseness of the heart nor the weirdness of the world
of matter. Use it to scan the world outside or within you, and you won’t make much of what you
find.

20 The platitudes of common sense

Common sense paves the world with flat platitudes, so that we can walk round in it and not trip
up on its lush unevenness. It is the archenemy both of science and of art. Aristotle was its most
proficient exponent, and so for two thousand years he lay like a dead hand on the life of the
mind.

Our own small opinions arrange themselves like iron filings around the big magnet of common
ideas.
Thinking is a solitary activity, but we are never on our own when we do it. Our heads hum with
the bawling voices of the tumultuous world. What light could I gain from my seclusion, when I
spend it in such lustreless company?

A platitude is a truism the converse of which is also true. Too many cooks spoil the broth, yet
many hands make light work.

21 Common sense against science

Once mocked by faith, common sense is now confuted by science, which advances by
deposing it and installing unlikely imagination in its seat. ‘This will be found discordant with all
experience,’ as Euler said of one of his demonstrations, ‘yet it is true.’

It is not science that is ‘trained and organized common sense,’ as Huxley said. It is mythology.
Science is an assault on common sense and mythology. Both these claim to be based on
nature, but they are made by custom. They seek to trace all events back to simple personal
intentions. The accounts that science gives of the big bang or of evolution are far more bizarre
than the folktale of a watchmaker god fabricating the world as a machine for our use. All the
laws of nature turn out to be contrary to nature as common sense conceives it. And in order to
grasp them, we had to rid ourselves of the idea of what is natural.

22 Common sense is anthropocentric nonsense

Science stood against the flights of metaphysics and for a real objective world that we could
reach through our senses. But what it has led to is a far more bizarre world than any
metaphysician dreamt of, and which our senses cannot validate.

The physical world, with its quarks, leptons, entanglement, superposition, wave-particle duality
and uncertainty, is far more poetic, mysterious and mind-boggling than the spiritual world
dreamt up by religious teachers, who could see no farther than the short and narrow views of
human-centred common sense.

Human kind makes its advances in form and truth by cleansing them bit by bit of their impure
human element.

SPEED

23 The speed of thinking

You conceive an idea in a brief flash of rapture, carry it round in a long pregnancy, give birth to it
in a quick struggle, and then have to spend years licking it into shape. You may incubate your
thoughts unconsciously, but you must hatch them deliberately.
We deride those of our rivals who can’t do the things that we can do, and we think that those
who can do more than us must be fakes or shallow opportunists. Ponderous minds preen
themselves on their thoroughness. Slapdash minds preen themselves on their quickness. Those
who write at a crawl are proud of their fastidiousness, and those who write in haste are proud of
their fluency.

24 The race is not to the swift

‘In philosophy,’ Wittgenstein notes, ‘the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly.’
It is the hare, scampering and napping in brief bursts, that comes last and gains the prize of
truth.

To find your way to the truth, you have to go slow. But in order to gain the time to go slow, you
have to be quick in dismissing most topics of common concern.

If you think about it long enough, you can get all you need out of any one thing.

In a life spent thinking even the most prolific mind comes up with no more than half a dozen
fresh ideas.

First thoughts may not all be bad, but too many of them are patched up from the second
thoughts of others.

25 Patience
You ought to think as urgently as if you were to die today, and as patiently as if you were sure to
live for all time. Our audacity goes to waste if it is not kept in order by patience. And our
patience goes to waste if it lacks the spur of audacity. A seeker must ruminate like a cow and
pounce like a tiger. You reach the truth by daring and delay.

The best perseverance waits so long, that it gains ends quite unlike the ones it first hoped for.
How many teeming ideas you may breed in the interim from when the brain takes thought till the
point at which the pen starts to work.

Half of talent consists in persistence. But you won’t have the heart to persist if you don’t have
the talent for the work.

Patience is the key to forming an artist or thinker, almost as much as impatience. So Valéry
called genius ‘a long impatience.’ It must run a sprint for the length of a marathon.

How few thinkers take the time to find the clarity that lies concealed at the core of most
questions.
26 The inspiration of boredom
Only a creature that has the capacity to think can be bored, but one that is free to think should
never be bored. And yet most of us would be intolerably bored if we were left with nothing to do
but think.

The life of the artist is one of arduous inactivity and strenuous idleness.

Boredom and passivity lour like the sultry sky that preludes the lightning-bolt of inspiration. But
we have now dreamt up no end of toys and games to skirt the tedium which might have
precipitated thinking. Ennui was the creative curse of aristocratic societies. And busyness is the
sterile curse of commercial ones.

Thoughts are formed as the cosmos was, by minute and random fluctuations in the void.

Instantaneous strokes of inspiration need long spans of vacant waiting in which to gather their
force.

You have to stick to a steady diet of dry inactivity, if you want to think world-shattering thoughts.

27 Great things bore us

A great artist or thinker must bear with being bored. And a great work of art must dare to be
boring. We know great minds and their products by how soon they start to fatigue us. We don’t
find them hard, but simply bland and foreign to all our interests.

Good art invents and surprises, is bright and amusing. But the best imagines monotonously. It
dares to bore you and to demand that you give your whole mind to it. It repels you, where
lacklustre art charms and entertains, satisfies and salves you. Second-rate works invite us in
and make us feel at home. They amuse us but don’t ask anything of us.

Great books are so boring because they don’t feed our hunger for fun. And mediocre books are
so banal because they do.

28 Fortunate obstructions
How delicate a fine intellect is, and yet how robustly it thrives in the stoniest soil.

Like and unlike, associates and attackers, emulation and opposition, all goad and fire you to
think. ‘Our antagonist is our helper,’ as Burke said.

Those who lack the courage to contend with worthy rivals fall as victims to worthless ones.

A thought has to hide a little, to show that it will repay the finding.
Our deficiencies enlarge us. We should be thankful for our flaws. They save us from
squandering our best gifts. Cowardice keeps us from coveting the tin trophies which our
dauntlessness might have won for us. And pride may stay us from misspending our talents on
small aims. Our self-deceptions free us from scattering our force on worthless ventures by
daring us to hope that we might be capable of grand ones.

Genius makes life hard and art easy. It puts everything to its best use, by smoothing the path, or
else by roughening it.

In order to get on in the world, a middling talent needs to make the most of all its opportunities.
But in order to find the truth, a great mind must put in its own way as many obstacles as it can.
‘All that is called hindrance without is but occasion within,’ as Thoreau says.

In the dungeon of this world you have nothing but your shackles to winch yourself up to
freedom.

29 Dangerous rewards
A constructive mind is imperilled more by the incentives that are held out to it than by the
impediments that stand in its way. Hindrances toughen and extend it. To smooth its way would
be to shrink and slacken it. Golden prizes call forth tinsel virtues. The opportunities that come to
us turn us from our real work. The world tempts the least talent with such rich bribes, that even
the greatest are now willing to sell their best gifts to win them.

True artists are the ones who make art harder than it need be, both for themselves and for us.
And real writers make writing hard for themselves and reading hard for their readers. We drive
ourselves on by making rods for our own backs.

30 The wandering paths of thinking

Thinkers, like explorers, inch forward haltingly, miss the right path time and again, double back,
and lose half their posse. At length they reach a newfound land of strange ideas which they
never hoped to see. And what they leave for us is not the unruly realism of a logbook, but a
map, a thing much more tidy, artificial and abstract. Then at their heels come the critics and
savants, who pave a broad and level way, so that we can all commute back and forth to where
they got with so much sweat. ‘Improvement makes strait roads,’ Blake says, ‘but the crooked
roads without improvement are roads of genius.’

Genius doesn’t go faster than talent. It hoes a different road.

Trailblazers have a knack for making fresh and fruitful blunders. Their wanderings will teach you
more than a subaltern seeker’s truths. Fine insights avail, even when they err. Dull facts would
still be dry and flavourless, were they ever so true. ‘Great men’s errors are to be venerated as
more fertile than little men’s truths,’ as Nietzsche wrote.

31 Bless your errors

How many times you have to get everything wrong, so that you can get a few small things right.
When you lose your way and retrace your steps, you gain such unlooked-for vistas, that you
bless your errors. A straight line sees least of the world. Lucky that life is so full of false starts
and wrong turnings

A genius is someone who has the brains and daring to go wrong in a quite new way. That all
one’s ideas should be quite false is no disqualification for being a great thinker. Just the reverse.

It takes a fecund mind to spin a rich system out of a few initial false moves. A suggestive untruth
may be worth more than a hundred sterile facts. Thinkers’ truths are rarely as lasting or fruitful
as their errors.

Most of my ideas are more or less accurate approximations, which I keep till I fix them in their
final precise untruth. Some misleading shortcuts may lead you to the truth as unswervingly as
others lead you from it. You have to use the simplifications of yesterday if you are to form the
thoughts of tomorrow.

The mental energy which humans have wasted on elaborating and defending their bizarre
schemes of thought has been one of the chief fuels that has powered the search for truth.

32 The discipline of distraction

The best way to catch real thoughts is to lay out in writing a sprinkling of decoy ones. And you
can ambush mindfulness by allowing your mind to ramble. Thinking is a studied vagrancy, and
distraction is the devil’s providence. What the years will teach you are the innumerable small
lessons that you glean while you’re waiting for your one grand awakening, which will never
come.

It’s just because we can’t give our whole mind to what is in front of us that we can think at all.

Scientists need to find their one big idea. But a seeker of human truth who does so should know
that it is a lie.

The idea or event that suggests to you ten thoughts if you meet it one day might give no hint of
a thought if you meet it the next.
33 The stuff of thinking
Ideas, like capital, aggregate in accordance with two laws, the law of self-reproduction and the
law of concentration. Thoughts make thoughts as money makes money. And to those who have
more will be vouchsafed. To think great thoughts, all you need is to have thought a lot of great
thoughts beforehand, since it is the thoughts themselves that do most of the real thinking.

We must learn to think by thinking. So how is it that we learn to think at all?

Most people are impermeable to ideas. They can grasp what they mean, but they can’t see why
they matter, since they lack the rich grounding of thought which might cause them to resonate.

DARKNESS

34 Passionate detachment
Genius feels thoughts, good sense merely thinks them. Masterly minds feel ideas as if they
were passions, and transcribe their passions into ideas. They know, as Pessoa put it, ‘how to
think with emotions and to feel with intellect.’ Yet they are scorched by thoughts whose flame
we scarcely feel. And they are tinglingly awake to the trials through which we sleepwalk. They
take in things as if they were close at hand, but can judge them as if they were miles away.
They dream audacious dreams, yet still reason with all stringency.

Passion gives light to some, but it darkens others. It may urge you to search for the truth, but it
makes you feel that you have already found it.

Thoughts are made like rocks, some by the pressure of a long despair, some by the
transformation of sediments laid down an age ago, and some in a sudden eruption of ecstasy,
‘the fine delight that fathers thought,’ as Hopkins phrased it.

35 Thinking through estrangement

In order to know a thing you must be alienated from it. Science is a sign of our estrangement
from nature, as history is one of the diseases of a culture that is cut off from its past.

To grasp what a thing means, you have to back off just far enough to misperceive it plausibly.
Stay too far, and your eyes can’t make it out. Come too close, and you won’t misjudge and
oversimplify it in a beguiling way.

In order to see a thing for the first time, you need to look at it with the same sad and ardent
detachment as if it were for the last time.
36 Thinking alone
Solitude confines and concentrates your gifts, society broadens but dissipates them. Other
people rouse you to be brighter and more false.

How could you be a real thinker, if the conversation that you hold with yourself does not mean
more to you than all those that you hold with others?

Society, like suffering, supplies you with all the stuff that you would need in order to think. But it
gets in the way of you turning it into a rich work. To do that you have to stay contentedly alone.
Solitude is a darkroom that you enter to develop the photograph of the world that you took in
society.

Solitude would be empty and sterile if it were not filled with thinking. And thinking would bear no
fruit if it were not done in solitude.

A plodding mind stays with others, even when it’s by itself. But a rare and intrepid one goes its
own way, even when it’s with a crowd. For a crystal soul like Dickinson’s, friendship felt at once
too intense and too insipid, and so she shut the door.

Truth is shy, and won’t come near you if you’re not alone. And so the best way to keep safe
from its onslaughts is by huddling close to your herd. But if you want to think in a new key, you
must stay on your own. And even if you don’t start out like that, you soon will be.

In order to find the truth, you must stand alone. But most people would fear that they had lost it
if they ever did that.

37 Thinking deprivation
You come to know a thing by desiring it, by acquiring it, by losing it, or by missing it. When you
long for what you don’t have, don’t you learn all there is to know of it, save how palely you will
care for it once you have got it in your hands?

You learn because you lack. Plenty gives you confidence, but privation makes you hunger. And
confidence may train you to grow modest, light and quiet. But hunger goads you to excess,
intrepidity and desperation, and it’s these that will guide you to the truth.

The most repressed and uneventful life gives plenty of scope for high raptures of reverie and
emotion.

Some know the world through copious acquaintance, and some through deprivation. ‘It would
have starved a gnat,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘to live so small as I.’ These view it as through a camera
obscura. A tiny pin slit lets in the wide show.
Some of the deepest reasoners, such as Kant or Nietzsche, had scant experience of the world,
as some of the richest lands are the most lacking in resources, while others are, like Africa, kept
poor by their natural wealth.

38 Out of the dark

Misery acquaints you with strange bedfellows, and one of the strangest of these is truth.

Each blow the world deals you opens a gash through which the truth may seep in.

We are all plummeting down a chasm. Thinkers are those few who can still muse on what they
see as they spiral downward.

There will never be a machine so distraught that it will feel the urge to form a work of art or a
thought of its own. But it can turn out endless iterations of kitsch.

Misery files the mind to a finer and finer tip till it blunts it. Like a monsoon, it first refreshes it,
then swamps it, and in the end rots it.

Oppression makes its victims stupid. All they can think of is their own plight. And they lose the
capacity to see themselves save in reference to their oppressors. But these have the luxury of
never wasting a thought on their victims. So they are free to occupy their minds with things more
worth their attention.

39 The sum of failures

How could you make out what is real or deep, till your eyes have grown used to the murk of
unsuccess and aloneness? Dusk brings out the subtle shades for those whose lives go dark
before they close. You have to wrestle for years with the angel of your failure, till it will bless
you.

You may net your most profound perceptions from your abysmal fiascos, so long as you don’t
drown in their instruction first.

The amount of truth that you can glean is equal to the sum of the failures that you can bear to
face.

Insomnia is the emblematic lot of the thinker, the eerie endless blank of despair, lost in a fog
haunted by zombies, to feel one’s being evaporating into the night.

Impotence is the teeming father of fresh thoughts. Those who can’t do dream.

Your fate as a thinker is to spend more thought on things and people than they would ever
spend on you.
WONDER

40 Thinking by exaggerating
Overstatement can spice the blandest truths. A platitude, like rancid meat, must be pungently
seasoned to make it palatable. ‘The mixture of a lie,’ Bacon says, ‘doth ever add pleasure.’
Thinkers bring moribund views back to life by exaggerating them, and so they are reborn as
more interesting untruths.

I can believe anything if it’s stretched far enough, even the truth.

A sprightly mind can trace its way to the plain truth by reading too much into the quotidian things
that cross its path. Thoreau circumnavigated the globe by canoeing round Walden Pond. And
he plumbed the inequity of the state by spending one night in the county jailhouse. When
Delacroix wished to paint a tiger, he used his cat as a model.

Artists render their experiences exemplary by misrepresenting them.

41 Wonder is the fruit not the seed of thinking

Scientists don’t study nature because its rainbow multiformity overawes them. Their aim is to
shrink it to a small sum of reductive laws of their own discovering. And they call nature beautiful
because it yields them beautiful equations. The purpose of science is, as Einstein put it, ‘to
make the chaotic diversity of sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of
thought.’

The mind works in the same way, whether it is an ancient assyrian sculptor or a modern particle
physicist. It simplifies, economizes and abstracts, and brings a jumble of accidents under its
own rule and order.

Wonderment is the consequence and not the cause of our discoveries. It is not the seedbed of
knowledge, as Bacon claimed, but its fruit. You don’t learn because you wonder. You wonder by
dint of what you have learnt.

It takes a long time to see the complexity of things. It takes a lot longer to see their simplicity.

Simplicity is a vessel which is worth just as much as the complex ideas that you pour in to it.
‘Simpleness,’ as Leonardo said, ‘is the height of sophistication.’

42 Cultivating wonder
Born blasé, we come by slow steps to be startled. Children are not prone to wonder. All the
world is too new to them.
The starry cosmos and uncharted space grow more strange and uncanny the more we get to
know of them, though we marvel at them less and less. Our minds are large enough to solve
their most involved mysteries, but are too harried by their own low drives to feel much reverence
for their majesty. We are, in Dickinson’s phrase, limited guests in this incredible lodging. How
inadequate our use to the infinite gift.

We are so cheaply amazed, yet so reluctantly awed. Having framed this world of wonders, the
Lord made our hearts dry and small, so that they wouldn’t burst in awe.

Is there any puzzle too large to baffle the human mind, or too small to engross it?

43 The ladder of abstraction

Genius is the exception that is able to piece out the rule. A great theorist, such as Newton, is the
first to draft an overarching law, the instances of which men and women had been witnessing
day by day for thousands of years. Small minds see more than they know. Great ones know
more than they see. ‘Great ideas,’ as Johnson wrote, ‘are always general.’

The mind climbs to its acme by the scaffold of abstraction. And the best writing builds on
unsupported speculation. ‘Man,’ Valéry says, ‘fabricates by abstracting.’

We postulate general laws from specific precedents which strike us just because they jar with
general laws.

EXPERIENCE

44 The idiocy of anecdote

‘Common minds,’ Macrobius notes, ‘are more struck by examples than by arguments.’ We are
repelled by cold reason, as much as we are soothed and amused by bubbly anecdotes.

Average people reel off yarns and opinions. Intellectuals cobble ideas and systems. But a true
pathfinder must dare to seek out a way where no ideas have yet been mapped.

We love stories, because they are intimate yet shared, sparkle with droll details, and scratch our
itch for what is new and titillating, while conforming to the old tropes which comfort us.

People want to see all their tired old notions reworked in bright new tales. What they love, as
Goethe said, is ‘a new way of putting what they are used to.’
45 Truth or stories
The worst story draws us in more magnetically than the best idea. Christians love their faith for
its fables more than for its truths. They like to hear how Peter sheared an ear, but take no heed
of the injunctions to turn the other cheek and resist not evil. The trivial, the personalized and the
anecdotal trumps the serious, deep and transcendental. Divine truths don’t mean much to us.
It’s the trivial human details that stick in our minds. And we are convinced that a story is factual
by the novelistic touches which show that it is a fiction.

We are all swimming away from the strand of truth out to a waste sea of stories. We go from dry
and barren fact to gaudy and barren anecdotes. Anecdotes are as gratifying as analysis is
mortifying. Stories dress up our selfishness, but thinking strips it bare. We spin stories to garnish
our greed and hide how implacably it wolfs its way to what it wants.

Stories occlude from us the truth of our being. They assert our agency and blind us to the deep
structures which shape the arc of our lives.

46 We trust experience rather than reason

I place more trust in my experiences than in my reasons, since my experience is more my own.
When asked to adduce a pertinent reason, I prefer to cite some illustration drawn from my own
life.

Anecdote, as Heidegger said, is the enemy of intellectuality, and that’s enough to make us so
fond of it. Reason would unpleasantly clear our minds of the sludge and debris that they have
banked up. So we use anecdotes to keep replenishing them.

People would rather be fooled by stories than fatigued and disillusioned by the truth.

Reasons are common property which anyone can lay claim to. But my anecdotes and
experiences belong to me alone.

One anecdote can kill a hundred truths. There’s no arguing with a story.

Reason would not be able to take a single step forward, if memory did not keep stored up all the
previous steps it had made.

47 Thinking needs imagination not experience

A poet to whom nothing has happened is still older than the pharaohs. ‘I have more memories,’
Baudelaire said, ‘than if I had lived for a thousand years.’ The best minds make most of what
they have least. ‘One may know the world without stepping out of doors,’ as Lao Tzu says. ‘One
may see the way of heaven without looking through the window.’ Kafka vows that it will roll in
exultation in front of you.

There is just one kind of experience that a thinker needs, and that is to think.

Intuition is wise before its time, experience learns to be provident only after the event. ‘How
much I’ve lived,’ Pessoa exclaimed, ‘without having lived.’

Who can trace grand thoughts back to the events from which they spring? Who can find the
source of the big cataracts?

48 Details
Our minds are at once stolid and inattentive, vacant but humming, vague yet congested with
workaday details. We stop short at the accredited semblance, neither graphically exact nor
instructively abstract. Most of the things we believe are at once too nebulous and too specific to
deserve the name of ideas.

Most of us choose to cling to particular falsehoods rather than find a general truth.

The laborious way is the lazy way. The hard way is to work less and to think more. ‘To do a
great work,’ Butler said, ‘a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.’ Thinking is an
assiduous idleness. Paid work is a regimented restlessness.

‘What need of details when you know the principle?’ Thoreau asked. People have to keep on
compiling a painstaking kit of minute particulars, since they won’t take the time to ascertain the
few basic theses which would make sense of them and make their study of them needless.
Dismissive of principles, they are entranced by technicalities and trivia. They gnaw on the dry
rind of fact, and fling away the juicy pulp of truth.

CONSISTENCY

49 Self-contradiction by not thinking

We fall into inconsistency, whether we think long and hard, or fail to think at all. We think too
scantily to make our thoughts cohere. Or else we think so much that they get tangled in a knot
of contradictions.

Others can’t help contradicting themselves, because they don’t think enough. But if I contradict
myself now and then, it’s because I have so many thoughts, how could they not be out of joint
with one another here and there? I glory in both my mulish consistency and my brainless self-
contradictions.
Those whose minds are not large enough to hold two coherent truths at the one time don’t find it
hard to hold a hundred brawling errors.

We don’t take the trouble to scrutinize our views, and so they stay the same through time but jar
with one another.

There are Don Juans of the intellect, irremediably promiscuous, who have caught inconsistency
like syphilis, though most of them stay mental virgins through years of such whoring.

50 Consistency by not thinking

Some people can keep up the same slant on an issue only by continually shifting the grounds
on which it rests. Those who hanker to seem consistent are all the time controverting their own
views, since they have thought too sluggishly to grasp what they entail.

We change on a whim, yet we drone on with the same thoughts over and over. And though we
have such a small range of opinions, they still clash with one another.

We are serial dogmatists, immovable but unsteady, fixed with the same stubbornness in a
dozen attitudes in turn. Our belief is rigid, though our beliefs are shifting and shapeless.

My ideas are as fixed as my moods are fitful, and they are as tractable as my drives are
tenacious.

51 The virtues of inconsistency

A strong will must be undivided, but a strong intellect is forked and mobile.

A writer or book garners its strength from the force and tension of its contradictions.

To be consistent is to be diminished or simply false.

By being disjoined from yourself you may catch a glimpse of the unity of things.

Thinking is an exercise not in self-expression but in self-alienation. A thinker can never be quite
sincere. Each is double and divided, split between the mind observing and the mind observed.
To think in a new way, you have to make yourself quite unlike all actual selves, and most of all
your own. ‘I stand as remote from myself as from another,’ as Thoreau wrote. Bold imaginers
are as much out of harmony with themselves as they are with others. They stimulate you either
by disagreeing with you or by disagreeing with themselves.

It is only on the edge of disintegration that it all begins to cohere. And it’s when you feel it all
start to go that you learn what it was all for.
52 Infinite perspectives
Self-contradiction is a way of multiplying your points of view on a question.

It’s better that a thought should be light enough to float, than that it should be solidly grounded.

Truth is not transparent, but each perspective is translucent. Through it you see further
perspectives, each one colouring the rest, which in turn call it in question.

53 Best in bits
We are too broad and too diversified to grow all of one piece. ‘The entire,’ wrote Adorno, ‘is the
false.’ We become whole at the cost of narrowing and limiting ourselves, and by excluding
influences which might have spurred our growth. Multiplicity of becoming or variety of making
would be aims both more attainable and more worth attaining than unity of being.

A great mind is fragmented and self-divided. Only a mediocre mind can be whole and
integrated.

We are at our best only in stray exploits. ‘Our ability is chopped up in small chunks,’ as
Montaigne says. Human kind has done such great things, not by dint of its high level of average
capacities, but by the force of their range and variability. The general run is of no account. It’s
the extremes and outliers, the freaks and monsters, the oddbods, waifs and strays, the losers
and suicides, that make all the difference.

It is the discords that make the music of humanity worth listening to. ‘There is nothing stable in
the world,’ as Keats wrote. ‘Uproar’s your only music.’

We are most creative when we are most broken and fragmented.

54 Thinking through paradox

As rhythm and imagery are to verse, so parallelism and paradox are to prose, a principle of
musical symmetry and a principle of conceptual difference, dissimilarity of meaning and
similarity of sound. Thus the Bible, Johnson or Wilde.

Strong thinking must make war on its own suppositions. But most paradoxes merely stage mock
combats.

Common sense comfortably leads us down the wrong path. And so we need the slant rays of
paradox to light our way back to the right one. Thought in any field makes progress by
substituting the unlikely paradoxes of plain truth for the platitudes of common sense.
Some paradoxes open your eyes to unsuspected panoramas. But don’t most of them just salt
your rancid platitudes as tart perversities?

EDUCATION

55 Education
The schooling of children ought to develop the skills in which they excel at that age, which is to
say, their formal imagination and their gift for memorizing. So they should learn languages,
mathematics, music and arts. But we act as if they can make wise judgments on subjects which
require wide experience and learning, such as philosophy, history, literature and the social
sciences. We ask them to judge cases before they can grasp principles, and to master
principles before they have learnt methods. So all our education is misdirected.

The solution to all our problems, all agree, lies in education. Too bad then, that no one has
solved the problem of how to educate the young.

Education is the process which aims to turn us into rational animals. But nothing is more absurd
than to design a system of schooling in line with the dictates of reason.

You have to use the tools that your schooling has armed you with to break out of the prison that
your schooling has built for you.

The natural repugnance which most people feel for poetry lies dormant in their souls till school
wakes it.

Most people are force-fed a few plums of poetry in the schoolroom, and the mere thought of it
makes them sick for the rest of their lives.

56 False education
False schooling moulds us for a life of well-paid and serviceable futility. True education unfits us
for the world. It brings in no return, is for leisure not for work, for the few not for the mass, for
self-cultivation not for the state. And so of course there is no longer any true education.

Where all are sent to school, no one is educated. They are only trained to serve as cogs in the
economy which promises to make all so rich.

The use of true education was to be useless. And the real function of a university was to enforce
a season of idleness on young minds at a time when they might use it to grow.

Fun fills up our leisure hours, and we need no tuition for that. So the sole task that school
performs now is to prepare us for a job.
The aim of mass schooling is not to train people to think but to equip them to do their job without
the need to.

Schools don’t make girls and boys bright. They raise the average level of dullness.

Nothing beats a religious education for instructing you how to lie with a crystal conscience.

The state trains up the young by corrupting them in the ways sanctioned by fashion.

57 Education for thinking

When you are taught a fact by someone else, all you learn is that one fact. Find out a truth by
your own endeavours, and you guess ten more and maybe a hundred. Dullards have to be
taught, a quick mind learns, a deep one makes its own discoveries.

Education turns the mind into a magnet to draw facts to it. Thinking sets it spinning to make a
motor to generate new thoughts.

You can’t make sense of any one thing, till you have learnt how the whole works. But you can’t
make out how the whole works, till you have mastered many discrete things. A few writers, such
as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Nietzsche or Yeats, provide you with a complete education. But
you need a complete education before you can reap much good from them. Their books contain
a model of style, patterns of form, paradigms of character, precepts of taste, a table of values, a
manual of how to think, schemas of historical development, and concepts to set your thoughts in
order.

Useless knowledge is the only kind worth acquiring. But these days we’re all too poor to afford
it.

58 Educating yourself for others

All schooling is sophistical, since it enables us to act as if we knew what we don’t know. We
keep up a show of knowledge. And in this shifty world that’s of more use than the real thing.

A teacher learns the wrong lesson twice, first as a docile and emulous pupil, then as a smug
performer. And some have no time to learn, because they are in such a hurry to instruct. Few of
us can let pass an invitation to show off how little we know.

Teachers are eager to hand on the lessons that they’ve learnt, since they have no better use for
them. But anyone who knows things that are worth teaching will have more sense than to set up
as a teacher.

Most teachers are not worth listening to, because all they have done is listen to their teachers.
How stupid I become by educating myself for others.

Teachers are content to serve as a thoroughfare for the feet of their students to trample. Yet
they presume that they know the goal to which to guide them.

‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ Too bad one of the things they can’t do is teach.

59 Cultural senility
Our new alexandrian age is resourceful yet sapless, frenetic yet spiritless, puerile yet senile,
squeamish but selfish, lacking in wisdom but technically adept.

You can gauge the vigour of a culture from the dilapidation of its colleges. It has lost its sap and
juice, if they are rich and flourishing. If they are healthy and thronging, it will be sclerotic and
emaciated. Alexandria is the antipodes of the imagination.

Scholars are the undertakers and morticians of a culture. They don’t lend it new life, but lay it
out for a decent burial.

A university is no more fit to foster fresh ideas than a factory is to make art. Academics are the
bureaucrats of the intellect. They collate and curate and sort and marshal facts, but lack the
audacity to seek out large new truths.

In a decaying culture the poet gives place to the critic as the prophet gives place to the priest.

Scholarship is the premature senility of a sprightly mind, which has grown repetitive, myopic,
fussing and hoarding.

60 Research is not thinking

News is trivia that everyone is keen to hear, scholarship is trivia that no one cares to learn.

Scholarship is one of the most diligent and laboursome forms of mental laziness.

Research is what scholars do instead of thinking.

Scholars find more and more subtle ways of entirely missing the point. They may not arrive at
the right answers, but at least they know how to ask the wrong questions.

Scholars fear to be caught in an error more than they love the truth. And so they get it all wrong.

A specialist has drab views on one subject, a polymath has drab views on several. They are
both too busy gathering facts to gain any new ideas.
The most delimited topic has room for enough puzzles to obsess the most dexterous mind and
to conceal that they are not worth deciphering. Such meagre riddles fixate us, but we shut our
minds to signal truths.

61 The megalomania of small minds

A smallminded specialist feels like stout Cortés, dizzied by the vast bonanza that they hope to
reap from some tiny patch of barren fact. Let the skies fall, but let my treatise on roman bean
farming be published.

What minor scribbler or dried-up scholar doesn’t feel that their books justify the universe?

Scholars regard each trivial revision in their subject as a revolution in thought. No idea is too
small to count for them as a revelation, so long as it pertains to them and their own little sphere.
Which of them would not say of their staggering findings, ‘I will utter things which have been
kept secret from the foundation of the world’?

We now look up to scholars as if they had made real discoveries and to critics as if they had
found a deep wisdom. We take their desiccated and esoteric commentaries for a new
gnosticism.

Commentators hold that the role of a great writer is to provide fodder for their commentaries.
The death of the author makes room for the birth of the academic.

62 Pedants
Quibblers and purists insist on a misplaced precision, since they lack the finesse to gauge how
many sides a question might have. They grope for the key, but in their bat-eyed fumbling have
not yet found the door.

A pedant’s mind painstakingly sifts facts, and lets in none but the most minute.

To take things literally is not to take them in their most direct and vivid sense but in their most
vapid and hidebound sense.

Rigid people learn a few small points so well when they’re young, that they lose the flexibility to
learn much else after that. How many things you need to keep in mind, and how many things
you need to shut your eyes to or unlearn, if you aim to search out new truths.

Some sticklers split hairs because they know so much about a small area, and some because
they know a mere smattering. Those who know nothing love to point out how little others know.
Both doggedness and dabbling come to the same thing in the end, namely a flat and dry
formalism.

Smug pedants presume that they are sedulous perfectionists.

Some people become formalists because they have no sense of form. They note each comma,
colon or parenthesis in a sentence, but are blind to its deep pattern and deaf to its music.

63 Parasitic critics
Would literature now seem alive, if its corpse weren’t wriggling with so many industrious critical
maggots? But a worm in the guts of a lion feels as pleased with its lot as the king of beasts.

Scholars are parasitic but self-perpetuating. They have no more need of their host. They have
found out how to feed off the excrement of their fellow parasites.

Critics are spiders, and their interpretations are the cobwebs which disfigure great works of art.

The scholarly strain their ingenuity to dig out in a piece of art those features that prove their own
ingenuity.

An unschooled reader feels far more reverence for laborious erudition than for mere original
thinking. Facts and erudition can be heaped up, shared, shown off, discussed, checked and
verified. But an original thought is not the sort of thing that you can mention in polite company.
But the respect for knowledge has now slumped so low, that people have ceased to revere
learned asses.

64 The critic’s Judas kiss

Critics betray art with the Judas kiss of interpretation. The value of a work of art lies in the
intensity of its imaginative fire. It is not the transmission of a message. That is the straw to which
a pedagogue would dry it. Anything that we say of a work of art is a waste of breath. It is not
there to be explained, decoded, classified or contextualized. You must feel it as a coup of
imagination.

By multiplying interpretations, scholars don’t free a text to reveal its own meaning. They torture
it till it yields up all the meanings they want to drag out of it, so as to show off their own skill in
interpreting.

We seek to interpret works of art, because we have no idea what a work of art is for.

Most critics are not failed artists. They are failed critics. If they were failed artists, they would
know a lot more about art. All that they learn from great writing is how to write badly.
The only useful criticism is that which is implicit in the form of great creative works. But we are
far too deep to have the skill to read that.

READING

65 Reading
Words wait patiently in the living tomb of a book for a reader to dream them back to life.

You learn nothing from the best books until you are ready for them. But it’s they that have to do
half the readying.

In order to make yourself worthy of the best, you have to read books that are better than you
deserve. You have to overrate your powers if you want to enlarge them.

In each second-rank work I recognize my own best thoughts. They come back to me with a
certain alienated mediocrity.

Some authors think that we read too much and too widely, and that we ought to confine our
reading to their own books and a few other classics, and spend the rest of our time meditating
on these.

You no more grasp the meaning of a sentence by attending to the meaning of each word in it
than you grasp the meaning of a word by spelling out each of its letters.

66 Thinking through reading

You can’t read well if you have not thought. But how could you think well if you have not read
well? You learn to reflect by reading, and then you learn to read by reflecting.

Meditation advances far more ploddingly and far more rapidly than reading. It may take an age
to find a new way of thinking, but once you have it, it will give you the key to unlock a whole mint
of mysteries, which no amount of reading would have done.

You add to your knowledge by what you read, but you multiply it by how you think. Read to gain
breadth, reflect to go deep.

You can grasp a new concept only if you have already thought up to the brink of it on your own.
It’s a bridge that you have to beat your path to by your own efforts before you can traverse it.
You benefit from some books because you are prepared for them, and from others because you
never will be.
The work of thinking never ends. By thinking through a problem or reading through a book, you
change your way of thinking so much, that you have to start again thinking or reading through it
using the new organs you have grown.

67 Reading and not thinking

Some people get no ideas except when they hold a book in their hands, and some except when
they hold a pen in their hands. But most writers are so busy writing that they have no time to
think, as most readers are too busy reading to have time to think. We read to be spared the
exertion of thinking. The writer will think for us, or neither need think at all.

Some people read in order to reinforce their prejudices. But most don’t read for any purpose as
serious as that. It’s intelligent people, who might have been able to think, that read so that they
won’t have to. The observant read those writers whom they trust to think for them, and the dull
read those whom they can count on not to.

Thinkers know that books are for people who don’t think for themselves. And yet they live and
think in order to write books.

If you want to use books to help you to think new thoughts, you have to keep rereading the
same old ones.

How widely we read, and how narrowly we think. ‘We live,’ as Wilde said, ‘in an age that reads
too much to be wise.’ But we have now ceased to read, so why are we still as empty-headed as
ever?

68 Read to grow more evil

Reading won’t make you better, but read as well as you can, and it might at least make you
worse. A rich work should leave you happier and more evil, more open to adventure in mischief,
and more mistrustful of your own fine feelings.

To read well is not an innocent act. You must have been corrupted by a whole history of guilty
knowledge.

A book is a carefully constructed bomb, and reading is a controlled explosion, which critics
would defuse with their laboured exegesis.

Mawkish critics presume to deliver art from its inhuman flawlessness, and graciously vest giant
writers with their own lilliputian virtues.
69 Bad books
Most people would prefer any entertainment to reading a book. And if they must read, they
would far rather read a bad book than a good one and a good one than a great one. But a book
that’s easy reading is not worth the effort. And a book that is not worth reading at least twice will
not be worth reading at all. Yet these are the only books that most of us want to read.

It is only by reading the same old books again and again that we gain new ways of thinking.

Some readers go to books in order to find their own hackneyed notions heightened into shoddy
eloquence and set out as a ramshackle programme. When they say that one is well written, they
just mean that it gives fluent utterance to their own stodgy outlook.

How could people learn anything, when they read such bad books? But they are such bad
readers, that they wouldn’t learn much, even if they read good ones.

Poor books are hard to read because they are so turgid. And great books are hard to read
because they are so terse.

70 Bad reading, not thinking

We prefer to skim through a hundred big diffuse books than give our attention to a single
succinct and exacting one. Most of us want to devote no more than half our mind to the books
that we read. And so we want to read only those books whose authors have devoted no more
than half their mind to write.

Some readers, like termites, swallow a stack of books, and shred them to a mound of sawdust.
‘To read without reflecting,’ as Burke said, ‘is like eating without digesting.’ We like books that
we can bolt without chewing. All we ask of them is that they should ask nothing of us. Yet in the
long run we give most to those who demand most of us.

The sole serious kind of reading is rereading. But we read only those books that are not worth
rereading and we can grasp at once. And rethinking is the kind of thinking that bears most fruit.
‘Thinkers,’ Valéry wrote, ‘are people who rethink.’

71 Good reading is slow reading

A great book takes at least as long to read as it does to write, since you go on reading it for
years after you’ve put it down. But poor books take as little time and thought to read as they did
to write, which is no doubt why they are so popular.
There is no method to reading, except to read none but the best with unhurried and pensive
reverence. ‘Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.’ But we would rather skim through second-
rate stuff in a careless rush.

Set all your mind to grasp a few lines of a great author, and you’ll learn more than from all your
hasty devouring of their copious volumes.

To write is a work of compression, to read is a work of expansion. The writer must condense a
long time spent thinking to fit a small space of text. And then the reader must expand this by
converting it back to a long time spent reading and cogitating.

The writer must be concise, to coax the reader to go slow. The most compact writing takes the
longest time to read, since it would force us to pause and think.
CYNICISM

Contents

Cynicism

Malice

Suspicion

Scepticism

CYNICISM

1 Cynicism
Most cynicism cuts no deeper than the shabby pretences that it mocks. But the world is so blunt
that it bludgeons cynicism into silence.

Most of us know when we have found the truth, since it makes us feel more at ease. Gadflies
know when they have found it, since they think it should make others feel less at ease. When
they lie, they trust that they are sparing us. And when they are cruel, they trust that they are
paying off their debt to the truth. A simpleton confuses truth with illusion, a cynic confuses it with
disillusion.

The heart too has its reasons, as Pascal said. Too bad few of us have any other. The crooked
heart in collusion with the world dreams more deviously than the head ever could.

The heart may seem to get straight to the truth by leaps of faith, but only because it calculates
more rapidly than the head.

Sceptics tell us that we can’t know the truth. Cynics show that we don’t want to.

When the profoundest thinkers start affirming things, they show that they can be as stupid as
the rest of us. Witness Nietzsche with his drivel of the Dionysian and the eternal recurrence and
superman and the meaning of the earth and will to power.

To affirm is to be doomed to lie. And to hold to the truth would doom you to despair.
2 Among the cannibals
‘Philosophers,’ as Rivarol said, ‘are anatomists and not doctors. They dissect, but do not heal.’
The thinker poses as an anatomist, is revered as a surgeon, but acts more like a cannibal. Yet
cannibals are more considerate than inquirers. They eat none but their enemies, and not till they
are dead.

The thinker has a gift for reasoned but passionate disillusion.

We mistake the dagger of psychology for a scalpel, since revenge has sharpened it to such a
keen edge. Is there anything more unkind you could do to some people than lay bare their
motives? ‘Vivisection,’ as Flaubert says, ‘is a form of revenge.’

Thinking is as easy as fishing, particularly if you’re using gobbets of your fellow beings to bait
your rod. You need a small spark of native adroitness, a good deal of practice and then years of
waiting. But look out that you don’t eat what you hook. The streams run so foul.

A thinker hunts not like a lion but like a lone spider, which spins its web out of its own guts, and
then waits in the patient dark for thoughts to tangle themselves in it.

3 The self-vivisection of cynicism

Raw minds make their truths out of their own woes. Ripe ones make them out of the woes of
those they love or hate.

If your aim is to grasp their true nature, you must have committed all the crimes that you indict,
be a prey to all the diseases that you diagnose, and dote on all the follies which disgust you.
‘There are,’ Wilde says, ‘poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has to sicken of
them.’

4 The cynical world hates cynicism

The cynical world is scandalized by an unblinking statement of cynicism. Having steeped cynics
in its own cynicism, it cries out when they preach it. It wants them to act after its own example,
but not to expose its ploys. But they betray it by divulging its double-crosses and desertions,
and it chastises them like a slighted deity when they do so. ‘Few things are more shocking to
those who practise the arts of success,’ Logan Pearsall Smith wrote, ‘than the frank description
of those arts.’ The world will make a fool of your cynicism either by outdoing it or by allowing it to
undo you.

You must be very shrewd to see through to the true value of things. But you must be very naive
if you dream that the world will put up with your exposing it.
Cynicism and despair may have truth on their side, but optimism has self-interest and
sentimentality. And the wily contriver knows that these have all the credit in this world.
Enthusiasm is paid so much more than cynicism, that only a fool would dare to play the cynic.
And so the most calculating cynics learn to act like the most beaming enthusiasts.

You can tell the confidence man by his mealy-mouthed denunciations of cynicism, and by the
trust that he triggers in the ruthless and gullible.

Like a sitter for a portrait, the world gripes whether observers dare to paint it just as it is or as it
is not.

MALICE

5 The spur of rivalry

Intellectual passion resembles rancour more than love. It is fanned by rivalry, contrariety and
spite. ‘My fury,’ said Isaiah, ‘it upheld me.’ Even those who love truth to their own detriment may
not love it purely or selflessly.

Love harmonizes, hate clarifies. Love paints in the softest pastels, hate etches in the sharpest
lines.

It is competitiveness and not curiosity that finds its way to the richest lodes.

Impartiality may guide you in the right way to think. But it is rivalry that will launch you on the
path.

Self acts like a magnet, disrupting the delicate compass of the intellect and attracting all our
thoughts to it. It may spur you on to seek out the truth, though it will hold you back from
discovering it.

Thinkers such as Schopenhauer who deride the cult of progress still don’t doubt that the light is
advancing, since they are confident that their own dogmas will soon have eclipsed those of their
rivals.

6 Truth, cynicism and revenge

To inspect your specimens of life, you have to stain them with malice and place them under
your glassy disengagement.

Spite may give the jolt to hot-wire cold intellects. ‘What we need is hatred,’ said Genet. ‘From it
are our ideas born.’
Malice is a volatile gas which you can use to bust out of the narrow corral of your polite
platitudes, though it may poison you first.

Deprivation makes us spiteful, and it’s our spite that keeps us on the watch. So the spur that
alerts us makes us unjust to what we see.

If vengeance did not fire us up, how would we have brought to light so much of the truth?
Revenge may lie to others, but it burns to learn all that might help it to fillet its victims.

You need the dark energy of malice and cynicism to keep your mental world expanding.

Where there is no treachery, there will be no truth. And where there is loyalty, there will be a lot
of lies. Thinkers are turncoats whom we can’t trust to acquiesce in the congenial lies by which
we thrive. They work, as Blake says, by ‘the infernal method, by corrosives.’ They aim to bring
to fruition the work that the serpent began.

Only a bad angel, shorn of all but pride and spite, is free to spy out the truth.

Every poet is inspired by a secret muse. And each thinker is incited by a secret adversary.

7 A waste of hate
Few people are worth all the malice that you lavish on them.

Our enmities and antagonisms arise as accidentally as our amities. And few of them are rich or
deep enough to last very long. There are a horde of people whom I might hate more reasonably
and fruitfully than the ones that I do, if I but knew them.

Polemics are a waste of hate. Better to use it to fire a path to the truth than to set your enemies
ablaze. The only dragons worth slaying are those that spring from our own entrails.

8 Great thoughts are great crimes

Great thoughts are the crimes that cravenly good people lacked the courage to commit. ‘Each
work of art,’ as Adorno points out, ‘is an uncommitted crime.’ A questing mind is blessed with a
boundless capacity not just for taking pains, as Buffon said, but for giving them as well, and for
not caring how much it gives both itself and others.

‘He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence,’ as Blake said. But a grand idea may be the
most productive pestilence of all.

Truth is the choicest of the flowers of evil. It may be that all the books make up one satanic
bible, the testament of hell, a savage encyclopaedia which logs each brutal truth that mortals
have gleaned since they thieved the apple.
Love may do as much damage as hate, and hate may bear as much fruit as love.

God must know so much less than us, since he can neither sin nor die. As Butler said, ‘no one
can know much till he has sinned much.’

SUSPICION

9 The cunning cynicism of rectitude

Life is a dispiriting pilgrimage. And only the naive and devious reach the end with their faith
unscathed. These are the true believers, who are urged on by their hunger for gain to lodge
their trust in the most venal schemes and creeds.

What novice intriguer could not ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’? The pure and upright
who take offence at his sleights and gambits use far craftier ones each day. ‘The cynicism of life
can’t be outdone by literature,’ as Chekhov says. ‘One glass won’t get someone drunk who has
downed a whole barrel.’

The young can afford the luxury of ideals. They have not yet learnt how much there is to play
for. They dream of dismantling the world and rebuilding it in a better form. But then they grow
up, and they just want to break off a piece of it for their own use. We pawn our youthful cynicism
to pay for our adult hopes. We seldom make such a cynical bargain. How cheaply our desires
buy off our discontentment. And how promptly our habits and vanity oust our disillusion.

10 Cynicism and suspicion

We descend through the hell of mistrust by three circles. First I keep on guard against my
enemies, and I grow self-righteous. Then I’m betrayed by the chillness of confidants, and I start
to doubt them. And at length I sense that I have colluded with bad faith and roguery, and I view
my own motives with a jaundiced eye and squirm with shame. First I learn how fraudulently the
world behaves. And then, if I’m honest, I learn how fraudulently I do. I start to look askance at all
facades, once I see that I have gained or lost by some of them.

Mistrustfulness is an intellectual duty but a personal disgrace, and a moral flaw but a mandatory
excellence of mind. You live most comfortably by relying on others. But how can you think
stringently, if you don’t doubt their heart and your own and all the shows which the false world
takes for truth? In daily life you save most time by giving in to credulity, but when you think you
save most time by exercising contempt.

Knowledge is a mocker, which reverence would gag.

Contempt whets the intellect, admiration dilates the imagination. ‘Damn braces. Bless relaxes,’
as Blake notes. Suspicion sterilizes like a mental disinfectant.

SCEPTICISM

11 Cynicism and scepticism

Most of the things that people believe are not even worth doubting.

Most scepticism is an amalgam of ignorance and presumption. Few of us know enough to have
the right to be sceptics. But we still take pride in challenging notions which we lack the acuity to
grasp. And most of us will doubt an idea sooner than our own capacity to gauge its truth.

Most so-called sceptics judge that they have thought enough about a an idea when they have
found an excuse for thinking no more about it. They don’t suspend judgement so that they can
give it more thought, they reject it out of hand so that they won’t have to think of it at all.

Some people boast that they are sceptics because they judge the truth of all ideas by the test of
how closely they align with their own idle preconceptions.

What is our scepticism but our smug common sense patrolling the cordon of our entrenched
convictions, to halt interloping facts from making a breach in our self-assurance?

A lot of people use scepticism as a rug to muffle truths that they don’t want to hear.

12 Sceptical credulity
A doubting philosopher such as Descartes fasts like a glutton before a feast of credulity. ‘If a
man will be content to begin with doubts,’ claimed Bacon, ‘he shall end in certainties.’ But how
could he be so sure? How do they skip from diffidently admitting that they don’t know a thing to
confidently propounding what no one can know, such as the immateriality or immortality of the
soul? They’ve no sooner razed the rotten foundations than they’re at work rebuilding the same
old castles in the air to house the ghosts of their God, their free will and their moral prejudices.

We don’t think in order to reach certainty. We jump to conclusions that we call certain so that we
won’t have to think.

Those who refuse to take the real cure are prone to put their trust in quacks.

13 Unthinking freethinking
People now, as Colton said, are born freethinkers who have had no need to think freely. They
hold a miscellany of fashionable prejudices in lieu of their herd’s inherited ones. They are proud
to have won their freedom from the tutelage that told them what to think. But they still have no
wish to think for themselves. Their glib pyrrhonism is as automatic as their antiquated faith, and
their new scepticism is as lazy as their old orthodoxy. In an age of faith they conform by
believing. And in an age of doubt they conform by doubting.

When grey orthodoxies die a natural death, scorners bluster that they are giant-killers.

It costs us less trouble to doubt a thesis than to investigate it. And we would rather believe an
idea than reflect on it. But we are quick to doubt any idea that might clash with our unreflective
beliefs or customs.

Most people don’t want to think. And they don’t want to be free to think. But they do want to be
free to choose who will think for them. Or more often they want to choose those who will choose
who will think for them. And whom do they choose? Those whom they trust. And why do they
trust them? Because the interest of these has always coincided so closely with their own, that
they have caused them few pains. Evidently they choose well.

14 The cunning or credulity of scepticism

Sceptics trust in their own doubts as proselytes trust in their own dogmas. They cling to their
incredulity with the same certainty that others cling to their convictions. They can’t so much as
doubt without dogmatizing. Like Montaigne, you should mistrust your misbelief too much to be a
sceptic.

Most believers believe much less than they think they do. And most doubters doubt much less
than they think they do.

People boast that they stand by science, till they find that science runs counter to their ideology
or to their interest.

Sly proponents of a dogma, such as Pascal, know that in order to woo us to their faith all they
need do is cast doubt on our doubts. ‘With most of us,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘disbelief in a thing is
based on blind belief in some other thing.’ So they lure us by a reasonable and temperate
suspicion to yield to a fanciful yet flat-footed naivety. As Bagehot showed, they alternate
between ‘an appeal to the coarsest prejudice and a subtle hint to a craving and insatiable
scepticism.’

Few people are so gullible as those who have been supplied with a pretext for their scepticism.
Those who boast of their own doubts are apt to fall for the grossest hogwash.

Watch out when someone bids you be sceptical. Most of them have a mind to diddle you.
15 The wisdom of superstition
Superstitiousness itself, as Montaigne insinuates, may be a madcap cynicism which has a
shrewd feel for the limits of mortal power and perceptiveness. It may be to accept our own
weakness, and to see that all we do is subject to the power of chance. Napoleon said that the
first qualification for a marshal was luck.

The theoretician scavenges like a jackal amidst the giant carcasses of myth and saga.
Philosophy, as Montaigne wrote, is ‘nothing else but a sophisticated poetry.’ Myths hold an
antique wisdom which is both greener and riper than gaunt philosophy. They keep fresh and
unfaded the old truths that it has lost the taste for.

The sole use of an established orthodoxy should be to incite the mind to restless heresy.

As ‘the fool by persisting in his folly would become wise,’ so cynics by persisting in their
cynicism would turn back to enchantment. They sigh for the luxuriant credulity of superstition to
sweep away the parched calculations of the faith-starved present. Better the vivid and breathing
faith of an age of magic than our own passionless instrumental rationalism.

Reason acts like a heartless bailiff, coldly evicting settled views which have lodged in the one
spot for generations.

16 Too great to be true

Some thoughts are too great to be true, but far more are too true to be great.

Aren’t most of the great puzzles of philosophy, such as whether we exist or not, too fundamental
to be worth brooding on? ‘There are some questions,’ Hardy said, ‘that are made unimportant
by their very magnitude.’

The dream of fame may drive you to seek out the truth. But it’s those who have left off the quest
for fame that have more scope to find it. You may get glory by craning for a high hope. But you
reach truth by submitting to a great despair.

Flightless minds, who know that they can’t soar high enough to snatch an indelible renown, are
free to forswear the sonorous and ingratiating lies which the eminent are obliged to deal in. A
minor writer, such as Lichtenberg or Butler, Renard or Porchia, may introduce you to a few
unostentatious truths, which the illustrious must stand aloof from, who are too randy for praise to
render faithfully the flatness of our lives.

Time yields up its most revealing clues to those staid enough to wait on it. And the years
disclose some of their most abstruse mysteries to the second-rate.
The most honest seekers win fame just where they turn false. We seize on their glossy fibs and
flummery, but are wary of their unembellished truths.

17 The drabness of truth

Life is all the time tempting you to make large and false responses to its small and false
challenges.

The last confession of one who lived to think. I aimed to astound you with new and strange
observations. So how could one line that I wrote be more than half true? Behind each glittering
word you could glimpse the dreariness of truth. But that was what I had to hide, though I didn’t
hide from it. And am I now in the grip of an impulse to act as if it were all more dramatic than it
was, to amaze with one last flourish, and to savour the satisfaction of expiating a guilt which I
did not quite feel?

A ghostly double haunts all thinkers. It flutters at their back and looks on, and is less susceptible
to style, and cares a shade more for truth and a shade less for glory. So it’s a good thing both
for them and for us that it is no more than an apparition.

Even the truths that you grasp after the most gruelling struggles are not quite true. A moment’s
more thought would tell you this was so. But whose good would such a moment serve?
GENIUS

Contents

Economy

Originality

Repetition

Ahead of its time

Mediocrity

The work is all

ECONOMY

1 The economy of genius

A genius is one for whom more things mean more than they do to the rest of us, and all in a new
way.

Teeming brains have trained themselves to have punctual inspirations, and have cultivated a
knack for scoring habitual lucky hits.

There is no kind of food that venturesome minds can’t make use of to grow to be what they are.
They are omnivorous yet monomaniac. They may take in a broad spread of stuff, yet they use it
all to feed their solitary fixation. There’s nothing that they can’t do without, but they let nothing
go to waste. They can profit from everything, while not requiring one lone thing. They need no
stimulus outside their own minds, yet they can use whatever comes to hand. All is dispensable,
but nothing is lost. Each thing serves, but none is needed.

When the mind’s on fire, all facts fuel it. ‘To a poet,’ as Johnson says, ‘nothing can be useless.’
Their insights make all things redundant and all more fruitful.

A fecund mind can draw nourishment even from its own sterility.
2 Genius is an affinity for a particular medium
Genius is not a gift for general creativeness but a preternatural affinity for a single medium. It is
a mind spurred to a high pitch of activity by the possibilities of the form in which it works.

Genius is at its core material. It gives free play to all the resources of its chosen art. It is morally
wayward, but fixed in its sensible form. Shakespeare makes a world of pure words, Mozart of
notes, and Velasquez of paint. And if words, notes or paint had not been available to them, they
would have ceased to create. As the soul lives in this flesh and would die outside it, so a prolific
mind can think only by immersion in its medium.

Why do writers claim that they write in spite of words? Do composers complain that they could
write great music, if it weren’t for all those pesky notes?

There is more imagination in Le Corbusier’s austere modifications of the built form than in all
Gaudi’s grotesqueries. And there is more vision in one of Cézanne’s unobtrusive still lives than
in the nightmares of Fuseli or Piranesi. Art must be perennially revolutionizing its means of
representation.

3 Spendthrift of genius
A prolific artist or hero or a whole age knows when to conserve their force and when to spend it.
They sagaciously save all their strength for the high quests which they know will break them.
They draw on a mental thrift that lives beyond its means. Their squandering is the true
prudence.

4 The great effects of small differences

What small differences make all the difference to us. The magnification of slim distinctions is the
cause of all substantial things. A forceful mind starts with a few lean advantages and stretches
them to large effects. Napoleon, a marginally more skilful general than his peers, overran the
whole of Europe. Transpose one or two notes of a rude tune, and it makes the most delectable
air. ‘Trifles make perfection,’ as Michelangelo said.

Shift your angle of vision by a few degrees, and the whole world takes on a radically different
aspect.

Though daring minds may say the same thing as dull ones, they mean incalculably more by it.
Their bald yes or no may give the clue to a whole table of values.

What drab constituents may add up to a masterwork, yet how magically it will upraise them to
epiphanies. A thousand shuffling steps lead to the peak of achievement. A slight mutation may
through many forks in time throw up a fresh type.
ORIGINALITY

5 Genius and originality

The task of the thinker is to conceive thoughts that are true, important and original. It’s not hard
to say new things about what is trivial, or important things that are trite. Scholars do the first,
and moralists the second.

Concepts are like musical instruments, which many of us have learnt to play, but few know how
to compose with.

Even for the most adventurous inquirer originality doesn’t shine like a continual sunbeam, but
may flash like a stray thunderbolt.

One of the few pains that life spares us is that of conceiving new thoughts.

The largest truths are hard to find but easy to grasp. And some are still more difficult to believe
than they are to discover. They mystify us less by their complexity than by their profuse
suggestiveness.

Even your freshest discoveries will in the end form a barrier to fence in your thinking.

6 The solitude of genius

Bold searchers are enveloped in a soundless solitude, which our babble is too blunt to pierce. At
the outset they seem to us not mistaken or mad, but small and peripheral like far-flung stars.
And we pay them no mind, since they twinkle so far from the constellation of our own inert
views. ‘The higher we soar,’ Nietzsche says, ‘the smaller we look to those that cannot fly.’ Most
of us can’t make out a new truth till someone points to where it is and why it matters.

Pioneering minds are as many years in advance of their time as it takes the world to shrink their
fresh thoughts to its own soggy truisms. They seem as far in front of it as distant suns whose
light takes so long to reach us.

A great idea opens up at its back a silent canyon, into which you can hear all the old certitudes
lurch and crash.

7 New truths repel us

Originality and abstraction make too thin and chilly an air for our gross minds to breathe. So we
rush to get back down to the lowlands of our muggy cant and anecdotes.

A narrow mind grabs hold of the largest questions by the smallest handle.
A new truth repels people like a dishevelled and disreputable freak. They shun it till it’s been
scrubbed and spruced up as a prim commonplace. It ceases to alarm them, once the crowd has
claimed it for its own. And they come to dote on it on grounds as risible as those for which they
initially spurned it. They embrace it once it’s been translated into the debilitated discourse of
their empty platitudes.

Most people can’t grasp a new truth till they have assimilated it to their old lies.

Few people will take the trouble to get to know a new idea till they’re sure that it is so well
known that there will be some cachet in getting to know it or some shame in not knowing it.

Even the most fearless minds distrust their freshest thoughts, since they can discern in them
neither their own self nor the stock thoughts of their drove. Theorists may lack the courage to
tease out all the implications of their own theory.

8 Genius renovates prejudices

Philosophers have forged the most inventive and quirky theories, which have served only to
bolster the archaic totems of their tribe, and to universalize its customs as general laws. In
christendom most of them, like Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley or Hegel, wove their diverse fabrics
of speculative thought which by some miraculous congruence all proved that the christian faith
is the true one. And nowadays, though it’s clear that equality is a baseless sham, they all found
their rigorous reflections on this lazy and acceptable prejudice as if it were a plain fact.

‘A great many people,’ says William James, ‘think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.’ But few people go to the trouble of rearranging them. They just
apply them to new facts in the confidence that they will be proved right once more. They are
sure that they have said something witty when they trim an old catchphrase to fit a new context.

If we have an open mind on a question, it’s because we haven’t spent the time and thought on it
to make it fit our stock notions.

Even the most daring builders end by renovating the dilapidated tropes of their time and place.
And if they do more, that is still all that we want from them.

How convenient, that our first principles fall in pat with the prejudices of our age.

We learn by using new clichés in place of old.

9 Waylaid into originality

Thinkers have to toil so untiringly to reach a fresh idea, that you can’t blame them if they fail to
account for all the obvious reasons that might invalidate it. Next to thinking a new thought, the
hardest thing is to critically review your old ones. The average professor could disprove
Descartes’s cogito in ten minutes.

If thinkers were resolved to believe or say nothing but what is true, they would have found no
truths to speak at all. ‘Can it be,’ asked Keats, ‘that the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his
goal without putting aside numerous objections?’

The great sin in thinking is to assume that you know what you don’t know. And yet if you never
did that, you could make no discoveries at all.

Thinkers thirst for the new, and gulp down gallons of the false to slake their craving for it.

10 Novelty
Human beings are skittish creatures who love what looks new as much as they fear and fight
change. Yet they pine for repetition as much as they pant for what is cheap and just coined.
They are bedazzled by innovation in trifles, but they squint when it is shown in anything more
sizable. What they crave is ceaselessly recurring novelty and ceaselessly varied replication.
Both the new-fangled and the old-fashioned take hold of their hearts. They want all things
surprising, and all things recognizable. Hypnotized by their low familiar dreams, they won’t lift
their eyes to high imagination. They now, as Colton wrote, ‘run after that which is new, but are
prejudiced in favour of that which is old.’

People love to do new things as much as they hate to think new thoughts.

An age of hectic innovating such as ours won’t wait for real originality, which takes so long to
ripen. Change is the enemy of the new. We change so fast, that we don’t have time to make
what is fresh.

REPETITION

11 Obsessive genius
The one sound method is mad obsession.

The best way to master a new idea is by stationing it with your obsessions.

A concept, like a territory, is the property not of the first person to explore it, or of the best to
occupy it, but of the one who has seized the most thorough hold of it. And here bulk may do
more than brilliance, as Proust or Dickens shows.

Aren’t most of our fixations as facile as they are consuming, and as empty as they are
tenacious? They are the obverse of our insouciance. Girls and boys flit from one toy or sport to
the next, since their green vagrant moods have not yet formed the hard skeleton of a career
which will hold up their full-grown interests.

Dour obsession may yield the fruit of sweet reason.

The thoughts that fill our minds from one moment to the next make up the best and worst of us.
We can grow just as large or small as they are. And since the one thing that fills the minds of
most people is their schemes to get more money or fun, what can be hoped from them?

The same obsessiveness may make either a large mind or a captious pedant.

We are too distracted to reason consecutively or systematically. So we have to ruminate

compulsively. How could you compose and edit the successive drafts of your thoughts, but by
revisiting them in relays of obsession?

12 Originality is a repeating
Originality is where you end. It is not where you set off from. You don’t come from the cradle
with a clean slate but prone to take on all the coatings of suffocating custom. And you learn to
create by endless reiteration, each time exchanging a thin sliver of new for old, till at last you
echo your way to individuality.

Creators start off by mimicking a form’s outer mannerisms, till they reach the core and they pass
out of imitation’s junior school. Those who centre their minds on a small square of thought
retrace the same ground so often that they may at last come to a new view of it. Ideas evolve
not by abrupt convulsions but by slow geological accretion. In thought as in evolution there are
no saltations.

Thinking works like natural selection. It requires a great deal of repetition, and a few random
mutations.

It may take you years to see some things. But having seen them once, you start to see them all
the time. ‘If you are possessed by an idea,’ Mann says, ‘you find it expressed everywhere, you
even smell it.’ Those who think new thoughts keep restating them. They’re rediscovering them
over and over for the first time, startled that anything so unlikely could be so true.

13 Originality is a late growth

You need a long ancestry of thinkers to draw on if you are to strike out on a fresh path.
Originality is a late growth. It comes at the end of a tradition, not at its birth.

A good artist experiments and innovates. A great one reaps and culminates. ‘Sowing is not as
difficult as reaping,’ as Goethe points out.
Dull writers, such as roman ones, have descendants. The best, like Shakespeare, have nothing
but forebears. They bring to completion what has gone before them, but don’t foreshadow what
will come after. They are not planters or sowers but perfecters and reapers.

Most notions have long been platitudes by the time that they are first put in words.

It takes years to see a thing for the first time. And to think new thoughts is the last thing that our
minds learn to do.

It is only when a culture nears its end that it builds up the monuments which will justify the
violent course of its growth. Art and thought are evening stars.

14 Genius by imitation
An independent mind matures by imitating. And artists grow to be who they are by emulating
what they are not. Genius, as Reynolds wrote, ‘is the child of imitation.’

I fall short of my mentors and models, either because I ape them so badly, or because I ape
them too well.

If you could find the perfect model for your work, what would be the point of doing it?

It is our instinct for imitating that leads us beyond instinct and imitation.

Great artists are inimitable, not because they are so peculiar and personal, but because their
stark impersonality gives us no idiosyncrasies to mimic.

Those who copy inadvertently jeer at those who copy intently. But one thing you learn when you
set your mind to imitate is that most of the time you don’t do much else. When I think that I’m
behaving spontaneously, I am usually just mimicking models that I’m not aware of, because the
rest of the world is mimicking them too.

Choose to emulate what’s fresh, and you are freed from following fads.

You surrender to influences like a surfer to a wave, to see to what height it will lift you and how
far it will take you.

People copy by nature, but grow original by art. They imitate by instinct. But the patterns that
they imitate are allocated to them by custom.

AHEAD OF ITS TIME

15 The sick are first to catch the diseases of the future
The flights of great minds are further in advance of them than the great minds are of their time.
And the great minds lag behind their own ideas almost as far as we lag behind them.

Minor writers divine the age to come with more clairvoyance than a major one, since they stay
closer to the stale assumptions which are sporing it. Great insights are perennial rather than
prescient.

Those who see farther into the future have caught its diseases a few years before the rest of us.
If great minds are harbingers of what’s to come, it’s because they are farther down the road to
degeneration. The poet, as Rimbaud wrote, is ‘the sickest of the sick, the great felon, the great
accursed.’ Those who are not decadent are stupid. If we were not heirs to a long process of
decadence, each age would have to relearn what the past had found out. As Pessoa wrote,
‘Decadent eras abound in mental vitality, mighty eras in intellectual weakness.’

A demagogue says the wrong thing at the right time. A genius says the right thing at the always
wrong time.

Science casts up problems which it takes a great mind to solve. In art the problem would not
have been posed but that a great mind appeared on the scene to pose it.

16 The genius of reaction

Reactionaries like Burke or Maistre are best qualified to read the present. And revolutionaries
like Marx are best qualified to read the past. Those who see farthest in front of their own era
may lag centuries behind it. They’re resurrectionists, who suture the joints of their revelations
from the exhumed assumptions of the past. Nietzsche’s thoughts were so untimely because
most of them were already hoary three thousand years before he thought them.

17 The present is the past’s ungrateful child

The present detects in the best minds of the past plenty of plausible grounds to commend its
own progress. It is flattered by their advanced views, since they smoothed the way for its own
truisms. And it is flattered by their retrograde dogmas, since they give it an excuse to be smug.

To celebrate great minds for being ahead of their time is to yield to the falsehood that the future
must be right.

We praise past masters for surmounting the pieties of their own age and presaging the pieties of
ours. We pay them the fulsome compliment of acknowledging that they were preparing the way
for us.
The present looks on the past as a precocious child. It would not think much of it had it not
grown up to be itself.

The present is a ruthless darwinist. It always records that the right side won, since it was leading
up to it. As monks saw their parochial creed prefigured in every personage or happenstance in
books or history, so we read in a strong writer such as Shakespeare the first flickerings of our
own egalitarian prejudices.

It’s those whose minds are in thrall to the idols of the age who take it that a genius must be
ahead of its time.

MEDIOCRITY

18 Genius and mediocrity

A brilliant mind delights in its own productions. But so does a dull and lustreless one. What artist
feels so exultant as the self-deluded poetasters of Catullus or Borges? Mediocrity is all that
greatness is except great.

Genius has no heart, but neither does stupidity.

Goethe proves how ineluctably commonplace the mind of a superlative creator may be. And
Johnson proves how strong an intentionally commonplace and conservative mind may be.
Voltaire shows how deep a superficial mind can probe if it’s sharp enough. And Joyce shows
what a dull mind a dazzling technician may have.

Montaigne was an undistinguished mind raised to genius by the accident of his vocation and
method. It was only by writing his book that he made himself the sort of man who could write it.
‘I have not made my book any more than my book has made me.

With not much talent Stendhal willed himself into greatness, whilst Dickens was born with such
staggering gifts, that most of the time he forgot to be a great writer, and shrank to a pantomime
Balzac, who winks and grins, weeps and leers, and makes sure that his vapid lambs come off
well and his vivid goats end in disaster and disgrace. Instead of unmasking ruthless bourgeois
self-advancement for what it is, he robes it as a chivalrous crusade on behalf of the weak and
voiceless.

19 Competence comes from mediocrity

It takes far more brains to be a mediocrity than to be a genius. And it takes a great deal more
erudition to be a critic than to be a creator.
A mediocrity is more quick-witted and versatile than a first-rate mind.

To be competent and efficient, you need to have dull ideas or none at all. Talent ables, genius
disables.

Those who never think have an answer for everything, and are never perplexed by anything. A
middling mind knows just the right words to say in order to win over other middling minds.
Shallow calleth unto shallow.

Now is a great time to be second-rate. The pay is enormous, and there will be no posterity to
mock your insignificance. It is mediocrity that has the Midas touch.

20 Genius all at sea

A deep mind is dim where the rest of us scintillate, and would be stumped by the jobs that we
get done with such ease. ‘Mine indeed is the mind of a very cretin,’ said Lao Tzu. Many first-rate
geniuses have had third-rate minds. So I may be a genius after all.

Great minds are just as unfit for tasks that are below them as small minds are for those that are
above them. ‘When I am not original,’ Renard confessed, ‘I am stupid.’

A genius in a drawing room has to work so hard to seem like one of us, how could they think up
witty things to say? ‘I live under an everlasting restraint,’ Keats confessed, ‘never relieved
except when I am composing.’

21 A genius is not a universal mind

A profound intellect can do just one thing at a time, since so many things crowd in on its
thoughts. ‘Beethoven can write music, but he can do nothing else on earth.’ A comprehensive
mind is comprehensive only in its own small preserve, as Shakespeare was in poetry. Or if, like
Leonardo, Goethe or Jefferson, they are proficient in a suite of them, they are so in just one
compartment of each. ‘If you do one thing well,’ asked Thoreau, ‘what else are you good for?’ A
great mind is a dunce in everything but its chosen metier.

Even the profoundest mind is like a coastal shelf. It is deep only here and there. For the most
part it is as shallow as all the rest.

Narrow views make for broad competence. It takes a middling talent to do more than one thing
expertly.

Genius can do many things that are impossible for talent. But talent can do far more that are
impossible for genius.
Genius itself may be just one of mediocrity’s more infrequent specializations.

The one way of becoming universal is to be, like Shakespeare, as little of an integrated person
as is possible. And what will last longest of us is what is least our own.

22 Miraculous potential, mediocre actuality

We start out with miraculous potentialities, which we stunt by restricting them to such mean
uses. ‘The youth,’ Thoreau says, ‘gets together his material to build a bridge to the moon, and at
length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.’ The mind is an intricate
utensil, which most of us employ for no more exalted end than shelling peas. ‘To what base
uses we put this ineffable intellect,’ lamented Emerson.

The world is a dazzling contraption which consumes all our craft to run it. We build up our most
ingenious constructions, whether establishments, trade, science or statecraft, by elevating our
elementary gifts to a high degree of mediocrity. How much skill, diligence and teamwork it takes
to carry out all second-rate tasks. So is it any surprise that so few of us succeed in becoming
even second-rate?

You need as much dedication to do a mediocre work as you would to do a marvellous one. We
strain all our powers to do the most humdrum things. But how flabbily we exert our minds to do
creative ones. Our best works alone fulfil the promise of our simplest gifts.

23 Genius and madness

Genius and madness are both closer to mediocrity than they are to each other. Genius nears
insanity only when it has ceased to be what it is.

Madness may be more an effect of the kind of life that geniuses have to lead in order to do their
great work than the cause that makes them able to do it.

The poet may be like a lunatic, but the lunatic is not in the least like a poet. Bold minds may be
crazy, and yet the products of a bold mind are the antipodes of the tedious outpourings of
craziness.

Mad people, like sleepers, have erratic but dingy visions. Like slovenly poets, they keep
recycling stereotypes from the common stock. In the west they are all Jesus or Napoleon. Their
fixations don’t open a door to wondrous truths. They are as predictable and repetitive as rats in
a maze.
24 The exception and the type
What is quintessential is often atypical. And the most distinctive comes in time to be the most
emblematic. Greatness is singular in its very universality. The finest style is at once exemplary
and inimitable. And the best writers indicate the typical by showing you the exceptional.
Dickens’s characters are eccentric but not extraordinary, Shakespeare’s are extraordinary but
not eccentric. Dickens constructs not characters but colourfully tinted wind-up toys, which he
jerks into spasms of mechanical vivacity. But Shakespeare is the representative poet, who is
therefore like no other poet.

Mad people, like the dull, are freakish yet derivative. A mind working at highest pitch is
unconventional yet archetypal.

To sum up in your modes of thought the spirit of your age, you would have to be a mediocrity.
Only then would you be shallow enough for all its currents to come to the surface in you.

25 The small scorns the great

Who now holds great minds in awe? I pity them, since, unlike me, they are so inadequate to life
that they have to compensate for their unfitness by growing desperately great. And we look with
condescension on those turbulent germinal epochs which didn’t know how to husband their
force so as to shrink to our snug and lucrative barrenness.

What great souls we must have, to be able to look down as from a lofty height on things that are
so far above us. What a world, which makes beauty feel ashamed before ugliness, where the
innocent are lashed by the self-righteous, in which stupidity condescends to intelligence, and
where small minds grind down the great till they’re as small as themselves.

26 Too ignorant to envy

People don’t fear what they don’t know. If they did, what would they not have to be afraid of?
And how could they fear it, when they don’t so much as know that they don’t know it? They
mock and scoff at what they have no grasp of, since they have too little respect for it to quaver
at it. ‘All that seems strange we condemn,’ Montaigne says, ‘as well as all that we do not
comprehend.’

Why would mediocrity envy merit? It’s too busy condescending to it and pitying it for its
unfitness for life.

The small minds who are not worthy to untie the sandal strap of the great laugh at the great
because their sandals are unstrapped.
We heap some of our most scathing disparagement on the great achievements that we are
least worthy of. Few things fill the common run of people with more contempt than great art, as
few things fill them with more true veneration than cheap kitsch.

Small minds see straight through great ones, since what is larger than themselves is invisible to
them.

THE WORK IS ALL

27 Lives of the artists

We love geniuses where they are most like us, in their lives, where they are least like geniuses.
Some of us can love art only by loving those who make it, as superstitious souls do homage to
the trinity only in its saints.

Artists focus their force so narrowly in their works, what do they have to spare for life but their
quite average drabness? ‘Great geniuses,’ as Emerson notes, ‘have the shortest biographies.’ A
true artist leaves no memoirs. All that you need to know of artists’ lives will be clear from their
work. And if they are real artists, that will be nothing at all. But we don’t care much for their
works, though we love to hear one or two salacious titbits from their life.

The only people whose lives matter are the few whose lives matter less than their works.

What ordinary people do is of more interest than what they are. But what artists make is of more
interest than what they are, though this is the only thing about them that ordinary people are
interested in.

Art ought to be anonymous, if only to remove the main reason for which most of it is made and
bought.

The artist is a bundle of accidents who makes works the least detail of which seems inevitable
and immutable.

28 The life is worth less than the work

The book lives a better and truer life than its author, more pure, quiet, proud and self-contained.
And the poem leads a more resonant and spacious life than the cramped and insubstantial poet.

‘The work is all,’ as Flaubert said, ‘the person is nothing.’ The life is the husk which the work has
no more need of. Nothing is more worthless than the personality of the artist, or more priceless
than the work of art. Life is for consumers. The creator cares for nothing but the work. The life
was just a long mistake which they had to make so that the work might get done and which will
soon be thankfully rubbed out by death.

29 The work is the true genius

To judge the work by the life is the revenge of middle-class morality on aristocratic art. Art is an
aristocratic pursuit. Morality is a bourgeois pretence. Religion is a plebeian consolation.

For those who have used life to some purpose death is the least of the evils that could come to
them. For the makers death is no refutation. They lit out long ago, and what they leave for death
is trash. Then they wake to live their real lives, unburdened of the day-to-day distractions of pain
and joy.

The life goes out, the work remains. ‘The great use of life,’ as William James said, ‘is to spend it
for something that will outlast it.’ But now we waste it to swipe our share of money and fun.

Good artists possess a talent, great ones are possessed by it. It works them as hard as it
needs, and then casts them aside. That’s why they have such a thin self to give to the rest of
life.

We each choose our prison. The artist must choose the one that sets the mind free to roam
where it will.

30 Used up by the work

The writer is nothing, and becomes still more of a nothing by writing. Their work is a larva that
lodges in their guts, and grows by feeding on them.

The work devours the soft pulp of its human maker, and turns it into the steel that it uses to
carve out more works. The work is the end, its maker is a mere means. And the artist is a tool
which is honed by making art, to the point where it starts to grow blunt and wear out.

How maimed and ugly you have to make your life, if you want to build up a work of perfect
beauty.

A writer is a miserable contraption for turning out miraculous sentences. But in our
overeducated age writers are more fascinating and articulate than their works, and their
biographies tell us more than their books.

Most of us have cheap substitutes for thinking so that we can live at ease. Thinkers are content
with cheap substitutes for living so that they can think as they wish. You have to get hold of a
few chattels that you don’t prize, so as to be free to risk all that you do prize. You have to learn
to live safely, so that you can think dangerously.
Artists are interlopers in their own lives. They visit it once in a while to blow it up and gather
more material to make their art.

31 Incredible artist
How could God be a credible artist, when he so far outshines his handiwork, and wants to be
honoured more than his productions, and was so vastly pleased with what he had made? Would
a human being not blush to have brought forth nothing more admirable than a jellyfish or a
tapeworm? ‘If I had invented them,’ joked Twain, ‘I would go hide my head in a bag.’

God is too much the egotist to be an artist. His best work was a bad image of himself.

All artists aim to make a work better than themselves for the world to admire. God is so vain that
he was content to make a world so much worse than himself so that it would admire him.

32 Great works and little souls

The runners’ running is worth more than their immortal souls. And a few perfect but perishable
sentences count for more than the writer’s immortal soul. Their bright achievements are washed
clean of the pollution of their life and spirit. The immortal part of you is not the small thing that
you are, but the great things that you make.

A work of art is worth far more than any mere soul that it might channel. Artists mean more than
their lives but less than their works. And they grow as great as they are less than the works that
spring from them. ‘Good artists,’ Wilde says, ‘exist simply in what they make, and consequently
are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.’ They make better than they are. The more fully
they give form to their vision, the further they fall short of what they frame. And what they shape
surpasses them even more than they surpass the rest of us.
ILLUSIONS

Contents

Ubiquity of illusion

Life-lies

United by illusion

UBIQUITY OF ILLUSION

1 We love illusion
We don’t start with truth and deviate from it. Illusion is our homeland, and truth makes a few
brief incursions within its boundaries, which we repulse with ease. There never was such a thing
as the real world for us.

We lie as we breathe, instinctively, habitually and unawares. ‘No man,’ as Emerson wrote,
‘speaks the truth or lives a true life two minutes together.’ The heart and head lie as the lungs
take in air. People notice that they are lying not when they lie best but when they strain to do it,
as they don’t notice that they are breathing except when they gasp. They suck the exhilarating
air of their illusions, and they feel hearty and expansive just by inhaling it. As Butler observed, ‘It
is the unconscious liar that is the greatest liar.’

Don’t we prize a book, denomination, party or creed not for the one big lie that it means to tell
but for the swarms of small ones that it takes for granted?

People are so prone to be imposed on by creeds and ideologies, not because they give so
much thought to things of the mind, but because they don’t care for them at all.

2 The ceaseless birth of illusion

From age to age there is such an unquenchable thirst for illusions, that we have to keep
adapting them to new conditions and furnishing them with new forms. But the love of truth burns
so low, that it can feed forever on the same fuel.

Lies may have shorter lives than truth, but they procreate more rapidly. A lie mutates so fast,
that it can adapt to all environments. Truth is stubbornly unadaptable.
A lie may have a vogue for a time, but a truth can count on being neglected through the ages.

Truth may have time on its side, but error has numbers. ‘Truth is the cry of all,’ as Berkeley
wrote, ‘but the game of the few.’

Error is hydra-headed, truth is cyclops-eyed.

Though resistant to ideas, we are susceptible to infectious opinions.

Truth is as easy to eradicate as lies are quick to infest us. Lies spread by contagion. But some
you are immune to, whereas others you need to be vaccinated against by assenting to them for
a while.

We use truth is a figurehead or a fig leaf, depending on which of our desires we want to hide.

You don’t decrease the demand for illusion by cutting off the supply. Faith is just one of the
forking tributaries of the broad river of delusion. Dam up this runnel, and the flood will surge with
more force elsewhere. ‘Dream delivers us to dream,’ Emerson wrote, ‘and there is no end of
illusion.’

3 Steeped in illusion
We all wear motley, though the patches of truth and falseness differ for each of us. All of us are
either fools or frauds, and many of us prove to be both. We should try to stint our folly, use no
more fraud than we need to get by, and know what we are.

We grow honest not by impulse but only after routing hard resistance.

People live by lies, till they die for real. They lurch from one splendid untruth to the next, till they
at last go out in squalid darkness.

Truth shines like starlight, brilliant but cold and distant. Illusion is the sunlight by which we live.

Most of our ills are all in our mind. And so most of our remedies are in our mind too. And they
are therefore all the more tormenting, since we can never get free of them.

People must have some affinity for fraud, since they are glad to lie for such low pay.

I tell as many kind lies as cunning ones. So I square my reckoning, and can lay claim to a love
of the truth.

How little effort it costs us to keep our eyes shut to the most glaring truths.
4 Advancing in illusion
I trust that I’m advancing in truth, when I swap a coarser fallacy for a more subtle one.

From year to year we get farther from real life but no nearer to our dreams.

It’s easier to get a lie into a head than to dislodge it. But you hardly insert a truth before it starts
trickling out. Our fancies snag faster in our brains than the real thing, since we have tailored
them to suit our wants. As Napoleon said, ‘it’s easier to deceive than to undeceive.’

LIFE-LIES

5 The ugliness of truth

Truth is either so dowdy, or, like the goddess Diana, so refulgently lovely, that she seldom
appears nude. But if truth is, as Nietzsche said, a woman, why does she act like such a prude,
and not deign to undress even for her most respectful wooers?

Telling the ugly truth is one piece of bad taste that few of us are so gauche as to indulge in.

All of us tell the truth if we have no choice. But why be gratuitously honest?

Polite people look away from truth as if it were an indecency, and practical people look down on
it as a useless nuisance. The love of truth is one of the strangest aberrations. And truth lives on
in the world only because there are a few who are aroused by its obscenity.

Truth steals in haggard and unwelcome as death in the midst of the raucous masque of our
desires. How frightening to look in the hollow eyes of one who has looked on the truth. Thinkers
need to put on a bright visor, to spare the world the sight of the grisly cripples that truth has
made of them.

Truth does not dwell on the heights. It skulks in the sewers with the rest of the waste matter
which we keep out of sight in decent life.

6 Truth disgusts us
The reception of truth requires a willing suspension of disgust.

Truth disgusts us when it’s naked, and it bores us when it’s dressed.

Though people don’t believe in the truth, they are still irked to see it rudely bared in front of
them. They care just enough about it to be repulsed by the sight of it. And though they pay it no
mind, they still loathe those who are nasty enough to tell it.
Truth gives us nothing to desire, but plenty to disgust us.

We don’t believe in the truth, but we still fear it. It’s a gun which might go off in any direction.
The people least to be trusted are those who dare to tell the truth. If they would tell you that,
they would tell you anything.

The truth is a stumbling-block on a road that no one would want to travel.

Most of the deepest truths are either too scandalous or too obvious to be spoken. But few of us
care so much for the truth to see how scandalous it is. And we are too anxious to conceal it to
admit how obvious it is. How could we be horrified by what it shows us? We are just too
heedless of it for that.

We know just enough of the truth to see that it must be kept hidden.

7 Human kind cannot bear very much reality

We try to heal our hearts with lies, not because we desire falsehood itself, but because truth
would do us no good.

Most of us know just enough of the truth to make us content with our plausible coinages. We
know our hearts too well to wish to know them better. We would rather be consistently and
decently deceived than scandalously and hurtfully disabused. Better a reputable dupe than a
ridiculous clear-eyed eccentric. We strain like puppies at the leash of error, but we lack the will
to snap it.

Truth is savagely abstract. But illusion is so beguiling because it is safely conventional and yet
complacently personal.

Life robs us of all the struts that hold up our make-believe, and so leaves us too weak to let go
of it.

‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality,’ as T. S. Eliot wrote. But neither can it bear very
much illusion. People can’t bring themselves to front the truth. Yet they don’t quite believe the
faith that they take up to shield themselves from it. They can’t even rest in the lies which they
need in order to live.

People rarely fix in words the illusions that they live by, and they may not even be quite aware of
them. And the illusions that they do fix in words are not the ones that they live by.
8 Illusion is a fortress
Truth may make the windows of your house, but strong illusions make the walls that hold it up.
Yet these too will tumble down, if the lies of others don’t shore them up. And from whatever
building blocks you seek to make your happiness, it will soon cave in, if you don’t ground it on
the unshakable dream of your own importance.

Illusion is a stronghold which truth would pull down on our heads to crush us.

That truth will shield us from woe is one of the illusions that we use to shield ourselves from the
truth.

How do we go on, but by forgetting what the years have gouged from us and the dismal lessons
they have taught us? Our brains would split, if we believed each day and hour the things that we
know to be true.

In this world of deceit and discouragement, the best you can hope for is that the years will be
kind to your illusions.

9 Truth through lies

Most of us would go mad, if we freed ourselves from our mad aberrations. You can’t even be
wise, if you’re not sheltered by a thatch of dry self-deception.

How could all the tender shoots of truth live on, if they weren’t shaded by the broad
overspreading tree of unreality?

You have to submit to be duped by faith, so that you can go on seeking a despairing wisdom.

Truth would make you a castaway, but illusion is the lifejacket that bears you up.

Thinkers are torn two ways. They must dwell in illusion while searching for the truth. And if they
find the truth, they still can’t live in it. And it’s touch and go which will sink them, the lies which
they must live in, or the truths which they choose to seek.

Our inane lies may be the truest summation of our inane and false lives.

10 The lie gives life

Our lives are saved by lies, and would be wrecked by the truth. Lies struggle with truth, as life
struggles with death.

We can live through the rest of our lacks, so long as we lack self-observation too. If we gave up
our hypocrisy, the world would wither to a wilderness. And if we gave up self-deception, solitude
would contract to a torture chamber. ‘The art of living,’ as Pavese wrote, ‘is the art of knowing
how to believe lies.’

It does not much matter what desolating truths I find out about myself, since I no more than half
believe them, and I get rid of them in such quick time anyway.

Some of us suffer from our illusions like a plague, but most profit from them like a fund of
capital.

We thrive best in the rank air of teeming illusion.

The more errors you hold on to, the fitter you are to survive.

We need uplifting illusions, to reconcile us to the poor trash that we have won, or else to rouse
us to attempt the high exploits of which we might be capable.

Since our species can know the truth, it is driven to live most of its life in fictions.

11 Truth’s a poison
Nothing human can survive in truth’s lifeless lunar atmosphere. You can breathe no air but that
of your vital half-lies. Even the most lucid of us are kept on our feet by our flimsy evasions. Life
is not compatible with the clear consciousness of what it is. Life is not worth much thought. And
if you give it much, you find that it is scarcely worth living.

Our illusions fill us up. The truth would empty us out.

Truth is as alien to our nature as illusion is necessary to our being.

Truth is a venom, lies are a cure. And you would have to be a fool or a suicide to dare to meddle
with the truth.

Truth is a poison, but most of us ingest it in such small doses that it does us no harm. But a
thinker’s stomach can absorb so much of truth’s toxin that it ends up killing them.

Truth is an opiate that makes life more unendurable than it was before.

12 Cruel truth, kind lies

A seeker woos truth like an unrequited lover. It’s the hapless ones who find their way to win her.
The fortunate get fantasy, her more kind-hearted sister.

Truth must be wooed long and long. And by the time she yields to you, she is dried up, withered
and bitter, and you will be too fashed to get much good of her.
Truth leaves you naked and exposed in a gale of affliction, when hospitable illusion would
shelter you. Your aberrations nerve you, where the truth would weaken and discourage you.
What deludes me makes me stronger. In the shipwreck of our hopes we have to cling to our
buoyant delusions to stay afloat.

Illusion is a deep ocean which bears up those who yield to it. The lost souls who yearn for the
truth thrash about in it and drown.

Truth is no help in time of trouble, but our humbug is an ever-present guide and consolation.

The truth would kill us. But even if lies killed us and truth kept us alive, we would rather die by
our lies than live with the truth.

13 Dying for illusion

A few people may give up their peace of mind in order to seek out the truth, but far more give it
up to keep their illusions. They’re willing to die for their prejudices, but they won’t live for their
principles. Why are they so keen to kill or be killed for tenets which they were too lazy to
examine? ‘People,’ Russel remarked, ‘would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.’ Defoe said
that there were a hundred thousand englishmen clamouring to make war on popery, who were
not sure if it was a man or a horse.

Those who lay down their lives for a cause don’t prove a thing, not even that they believe in it or
grasp what it means. And yet a creed may not be untrue even if millions die for it. But its
adherents assume that they prove it true if they can make more of its adversaries die.

There are many ways to avoid examining whether your beliefs are true. To let yourself be
martyred for them is one of the more extreme.

People have never cared to live for the truth. But they stand ready to kill for their illusions.

14 The illusion of disillusion

We grow disillusioned with the world when it refuses to indulge the illusions that pander to our
own importance.

We don’t fear lies but the motives for which people tell them. And we don’t fear truth but the
effects that it might have on us. I’m disillusioned by those subterfuges that profit someone else
more than me. And I’m disgusted by the deceptions that have ceased to serve my own ends.
Those who assent to a lie from which they had hoped to gain are the first to squeal when they
learn that they too might lose by it.
How disillusioned I may be by those things about which I was sure I had no more illusions. And
what enchanting illusions I keep up as to objects by which I have been heartily disenchanted.
Our lies are so durable because they are so elastic. And if they do snap, there is always a new
one near at hand to take their place.

15 Disillusion and desire

People may fancy that they are gravely disillusioned by the world. But they are just disheartened
that they have gained such a low place in it. A small promotion is enough to buy off their deep
disillusion.

You may get rid of most of your illusions, but you can never get rid of your desires. And your
desires bring with them their own illusions.

I try to dignify my frustration by titling it despair, and my disappointment by titling it

disillusionment.

Life is a series of dizzying adventures in disgust and disillusion. And yet most of us end up
adroitly poised in our steady self-satisfaction.

16 The economy of prejudice

If we tried to use our reason, most of us would aggravate our initial slips into catastrophic
conclusions. By some happy chance we are more judicious, or at least more harmlessly
muddled, than our principles or our prejudices should make us. ‘The average man’s opinions,’
Russel wrote, ‘are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.’

Reasoning would isolate us, and cut us off from our unreflecting herd, and leave us shivering in
the dark. But we want to huddle close in a bright warm fug of shared prejudice.

We may be too remiss to track down the truth, but how perseveringly we work to keep up our
indolent bunkum. Why do we tax our miraculous capacities to dream up ways of evading the
truth, when we could have used them to find it out with far less labour?

UNITED BY ILLUSION

17 Lies keep the peace

In social life truth is the first casualty of peace. How could we get on so harmoniously, if we
didn’t find it politic to act as if we were fooled by one another’s lies? ‘If people knew what others
say of them,’ Pascal wrote, ‘there would not be four friends in the world.’ Truth is the nuclear
deterrent which keeps the truce between friends, since we know that no one will dare use it.
Malevolent people cause such mayhem, because they light the fuse of the ill will that lurks
beneath all comradeship.

A tactless mouth may cause more hurt than a malicious one.

Peace and harmony are founded far more securely on contempt than on respect, on ignorance
than on empathy, on insincerity than on frankness, on indifference than on affection, on shallow
convenience than on deep affinity, and on habit than on spontaneity.

Anyone who dares to get off the gaudy merry-go-round of mutual flattery is not fit to live in
society.

If we weren’t content to tell such generous lies, how could we feel such sincere affection for the
people we need? Fake sincerity rivets society together. True sincerity would rip it apart.

18 The community of illusion

Society is held together by the lies we tell one another. And each of us is held together by the
lies we tell ourselves. Baseless illusion is the sole solid fundament on which a state can be
based.

Our lies keep us shackled to the world. They are what we share most intimately, since they
frame the rules of the game which we all hope to win. And we try to foist them on as many
people as we can, since we add to our own sum by imposing them on others.

In suffering for an illusion, you can at least be sure that you are not alone, as you would be if
you were suffering for the truth.

How tenderly the brute world treats our delusions. Yet how unforgivingly it treats those who woo
the truth. It indulges the deceitful more than kind people hope, or than stern moralists fear.

19 Hooped together by illusion

Our lies unite us. Civilization, as Yeats said, is ‘hooped together by manifold illusion.’ Stable
states are ballasted by one vast underlying fallacy. Unstable states are bound by knots of frayed
mismatching ones. More resilient cultures don’t have the strength to bear the truth. They just
have stronger and more trenchant errors.

Civilization lives by lies and self-deception, refashioning life as a parade of particoloured masks
and facades. Yet it is the one setting in which we can find a way to the truth.

Our society is kept humming by its practical information and by its gratifying illusions, its new
contrivances and its old lies.
A society that has evacuated all its errors would soon die of a spiritual dysentery.

People swear by their particular truths but thrive by their general lies.

A cause proves its worth partly by the goods that we give up to serve it. And the first thing that
all of us are willing to give up is the truth.

It’s lucky that people are as ready to tell hopeful and unifying lies in a good cause as in a bad
one.

20 Shared illusion
It is because we have to live in groups that we need our personal illusions.

Most of us reckon that a thing comes to be real when it makes its way into the world at large
and others take it up. But a few know that it turns into a sham as soon as it does so. Does
anything seem so crackbrained as a falsehood that no one else accepts? Yet this is just one
more common prejudice. What we put most faith in is the errors that a great number of others
share.

Truth is the thing that seems least real in this world of cheap charades.

Real things, such as truth or beauty, make unreal ones, such as opinion, wealth or success,
appear unreal. But unreal things do the same to real ones, and in the minds of far more people.
New truths lay bare the falsity of authorized cant. But authorized cant mocks new truths as if
they were mere oddities. For most of us a truth is one of those superfluous things that means
nothing to us if it doesn’t mean something to others.

Our shared platitudes are the best shield that we have in the face of catastrophe.

Why is it that a thing comes to seem credible or estimable for us because others credit or
esteem it? ‘I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves,’ as Hume notes, ‘when
unsupported by the approbation of others.’

21 Fake cause, real feeling

False convictions stoke in us real fervours, and the most truthless transport us with the most
force.

Ideas that are uncontaminated by fact infect us with pure feeling.

Images and icons rouse in us more intense feelings than the real thing. Even those who love life
are more in love with its simulations than they are with life itself. We don’t love images because
they remind us of the world. Rather we now love the world because it puts us in mind of the
images that have set us on to crave it.

People are more wonderstruck by the images of things than by the things themselves. They are
awed not by the stars but by the names they assign to them, not by the cosmos but by the
theorems that they use to construe it, not by its subtle laws but by the gargantuan machines that
they use to probe it.

We feel a genuine passion for fake things. But we can muster only a lukewarm respect for real
ones.

A sham is always more convincing than what is genuine. It’s the hokiest rigmarole that makes
us swoon.

Most of us are too shrewd to be fobbed off with what is real and precious, yet we are
mesmerized by the shallowest fakes.

Tinsel fakes thrill our hearts more than the real thing. They seem to have a buried life that they
know they don’t lead. And what is second-hand sounds more plaintive. It echoes all the pasts
that it once had and has now lost.

22 Revelation and repetition

An idea strikes us as a revelation, not when it first butts on our mind, but when we finally accede
to it after it has long been rattling round in our heads. A revelation is not the dawn of the light of
knowledge but the noontide of an obsession. It’s not the first spark of an unforeseen
illumination. It is not a sudden event but the end of a long process. What we call a revelation is
a recognition of what we have long thought. Its flash is the sudden detonation of a long and
premeditated fixation.

A thought is like a tune. They don’t make their way into our hearts till we have heard them
several times.

We are impressed as if by a revelation when we hear our moral nostrums played on with an
anguished gravity.
IMITATIONS

Contents

Substitutes

Fantasy

Prejudice

Imitations

Convention

Experience

Acting

Words

SUBSTITUTES

1 Our world of cheap imitation

In this world of imitation it’s shams, frauds, puffery, masks, drapery, shuffles, masquerades and
hoaxes that have the real authority. What is genuine has no place. Nothing is so real and
solidly-based that it can keep vertical if it lacks the prop of empty pomp and ostentation.

We seem real in our own and others’ eyes only by the part we play in all the world’s false
shows.

Don’t most people find some proxy that will cost them less and gain them more to do duty for
the arduous and precious goods that they claim to set such a high value on? If they can call it by
the same name, they count it a bargain. And most of them are content to roost in this cheap and
undemanding double world. They prefer anecdotes to evidence, incidentals to the core,
presuppositions to principles, entertainment to enlightenment, news to permanent truths,
borrowed opinions to our own cogitations. ‘Only make something to take the place of
something,’ Thoreau wrote, ‘and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.’
How could our substitutes not be slick and shallow, when the things for which they are
substituting are slick and shallow too?

There has never been an age in close touch with the real thing. But few have made as many
cheap fakes to take its place as ours has.

2 The priceless real and the costly imitation

We will end up paying the earth for the substitutes that we use to do duty for the real and
precious things which we hoped to get so cheap.

I shun real and solid goods, but my greed drives me on to trawl for thin and inessential ones. I
cling ferociously to the trash that I don’t prize, yet I coldly let go of the precious things that I do
prize.

Most people won’t pay a thing much attention if it fails to play up to the flattering image they hold
of themselves.

How much of our life we waste to get such worthless junk, and how little of it we give to tend
such priceless treasures.

People sense that priceless things cost too much even when they’re free. And what’s the good
of a thing if it can’t be bought and sold? It would give no measure by which they can flaunt their
success.

3 Faustian or fatuous imitation?

Aren’t most of our bargains more fatuous than faustian? We sell our birthright for a mess of
pottage. Some of our canniest deals go near to beggaring us. We trade our freedom to gain the
mean expedients that we trust will one day make us free. And so we bow our necks to a
permanent yoke to win a precarious liberty.

As we grow wealthier, we complicate our appetites and coarsen our minds. We crave more and
more costly refinements of plain necessities. But we still make shift with the old crude
substitutes for the most precious goods, such as art or intuition, which cost us so little anyway.
And now that the cheapest things are turned out with such ease and speed, priceless things
can’t be made at all.

4 Cheap imitation trumps the best

The best is never good enough for us. We want something more plush and velvety and
conspicuous. Few people desire the best. And when they do, they prefer it varnished and
adulterated.
We want to lodge our senses in a sumptuous palace, which will soon fall into disrepair anyhow.
But we leave our minds to cringe in a derelict hovel packed with shop-worn pilfered fittings. We
fit out our homes with luxuries, and fill our minds with scraps. So we demand the best of all the
things that are not worth possessing, delicacies, finery, furnishings, gewgaws, gimmicks,
frippery and blinking devices, all the toys of our gimcrack affluence.

We want the best of the cheapest things and the cheapest form of the best things. We strive to
excel in the lowest tasks. What we covet is cheap trash expensively done.

5 Our imitation selves

I don’t doubt that the goal that lies just out of my reach is my better self. But this is what has
stolen the place of the better self which I could become right now, if only I could quit struggling
to seize the cheap baubles that hang in front of me. As Pascal points out, ‘We unceasingly
strive to embellish and preserve our counterfeit being and neglect the real one.’

We seem most real to ourselves when we are with others. But we seem at our best when we
are alone. Those around me, whose lives are so unreal to me, make my own appear real to
myself. I seem genuine when I am most fake. And I can stay true to myself only by becoming
nothing to everyone else.

We mistake impersonations for personality, assertions for convictions, battle-cries for creeds,
success for skill, the outcome for the essence, and praise from others for our own pride.

6 The age of imitation

Vitality is the fetish of an age that is used up. Nature is the fetish of an age that is cut off from
the natural world. The whole is the fetish of an age that has shattered it. Progress is the fetish of
an age that is past its best and near its end. Authenticity is the fetish of an age which is in love
with fakes. Diversity is the fetish of an age that has squashed real difference. And the local and
regional is the fetish of an age that has made each place the same. If the cancer could speak, it
would no doubt boast that it is perfecting the body by replacing all those sluggardly cells with
more active ones.

FANTASY

7 Never at home to the truth

We rush expensively round the world in search of the gaudy makeshifts for the plain rich goods
that we could have found at home. ‘Let us not rove,’ Emerson urged, ‘let us sit at home with the
cause. The soul is no traveller.’ You have all that you need right here in front of you. But who
can sit still long enough to see it? ‘Human unhappiness,’ as Pascal wrote, ‘springs from one
thing alone, our inability to stay quietly in our room.’

People live as they travel, and they travel as they consume, distractedly sampling the flavours of
their plastic fantasies, and taking their own snaps of the landmarks that they have seen in all
those films, postcards, guidebooks and posters. They jaunt round the world in the quest to
experience at first-hand the second-hand images of a place which have been printed on their
soul. Then they skew these too by experiencing such a narrow ambit of them.

Why should we care if we have tasted life to the full, so long as we’ve got the photos? In this
world of instant consumer experience, we record everything and experience nothing.

The dreariest globetrotter has ranged and seen more than the most intrepid explorer.

8 Everlasting imitation
We are a stiff-necked people. Yet how low we kneel to the first fetish that we find. All of us rend
our flesh for the calf of gold, but we won’t give up trifles for the one true God. We may not need
a creed to put our trust in, but don’t we still crave an idol to crook the knee to? And yet most of
them are too unworldly to keep our loyalty for long. Our idolatry is as fickle as our faith.

We bow down to false gods, because we assent too soon, and crave too much, and think too
little. And though we may be determined not to worship idols, we still make an idol of our
worship.

Who could be so naive as to trust that all falsehood will fall to pieces as soon as they have
smashed its latest idol? If people don’t spend their credulity on one kind of bilge, they will spend
it on some other. And most of them want to spend it on the sort that those round them spend it
on.

9 Scant imagination
We are, as Bagehot said, governed not by the strength of our fancy but by its slackness and
languor. If we are governed by imagination, it is by other people’s. And if we had more of our
own, it might not cheat us with such ease. I am in thrall to images, because I have so little
imagination. Our illusions are so thin and limited, and yet we never come to the end of them.

We are suggestible but not imaginative. We have such overbearing illusions and such a timid
imagination. And our fantasies are just as dank and grimy as the low reality which we want to
use them to tunnel out of.
10 Our greedy imitation dreams
Our fantasy is our ideal consumer feeding us the world. It cooks up images for our greed to grub
up and swallow. We have just enough imagination to pique our greedy dreams, and just enough
initiative almost to make them real. We confect senseless wants, and then have to use up our
lives cramming them with senseless satisfactions.

People have all the fancy they need to set them on to crave more of the same, but not to spur
them to make what is new.

I give my mind up to melodramatic dreams, and thereby pile on my head prosaic debacles. We
tell ourselves lies that we don’t believe, and then wreck our lives in the vain effort to live up to
them.

PREJUDICE

11 We perceive with our prejudices

I begin to misconceive the world where it meets my skin. I misjudge the very air, warm or cool,
wet or dry. Most of us see with our prejudices, not with our eyes. We are thus spared first from
attending to what’s in front of our face, and then from the need to judge by our own lights. ‘What
we see isn’t what we see but what we are,’ as Pessoa notes. We see what we expect to see.

Most of us can grasp only what we have seen, yet we still muddy it with our turbid fantasy.

To see a thing afresh, you have to gaze at it long and long, till you start to see it for the first
time. A blur of custom blears our eyes from the cradle. When asked to draw what they see
before them, children reproduce a facsimile of its stock icon.

Of the billions of pairs of human eyes on earth, how few view things in a new way. And how few
really see things at all.

You need farsighted imagination to see what is in front of your face. Of all the people and places
that we’ve laid eyes on, how few have we really seen.

We are able to see only what we have been trained to look at. And for most of us that’s not
much.

12 Imitation sentiments
Our thoughts sound so believable to us because they echo the sentiments that we are so used
to hearing from others. We don’t reason. We merely respond. And we don’t respond to things as
they are, but to the responses that others have made to them. We don’t deal with actualities.
We tack together new editions of the old versions of them.

‘Our souls are moved at second-hand,’ as Montaigne says. I am touched by things because
others have been touched by them. And I don’t know what I ought to feel till I learn from others
what it is that they have felt.

People judge things not as they are, but as others judge them to be. It’s not so much
appearances that fool us but the views that the rest of the world holds of them. We live by
imagination, but for the most part by the imaginations of others. ‘Mirror on mirror mirrored is all
the show,’ as Yeats wrote.

People evaluate by comparing. But what they compare are not things as they are but the
predominant valuations of them. They are too negligent to delve into the intrinsic properties of
things. So they judge the truth of ideas, as they judge everything else, by their incidental effects
and ascendancy.

13 You see what the world sees

We have eyes only for the sorts of things that we have seen in the past, or for the things that
others have seen. Most of us can see to appraise only what others see, and even then we use a
borrowed yardstick. ‘We take unconsciously the opinion of others,’ as Trollope says. ‘We drink
our wine with other men’s palates, and look at our pictures with other men’s eyes.’

Seeing is believing. But most of what we see is shaped by what others believe.

I stick stubbornly to my own judgement, once I have learnt from others what it is.

The proofs that appear to me the most cogent are the ones that I have found by my own efforts.
And yet I don’t quite trust them till I know that a lot of other people do too. No argument seems
more unanswerable than one that dominant prejudice makes redundant. Why else would we be
so sure of our codes of right and wrong?

14 Judge for yourself

When people judge for themselves, they adopt the received view that sorts best with the rest of
their received views.

People assume that they ought to think for themselves, because they have heard other people
say so.

I am vain of my own assessment of things, yet I praise what others praise and scorn what they
scorn. I cleave to my own opinions, though I don’t know what I think till the unthinking world tells
me. ‘The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves,’ Sheridan says, ‘is
very small indeed.’ We form our judgments, as we do most things, egoistically but not
independently.

Are there any so indigent, that they can’t afford the luxury of assessing others? And are there
any so downcast or obscure, that they don’t have the right to judge the whole show by their own
bleared lights?

15 Imitation lies
How few of us take the trouble to find our own truths or even to forge our own illusions. It’s
cheaper to get them on loan from others.

Convention manufactures our fallacies for us, so that we don’t have to draw on the handicraft of
imagination. We don’t think our own thoughts. We counterfeit an authorized currency. And we
don’t discern our artfulness and shamming, since we sham so instinctually.

We lie by nature, but an imaginative lie must be the work of patient art. Yet our very lies lack
inventiveness. ‘As universal a practice as lying is,’ Swift said, ‘and as easy a one as it seems, I
do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation.’ How could they not be
dull, when they are so sincere?

We veer off into the wrong paths because they’ve been trodden so smooth by all the scuffed
feet that have tramped them. We are whimsical but not original, idiosyncratic but not individual,
and obdurate but not independent.

16 Imitation and the unimaginable

Why do crimes like the shoah seem so unimaginable once they have happened, when they had
been imagined long before they were committed? We go on inflicting unthinkable atrocities
because we have thought them out so sensationally. And so we will at last inflict on the world an
end that will be unthinkably thoughtless. Once the pious had inscribed over the gate of hell
‘Divine power made me, wisdom supreme and final love,’ it was inevitable that monsters would
one day set up their obscene paradoxes over the gates of extermination camps. How little
imagination we must have, to hear of such horrors and not go mad.

I can’t imagine not being here for the years to come, which I can’t imagine. Nothing is more
unremarkable than the death of others or more inconceivable than our own.

IMITATIONS
17 The imitation and its circumstances
‘We rarely view great objects in insulation,’ Montaigne says. ‘The small accoutrements, the
outer paraphernalia are what catch our eye. Caesar’s toga threw all Rome in turmoil, which his
death did not do.’ The occasion and all its attendant circumstances moves us more than the true
cause.

How could we see anything but trifles and trappings, skin and surface, costume and covering,
when we are nothing but trifles and trappings ourselves? And why would we want to, when they
are brighter than the dun world that surrounds us?

18 Imitation deity
We prefer the frame to the sketch, the blurb to the book, the tale to its telling, the shell to the
kernel, the annotations to the text, the libretto to the music, the setting to the play, the costumes
to the script, the story to the style, the pay to the deed, the fame to the feat, the church to the
faith, the graven image to the god, the life to the work. We inspect the painter’s signature more
inquisitively than the painting’s design.

Kafka’s goblin face haunts us more than his devastating fables. Guevara’s defiant stare
galvanized a generation of tame eaters and feeders to hollow posturing and declamation. It may
be true, as Pessoa said, that ‘every gesture is a revolutionary act.’ But every revolutionary act
soon freezes and then melts into a gesture. It is the icon that we love and not the god, the pose
and not the principle. And yet the lurid caricature of an author like Machiavelli may show us
more fruitful truths than the real thing. You have to forge a false image of your models in order
to learn the real lessons that they have to teach you.

19 In love with imitation

A world does not seem real for us till it has been represented. And we are convinced that it is
authentic by all its crass facsimiles.

We wish that there were someone observing our life. And when we view a play or read a book
or look at a sketch, don’t we hope that we are doing what others might somehow do for us,
witnessing our lives?

That truth is stranger than fiction is one of the trite fictions that are more familiar to us than the
truth. ‘Truth,’ as Twain said, ‘is more of a stranger than fiction.’ Life springs more surprises than
books, but all of the dreariest and nastiest kind.

People who pride themselves on knowing life direct rather than from books have their minds full
of the corny tropes of cheap fiction, which help them to thrive in the world.
Anecdotes thrill us, but art leaves us numb. People crave the infantile satisfactions of story, but
they have no patience for the adult exactions of art. They favour cheap melodrama over chaste
melody.

CONVENTION

20 Nature and imitation

Whatever people approve of they call natural, and what they disapprove of they call unnatural.

Nature might be a good guide, if we knew what it was or where it was pointing. It might be the
right place to start from, if we knew where it was. Or it might be a good state to return to, if it had
ever been real.

Nature is a palimpsest on which from age to age custom writes its version of the conduct that
suits it.

Human nature stays the same from age to age, since there is so little of it. It strives to get what
it wants, but what it wants and how it strives to get it are limitlessly adaptable. Its most
distinctive feature is its bent for proliferating bizarre conventions. Nature can vary as weirdly as
custom, and custom clings as tenaciously as nature. The most frivolous customs may cling for
the longest time. A catholic may sooner quit believing in the trinity than eating fish on Friday. In
this shallow world it’s the most superficial things that go deepest and last longest. And yet a
usage or taboo that has lived on for hundreds or thousands of years may die out in a
generation.

We are by nature creatures of convention. ‘Nothing cannot be made natural,’ Pascal wrote.
‘Nothing natural cannot be lost.’ Artifice is our nature, and our nature is one of the unnatural’s
unnumbered variants.

21 Our unnatural human nature

Human nature, if it exists at all, can be defined only by negatives. It is not rational or perfectible.
It is not unchanging or immortal. And it is not natural.

One of the defining marks of our nature is the ease with which it is lost.

Our nature is so thin a cloth, how could there be any trait deep-dyed in it?

Consumerism, which is so shallow and unnatural, may be the social form that comes closest to
expressing our deepest human nature.
Drive custom out with a pitchfork, yet will it run straight back. ‘The unnatural,’ Goethe points out,
‘that too is natural.’ Though one might just as well say, the natural, that too is unnatural, and the
inhuman, that too is human, and it may be the most human thing of all. There are very few acts
or customs that are contrary to human nature, save those that our most hallowed institutions
ordain. Nature is as promiscuous as natural law is prohibitive.

Human nature is one of the figments of culture. And where people have a strong belief in
nature, they will put their trust in miracles and magic to control it.

One of the constants of human nature has been the conviction that nine tenths of other human
beings do not share in human nature. None of us has woken to discover that we are
cockroaches, but all too many of us have woken to discover that this is what our neighbour is.

There may be no such thing as natural kinds, but an antelope that could not tell a lion from a
gazelle would not last long.

22 The imitation animal

When left free to follow nature, we naturally copy our peers. ‘Man,’ as William James said, ‘is
essentially the imitative animal.’ To conform is one of the deepest of the heart’s needs.

We don’t touch nature save through the prophylactic of custom. And we don’t discern custom,
as we have grown so used to taking it for nature. Many of the desires, behaviours and
institutions that seem most natural are in fact the most stubbornly conventional. It takes a long
course of nurture and formation to turn people into what they think they are by nature.

Indigenes are more admirable than us, not because they live in closer touch with nature, but
because they cleave more loyally to their unnatural customs. They do not live freely after their
own whim. Every act of the day is a rite regulated by immemorial custom.

Even our aberrations run on lines laid down by custom.

Few people are naked underneath their nudity. They are still clad in all the layers of their habits,
creeds, pretences and customs. Every square inch of us is tattooed with fantasies and received
ideas.

23 The neurotic animal

We should strive to be the best animals that we can. But we are such sorry animals, that if that’s
all we are, then we are not worth much.
From pole to pole our kind is a neurotic animal, and has at all times been perverted. Nothing
comes more natural to us than our quirks and deviations. ‘Man,’ as Rousseau says, ‘is a sick
animal.’ And we will butcher all the healthier ones in our vain search for a cure.

Human kind is both the youngest species and the most decrepit. It is at once a miraculous
prodigy and a doddering codger.

Wisdom could be born only in a self-conscious soul. But self-consciousness would strangle it at
birth.

Humans are diseased animals, self-conscious, self-divided, ironic, cut off from their instincts,
with a grudge against life, dragging around a hypertrophied brain, barely aware of their
surrounds which they are degrading by the day, harried by their anxieties, never in the moment,
yet oppressed by time, memory and premonitions of death.

We are all now so ill, what nobler ideal could we conceive of than a healer of the unhealthy
human animal? Why else would we have hired such sickly gods to tend us? Soon, as Goethe
prophesied, ‘the world will turn into one huge hospital, where each is everybody else’s humane
nurse.’ Yet no one will be cured. We will just drag out our fever rather than make a clean end.

Our passions corrupt our reason, and our reason complicates our passions.

24 Unity of being
To be whole is reserved for the animals. To be self-aware is to have left unity of being behind,
and to have entered into irony. Irony, as Pessoa wrote, ‘is the first sign that our consciousness
has become conscious.’

How much we would have to shrink ourselves, and how narrow we would have to be, if we were
to try to become whole.

It is only because we have a self-consciousness which splits us in two that we think that we are
one and whole.

Animals are wise. We are merely ingenious. They know what they need. We don’t even know
what we want. And their wisdom will prove no match for our murderous know-how.

A true sage, a Buddha or Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, far exceeds me in wisdom, but far less than
the dumbest beast exceeds them.

To be human is to be subhuman, all-too-human, and superhuman, all at the same time.

Those who seek the centre find that there is none.

To be consistent is inconsistent with being human. And yet most inconsistent people are mere
farragoes of incoherent platitudes and habits. ‘We don’t show greatness by being at one
extreme,’ as Pascal says, ‘but by touching both simultaneously and straddling the gap in
between.’

25 Our doubleness
For an animal each event means just one thing. But for a human being each event means at
least two things. Animals have no associations beyond immediate stimuli to send them mad.
They can’t know the rich doubleness of our sensations, and we can’t feel the singular intensity
of all their satisfactions.

Our very consciousness of the conditions of our being bars us from being present to life.

It is solely by virtue of our superfluous associations and irrational responses that we can set our
minds to think and reason.

Animals are perfect pragmatists. They care only for what works. They feel no need to find a
foundation for their conduct. Their point of view is never spectatorial. They research rather than
find final truths. And they have no emotional associations to send them mad.

Animals are extreme humeans. They draw no connections of cause and effect, but they keep on
the watch for regularities. They observe constant conjunctions of one event and another, but
they do not try to explain them. ‘Man,’ as Lichtenberg notes, ‘is a cause-seeking animal.’

26 The rational animal

It is reason itself that prevents us from living in accord with our nature as rational animals. It is
only the unreasoning beasts that live as reason directs.

Humans are rational animals whose attempts to reason drive them mad.

We are beasts that want to have everything both ways, and so we will end up with nothing either
way. We have maimed and mutilated our primal instincts by thousands of years of training and
culture. Yet we use the most elaborate schemes to give an outlet to our most childish drives.

27 Instinct and imitation

Instinct is so strong because it is so stupid, and it’s so cunning because it’s so simple.

Do birds feel the euphoria of flight? Or is it to them what walking is to us, a gift they would be
glad to be rid of, if they had the machinery to do its work?

The noblest beast or bird is just out to cadge a meal and fill its belly.
Ignorance is the best defender of sound instinct.

The beasts are happy in their unfreedom. We alone are wretched, because we dream that we
can be free.

A sentient being needs to cling to the illusion of its meaning and purpose, so as to give its brute
insensate will a pretext to go on with its struggle.

The louse crawling on Napoleon’s nape has as strong a will to live as the emperor.

It is not insanity but instinct that does the same thing over and over and expects a different
result.

To call our impulses instincts is one of the learned reflexes of the intellect.

28 The machine of instinct

Most of what we take to be natural is mechanical, and all that we take to be human is artificial.

Instinct is of all things the least natural and spontaneous, the most robotic and machine-like. It is
the mere translation into habits of an encoded kit of instructions. And it is a code that can easily
be overwritten.

Pure instinct or pure reason would turn a human being into a machine.

The unconscious is not a bestial, uncontrollable vital force. It is a relentless and repetitive
machine with simple springs.

Nothing is more narrow, base, cold and mechanical than sound natural instinct.

29 Instincts and imitation

We call instincts those habits which have been in use for so long that they have taken the place
of our instincts.

Civilization is not a thin veneer which covers deep animal drives. It is a thin veneer laid on our
even thinner habits and customs.

Disgust may be one of our most natural instincts, but there’s next to nothing that custom can’t
train it to swallow or disgorge.

The animals can make do with their instincts. We, with our more evolved form of consciousness,
need illusions. They live their ignorance through their sane instincts, we formulate ours as ideas.
Since we have the eyes to see the truth, we need to stun and blinker them with our
misconceptions. We are dressed-up animals, still stung by our lusts and alarms, but out of step
with our natural bent.

We have blighted our instincts but not killed them. All we have done is to deprave and deform
them. They have grown hunched and short-sighted, but their teeth are as sharp as at the first.

The body condemns the soul to toil for its gross desires. And the soul condemns the body to
exile from its sound instincts.

30 Conformity
We cling to convention because we are so listlessly artificial. But we can foil convention only by
becoming strenuously artificial. You can’t defeat it by spontaneity but only by forethought and
deliberateness.

Some minds are so heavy and immoveable, that all they’re good for is to act as ballast for social
norms.

No name, no shame. You don’t learn to feel embarrassed by what is natural till it has been
named.

Conformist competition assembles the labyrinthine machine of self-interest. We conform to

compete in what matters, such as work, and compete to conform in what does not, such as
conversation.

Our views fluctuate like a weather made by the insistent climate of our time and place.

The herd is our habitat, and we camouflage ourselves in it by conforming.

I spend half my time trying to fit in, and the rest striving to stand out.

Would we think so highly of those who flout convention in such commonplace ways, if we didn’t
submit so supinely to it ourselves?

We live so falsely, that you can win a name for bold wit by casting out a curt but obvious truth
now and then. We count on the sentinels of civic respectability, educators, lawgivers,
magistrates and parsons, not to do this. But in our cringing age we fete them when they seem
to.

31 Conceited imitation
We keep up our illusions by our personal conceit and our social solidarity.
Most people are as conventional as they are conceited. But fortunately convention curbs their
conceit, and their self-conceit makes some of them delightfully unconventional.

Society, though careless of our private conceit, is admirably configured to give scope to our
endemic self-inflation. It makes up a vast fretwork of mutually remunerative frauds.

How low I stoop to keep up my standing in the world. And how smart I feel when I acquiesce in
popularly held opinions.

All take pride in their singularity, but they thrive by their timid conformity. They want to feel that
they are like no one else, yet they grow jittery if they stray too far from their herd.

We all conform, yet we boast that we are mavericks, since we commit a few acts of abortive
defiance to flout our subjugation. Some of us try to vamp up our distinctiveness by cultivating a
small ensemble of affectations.

32 The banal is bizarre

People go extravagantly off course, either because they have dreamed some weird new dream,
or because they adhere to some tawdry creed which they have never bothered to interrogate.
They think lethargically yet theatrically, if they think at all. So they lapse into sensational tropes
rather than strive for chaste truths. They fall into such far-fetched misinterpretations, yet they fail
to say anything new.

Our dogmas are fantastic but not imaginative, and arcane but not rigorous.

Our superstitions are as banal as they are bizarre. And most of our common sense is as bizarre
as it is banal. The opinions that besot us are flamboyant yet flat. And the prejudices that we live
by are flavourless yet synthetic.

The most outlandish creeds have gained acceptance as official teaching. They seem like
common sense once they capture common minds. But when they lose their hold, they start to
look as aberrant and perverse as they always were. Orthodoxy is deviancy and blasphemy
sanctified by time.

EXPERIENCE

33 Experience and imitation

Some insights glimmer as the luminous sunset of a rare experience.

You’re not fit to judge an idea that you’ve had, till you have forgotten the experience that gave
rise to it, and it seems like someone else’s.
Your experiences may crystallize your thoughts, but they don’t create them.

I can decently commend what I am by commending what I have lived through. And I am so
proud of them that I am happy for them to lead me astray.

If you wait for history or experience to teach you, then you will have learnt too late, like a
commander fighting the war just gone. ‘What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when
they are of no use to us,’ as Wilde said.

How shallow are our most profound experiences, and how narrow are our broadest views.

34 We don’t think, we experience

Most people are empiricists. They find it easier to take in facts than to search out reasons.

Bookish and cloistered people are in the same case as travelled ones. Both have quarried a
heap more raw material for thought than they will ever use to think with. ‘Each of us,’ Nietzsche
says, ‘now lives through too much and thinks through too little.’

The flash of an event may disorient us and darken what it seems to light up, and the glare of
particular incidents may blind us to broad truths.

There are so many activities that might set us on to think, such as reading, research, travel or
conversation. But we keep busy with them so that we won’t have to think, while averring that
they prove how much we have done so.

We have no end of toys and sports that stand in the way of us thinking, but we wouldn’t think
even if we got rid of them. And we have a lot of stimulants that might set us on to think, and yet
we still don’t think even if we use them. We have all the material we need to think with, but still
we don’t think.

35 The imprecision of perceptions

A memory, as Hume said, is a bleached after-image of a percept. But is a percept itself not just
a bleached, vague, fuzzy, simplified, inexact, conventionalized picture of the real thing, formed
to smooth our way through the confusion of the world? You don’t discern each branch on a tree
or the twigs on each branch or the leaves on each twig. The variants of hue are lost on your
glancing eyes. Perception is instrumental, not contemplative. It picks out the details that might
be of use to you or a threat to you, as you speed your way to what you want.

We build up the scene in front of our face by selecting from the ten thousand fleeting and local
perceptions that are coming at us the few that we think we can use.
It is not our perceptions of sensuous details that are exact. Rather it is abstract ideas, which
have been scrubbed of the fuzziness and vagueness of these.

36 We learn by information not by perception

Most of the facts that we take in are not the raw data that our senses transmit but the accepted
coin minted by custom.

We get to know the world by experience, but most of our experience is not of things as they are
but of the facts that we pick up from others. Most of our knowledge of the world comes to us by
hearsay. If we had to rely on our own experience to teach us what the world is like, we would be
as lost as new-borns or idiots. ‘We live by information, not by sight,’ wrote Gracián. ‘We exist by
faith in others.’

We are born into convention, and brought up by imitation. And by the time that we have grown
conscious, we are so cramped by common thoughts and habits, that it’s too late to try to think or
act in a new way.

There may be no innate ideas, but it’s just as true that there are no unfiltered perceptions.

37 Imitation takes in nothing raw

We derive our most vivid images and memories not from the things we live through but from the
external icons of film and photos.

People live most of their life vicariously. So they allow images and custom to script it for them,
and then they fail to grasp what they tell them. They set great store on experience, but most of
what they experience are the fantasies that they get second-hand, which assure them that they
have lived through things first-hand.

I feel sure that I have taken in raw the experiences that have been synthesized many times
through other minds. I process fresh events to make fatuous chat.

38 Experience teaches nothing

‘Experience,’ wrote Livy, ‘is the schoolmaster of fools.’ The world is still a brutish tutor, and still
we don’t learn. It enjoys flogging its pupils more than educating them. It robs them of the rich
percipience that their youth and inexperience gave them for nothing, and then exacts an
exorbitant fee for its coaching.

Our lives, which seem so rich and chequered, confirm time and again a small compendium of
thoughts formed by bloodless researchers who had a sparse acquaintance with life. Those who
scorn mere book-learning verify by their untutored experience a narrow strip of trite notions to
be read in books. All the good maxims exist by now, as Pascal said, but how monotonously we
keep on reconfirming their direst lessons.

Life scatters from your thoughts most of its teachings as soon as it has passed them on to you.
So there are some things that you have to go through again and again, to fix in your mind what
going through them made you forget.

39 All that experience teaches is how to cope with it

All perceptions have a function, which is to pick out from the mass of our impressions the few
things that might harm us or be of use to us.

Few people want to learn more from their experience than how to cope with it. And all they gain
from their involvement in the world is the skill to use the cheap arts that will help them to rise in
it.

All that most people want to learn from experience is how to squeeze it to yield more profit or
amusement.

Most of us can bear to live reality, provided we aren’t forced to reflect on it. A few of us can bear
to reflect on it, so long as we aren’t forced to live it. Once you have learnt what is true, how
could you bear what is real? Some people can steer through a torrent of experience because
they don’t feel it keenly. And the few who do feel it keenly can’t bear to go through much of it.

40 Experience does not change us

We come out of most events by the same doorway we went in. We love to boast that some
occurrence has changed our whole view of the world. And yet it’s rare that we can point to any
fresh notions that it has supplied us with.

Our most unsettling experiences fail to dent our pre-established opinions. An upheaval may jolt
your fixed ideas, but they soon spring back all the sturdier.

We shift and vary at the least cause. Yet the most momentous happenings leave us blockishly
unchanged. The gentlest breeze can blow us off course. But a blast won’t budge us from our set
ways or fixed point of view.

We wade into experience, and find that it wets us just up to our ankles.
41 The sum of experience
Before you have lived long, you are taught that living will teach you all that you need to know.
But what you learn from a long life is that it doesn’t have much to teach you. Yet most of us
learn so little from life that this is one more lesson that we fail to glean.

The years, which we trust will unfurl to us a colourful banner of truths, leave us with a pinched
yield of musty truisms. Why else would we place such a high value on what they teach us? They
gratify us first by reinforcing our timeworn views, and then by dignifying them as revelations.

We crib most of our views from others. We depute to them the task of making sense of the
world for us. And so we read events in the drab code of our tags and catchwords.

People take it that they get their ideas from experience because it supplies them with the
anecdotes which is what they have in place of ideas.

If I had learnt more from my past experiences, I might be free to spend my time now on
something more edifying than experience.

I can’t touch life direct. There is, as Pessoa said, a thin sheet of glass that keeps us from feeling
it. And when I try to smash through this barrier, the shards slash my skin.

42 Imagination is worth more than experience

Our experience is surprised to learn what our inexperience has long guessed. ‘A moment’s
insight,’ says Oliver Holmes, ‘is sometimes worth a life’s experience.’ By the deployment of what
Wordsworth styled ‘feeling intellect,’ artists imagine the things that the rest of us have to live
through.

You broaden your mind by ranging widely through the expanse within your own head. But most
of us just shuttle from one stock view to the next. ‘It’s not only better,’ says Pessoa, ‘but truer to
dream of Bordeaux than to go there. If I were to travel, I’d find a poor copy of what I’ve already
seen without taking one step.’ By longing to travel to a place you learn all that it has to teach
you. But when you consummate your longing you may well sterilize your vision. ‘The farther one
journeys,’ Lao Tzu writes, ‘the less one knows. So the sage gets there without going.’

Life holds out such rich possibilities, yet people taste it in such a thin form. And it can be so
stinting, yet they imagine it so prodigally. How penetratingly they feel the most casual
occurrences, but what sparse sense they glean from the greatest marvels.

Those who have least imagination set a high price on wide experience.
Thinkers are those who have managed to lose their innocence at the least expense of
experience.

43 Prejudice guides us through experience

Our ideology guides us through what happens to us, and then it tells us what it means. Our
most wayward experiences prove the truth of our most orthodox prejudices.

I would be lost in the world, if I were dispossessed of the chart and compass of my received
ideas. It’s a good thing for us that all we have to make sense of our most profound experiences
is a few trite thoughts and tropes. Our fatuousness, which should befuddle us, comes to our
rescue by simplifying life and supplying us with the trusty nostrums which will pilot us through it.
When life’s crises would force us to face what is most real, we take shelter in what is cheap and
fake.

If we chance to stray into unmediated contact with the thing as it is, we are relieved to revert to
the phony notions that we have got so used to. Churchill remarked how people ‘occasionally
stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had ever
happened.’

People pay no heed to ideas, yet they let their prejudices garble all that they know or feel about
the world.

44 We experience our prejudices

Most of the thoughts that we owe to personal experiences merely reprise trite theories.

All we need in order to thrive in the world is a few tattered platitudes. And this is just as well,
since we reap from all our thriving not much more than a few tattered platitudes.

You can build a full and authentic life on the footing of a few flimsy truisms.

Our experiences run in the muddy ruts dug by common prejudice.

Experience beguiles us by supplying us with new sensations while entrenching our old ideas.

Our received opinions teach us a large part of what we think we live through. And then what we
live through authenticates our received opinions. ‘As a child,’ Pavese wrote, ‘one learns to know
the world not, as it would seem, by immediate inaugural contact with things, but through the
signs of things, words, pictures, stories.’ We experience our prejudices, and prejudge our
experiences.
Most of us stay home in the cosy fug of our preformed views. We know better than to venture
out in the bleak midwinter of new truth.

Those who know only what they have lived through will live through only what they already
know. Yet we take it that living will prove the commonplace that life confutes all commonplaces.

45 Travelling imitation
A site comes to be picturesque by having been pictured so many times. ‘When a thing is a
wonder to us,’ Twain says, ‘it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others
have seen in it.’ Most of the beauty that we see comes to us through the eyes of other
beholders.

A foreign country is a cliché waiting to be fleshed out by our experience. We know other times
and lands through the stale images that we hold of them, which are conveniently contradictory.
So France is the emblem of both prose and passion, of clearness and mist, of classical restraint
and romantic glamour.

Travel has so little effect on most minds that it doesn’t even narrow them.

What you learn when you travel is that you take in as little of what you see and go through in
foreign parts as you do at home.

Tourists are like children in the midst of adults. They have to watch how to act in order to get
what they want, and must mimic ways of behaving that they don’t quite grasp the point of.

The habit of travel makes us too distracted to find at home what we circled the globe in search
of. We go overseas to seek what we lacked the discipline to see by sitting still.

ACTING

46 Imitation individuals
We begin by imitating others, and we end by imitating ourselves.

We mimic how people act, because we need to get on with them. And we mimic what they
believe, because we don’t much care for the truth. So we come to be careless copies of cheap
originals. ‘Most people,’ as Wilde says, ‘are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s
opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ We strive to make our lives real and
substantial by emulating phony and hollow models, like films, celebrities and photographs. We
are like second-rate novelists, always reediting the humdrum events of our lives as if they were
piquant episodes in a second-rate novel.
47 Merely players
Our urge to play a part and our resolve to do just as we wish in spite of what the world may think
might not be as different as they seem. All the best and worst things that we do have some
smack of histrionics in them. ‘Man,’ as Hazlitt said, ‘is a make believe animal. He is never so
truly himself as when he is acting a part.’ Why do some people prefer to act out a tiresome role,
such as that of the wailing widow, than just be who they are?

All the world is not a stage. So why do all the men and women persist in behaving as if they
were players?

We have to present a false front to the world, either because we feel so ashamed, or because
we are so shameless.

48 Imitation gestures
We are all the time declaring war on lies, and lying in our declarations. ‘The awe occasioned by
how things sound,’ as Multatuli says, ‘plays a large role in the history of delusions.’ Our lush
gestures still charm us even when they cost us dear. And the most incongruous kind of gestures
may be our grand avowals of truth and transparency.

There are times when I reach for a real feeling, and find that all I have is a trite gesture. And
even the most impromptu of my gestures I have picked up from others. ‘A human being,’ says
Adorno, ‘comes to be human by imitating other human beings.’ We are living and responsive
mirrors. And we change our shape, position and angle in reaction to the images that we reflect.

How many rehearsals it takes to perfect our most spontaneous gestures. And we still don’t get
them right.

Children seem so ingenuous because they are so unnatural. They are still rehearsing a part
which they don’t quite grasp. And they have not yet learnt the craft to hide their guileless
cunning.

When I am on my own, I con the parts that I play for the world. I act all my most earnest moods
for an audience, though it may be no more than my own admiring eyes. Yet I may rehearse a
scene so many times, that when it comes, I’m too irked to stage it in the way that I had planned.

49 Authentic actors
Blessed are the actors, for they shall be called sincere. We feel that fact looks like bad fiction,
and that frankness looks like bad acting. We love to be true to ourselves, most of all when
someone else is watching.
The real actors are the ones who keep playing the same part in front of themselves that they
play for the world. Which is to say, the sincere.

Emerson says that ‘Every man alone is sincere.’ But no one alone is sincere, and when alone
we are least in ourselves. We tell ourselves all the flattering lies that we don’t tell others. So we
go from imitation to imitation, and never stop playing a part.

Our age dotes on forthrightness, and hence makes a fetish of showmen and boosters.

The most genuine people know that they are always acting. But the most effective actors are
those who think that they are sincere.

In order to convince people that we are authentic, we borrow a few phony tricks which we try to
make all our own.

50 The arts of imitation

‘Give a man a mask,’ Wilde says, ‘and he will tell you the truth.’ We may come closest to the
truth when we cast out a few flippant witticisms which we don’t in the least believe. The rest of
the time we dwell in our world of earnest illusion.

Actors have nothing to withhold, but have a trick of appearing to. They use a twofold chicanery,
seeming to feel moods by seeming to suppress them. They don’t borrow a real face, but fashion
a false depth.

An actor ought to speak as a mask, as a dancer ought to move like a marionette.

The brains of stage actors show in their voice. The brains of film actors show in their face and
body.

51 We become the parts we play

I form my most authentic self by acting out the roles that the hope of gain makes me take up. I
wear my disguises lightly because I am such a mystery to myself. Play an ensemble of parts,
and you may learn how much you are patched up from the parts that you play. Keep on one
seamless mask, and you’ll seem candid to all, and you’ll be spared the ignominious
acquaintance with your own mixed motives.

When I have to associate with a person whom I dislike, I try to make myself like them, so as not
to seem false in my own eyes. I pretend that I’ve been fooled, for fear of appearing insincere.
And I act as if I admired them, so that I won’t feel soiled when I toady to them. Our self-serving
poses make us more considerate of others.
Who is strong enough to resist becoming what the world lauds them for? We try to live up to the
false views that people hold of us. So we come to be more or less what others take us for.

Some people overact their parts, to prove that they are not acting. They turn their back on truth,
because they are so bent on appearing sincere. They swell their seemly pretences of feeling
into unseemly histrionics. Speak emphatically, and you will convince yourself and others that
you believe with all your soul.

52 Honest hypocrisy
Few of us are honest enough to be hypocrites. To be a hypocrite, you first have to own the truth
to yourself and then lie only to others. Conscious dissimulators must confront the truth about
their own motives which the sincere can pass by.

You have to choose between sincere self-deception and honest hypocrisy. You have to execute
a lot of evasive manoeuvres, if you hope to shield your embattled truth from the world’s intrusive
sincerity.

As there was no one so wise as Socrates, because he knew that he knew nothing, so the most
honest are those who know that they never speak the pure truth.

There are times when boldfaced egoism alone will dare to tell the bare improper truth.

53 Truth through deviant imitation

We have a knack for arriving at the truth by the looped and zigzag avenues of obliquity.
‘Success,’ as Dickinson wrote, ‘in circuit lies.’ Our kind, which puts truth on a high pedestal,
proves its worth by the artifice, inventions and fictions in which it excels and by which alone it
can chalk its path to the truth. ‘Our journey is entirely imaginary,’ Céline wrote. ‘That is its
strength.’

Parents coach their children not to lie about small things or to tell the truth about large ones. We
need irresponsible fictions to show us how to do the reverse. The world lies by telling the truth.
Fiction reveals the truth by crafting significant lies.

We are so crooked, how could we draw near the truth save by acts of bad faith? Reach it, and
you will learn how great is your need of hypocrisy.

Most of us speak with sincerity but not with truth. A strong mind is truthful yet seldom
transparent.
54 Sincerity the death of self-awareness
The more self-aware you are, the less sincere you can be. Most people are not hypocrites. How
could they be, when they don’t so much as know what it is that they believe?

Sincere people are too shrewd to tell the truth, and too delicate to know that they are lying.

It’s only insincere people who can bear to know the truth. The candid feel no cause to search it
out, since their snug self-certainty keeps them so safe and warm.

People speak without reflecting, and then they believe whatever they say, provided they can
keep it in their heads, which is that much easier once they have said it. They scarcely know
what they believe till they have said it. And they keep up their sincerity by saying it over and
over.

It’s not hard to give your faith to a thing if you have not thought about it.

There is bad faith even in our exposure of bad faith.

Those who lie to themselves are never found out. We must be sincere, since we never catch
ourselves in a lie.

55 Self-deceiving sincerity
We don’t tell lies. We think them, feel them and live them.

Most fervent devotees are commendably frank and yet disgracefully two-faced. ‘Beliefs,’ as
Nietzsche said, ‘are more injurious foes of truth than lies.’ An unsettling conjecture is a better
friend to truth than a settled conviction.

What is most false in our passions we turn into our convictions. And then we fight for these with
a genuine passion.

Two roles we never tire of are being sincere and being such fakes.

The devil is a deceiver. Like all righteous beings, God needs to be a self-deceiver.

Sincerity is the virtue of those who lack the self-awareness to see how far the most heartfelt
belief is made up of play-acting, self-interest, convenience, vanity and habit.

It is said that liars need to have a good memory. But they have far more need of a bad memory,
so that they can continue to lie with full conviction and a good conscience.
A doctrinaire fanatic, such as Hitler, still has to key up his sincerity like a ham actor. Yet the
most guileful pretenders lend a limitless trust to their own candour. ‘The greatest and truest
zeal,’ Hume wrote, ‘gives us no security against hypocrisy.’

The zeal with which you assert your convictions shores up your own faith in them.

56 Practised deceivers believe their own lies

Sincere people are dangerous. There’s no lie that they can’t bring themselves to believe.

Sincere partisans can’t tell when they are lying from when they are just being stupid.

How could we have faith in a leader who has no faith in his or her own lies? It takes a charlatan
to inspire unquestioning trust. And it takes a great narcissist to play on our own narcissism.

‘Preachers know that the mood which comes on them as they speak,’ wrote Montaigne, ‘moves
them to belief.’ They have the knack of being taken in by their own sincerity, and are guilefully
duped by their own guile. ‘Always they have faith,’ says Nietzsche, ‘in that with which they
infuse the most faith, faith in themselves.’ They work by ruthless manipulation and artless self-
delusion. They fool us with such facility because they seem so frank. And their self-belief grows
as their deceits gain credence. It feeds on its own sense of success and good faith.

How short is the step from displaying more emotion than you feel to feeling as much as you
display. Most feelings that we conceal from others we soon forget to feel. And if we need to
pretend to feel something, we will soon come to feel it with all our heart.

57 The lie gives light

The self-belief of deceivers is so incandescent, that it warms the people round them and casts a
bright light on their own innocence. They seem generous, because they applaud whatever
strokes their own ego. And since they feel that most things do, they’re applauding night and day.
They win your heart by first building up their own importance and then condescending to take
notice of you. Only a swaggerer seems important enough to boost my own swaggering self-
importance.

Sly persuaders contrive to believe not just in their own mission but in their audience as well.
Anyone who is credulous enough to trust in them must deserve to be imposed on by their faith.

Salvation is by faith. Pay no heed to reason. I am the way. So claims every confidence-man.
And the most cunning chancers prove the truth of Augustine’s advice, Act as if you had faith,
and faith will be given unto you.
We take it that a thing or person must be reliable because we have no choice but to rely on
them.

58 Taken in by our own sincerity

If we weren’t so sincere, how could we keep up our pretences with such conviction?

Sincere people believe in their own belief, not in the truth. And they keep up their faith in
themselves because others show that they have faith in them.

How many base things we wish to be but not seem. And how many fine things we wish to seem
but not be. I don’t want to appear to act like a hypocrite. But I am quite willing to be a hypocrite
so as not to seem like one, just as, according to Pascal, one may behave like a coward in order
to win a name for courage. I blush to seem so fake, and so I forge an authentic self in order to
seem sincere.

A self-believer is bound to be a self-deceiver. All faith comes at the cost of a great deal of
deception, be it of oneself or of others. But this is one cost that we are all willing to pay.

Some people are content to be fooled by anyone at all. And some are determined not to be
fooled by anyone but themselves.

All deception starts and ends in self-deception. ‘The most successful tempters and thus the
most injurious,’ as Lichtenberg said, ‘are the deluded deluders.’ We can’t take in our dupes if we
have not first sold ourselves on the lie.

Sincerity is a conceited or convenient loyalty to our habitual lies.

59 The rewards of imitation

So long as you consent to be a liar, the world won’t force you to tell many out and out lies,
though it will pay you well when you do. Bad faith is its own reward, but it reaps the world’s
reward too.

Those who scruple to tell a downright lie will submit to living a whole life of upright self-
deception. They aren’t honest enough just to lie with their lips. They have to stain their souls
with the lie, so that their thoughts and words and conduct will seem all of a piece.

It is those whose life is a lie that can make of it an integrated whole. The dash of truth would be
so out of flavour with the rest of it that it would make of it a sour mess.

What intractable rectitude makes us too nice to lie to those whom we most need to, and too
squeamish to lie to the ones who can least detect it?
If you were not so sincere, how could you act your part so well? And if you did not act your part
so well, how could you be so sincere?

60 Suckered by sincerity
We believe in sincere people because we see how piously they believe in themselves. And we
have faith in them because we see how much faith the world has in them. And they have faith in
themselves for the same reason. They move and convince us, while the truth would fatigue or
disgust us. Their shows of frankness seduce us, where plain veracity would repel us. The truth
leaves us numb. But we are warmed by the fervour of people who blaze with faith in their own
candour. We put our trust in those who hold fast to an unquestioning trust in their own integrity,
who accordingly are the least deserving of our trust. ‘The world,’ Trollope wrote, ‘certainly gives
the most credit to those who are able to give an unlimited credit to themselves.’

We withhold our faith from those who would tell us hard truths, and give it to those whom we
can count on to lie to us as they lie to their own hearts.

61 The duty of self-deception

Seasoned deceivers know nothing of the delights of mendacity. They perjure themselves as a
grave moral duty which they discharge with principled zeal. But unlike the rest of their good
deeds they are quite unaware of this one.

An honest hypocrite shocks a solemn self-deceiver. A pious cheat burns with moral outrage
when a rival behaves duplicitously. And they take offence when their dupes refuse to lend them
their trust.

Sincere believers are offended by the cheap and blatant honesties which scoffers use to malign
their rich and superfine duplicities.

A sincere person would be sickened by a bald statement of the truth.

Sincerity is a psychic thrift. People would blush to profess what they don’t believe, and so they
believe whatever it is in their interest to profess. They take themselves in, that they might seem
open to others. Most of us have too much decency not to be fooled by the lies that we need to
tell. ‘The true hypocrite,’ as Gide says, ‘is the one who has ceased to perceive his deception,
the one who lies with sincerity.’

62 Sincerity, self-regard and self-interest

I admire my own authenticity with smug self-consciousness, and my spontaneity with conscious
self-satisfaction.
Our sincerity makes us conceited, and our conceit makes us sincere. What a batch of
falsehoods we stuff our lying hearts with, to feed our faith in our own truthfulness. Sincerity
would sit on its perch and scream all day long nothing but ‘Me, me, me.’

Grinning sincerity impudently flaunts itself, while truth skulks furtive and shamefaced.

There’s no pose that people won’t put on as a dodge to assert their honesty.

Honest people know that they are frauds. But the sincere don’t know themselves at all. So they
are proud of their good faith, which they keep up by refusing to see how continuously they lie.

People are not aware of all the fraud they use to get by in the world. And if they were, they
might not be able to use it with so much artless cunning.

We have seen enough of the world to make us hate it. But we still want so much from the world,
that we have to act as if we loved it. And our belief soon falls into line with our act.

We earnestly believe whatever it suits us to believe. Our convictions are the obeisant retainers
of our commanding ambitions.

We are too cautious to lie, and too shrewd to know or tell the truth.

WORDS

63 Words, things and imitation

Language is the wall partitioning our prison cells which we tap on to signal our loneliness.

Most thoughts are like lightning bolts which strike a few seconds before the thunder-clap of
words.

We don’t notice what we don’t name. But what we do name soon melts beneath the thick cloak
of the names that we confer on it. ‘More hinges on what things are called,’ Nietzsche says, ‘than
on what they are.’ And the name comes to mean more to us than the thing it refers to. It is the
focus of all the customary associations which take the place of the thing in our minds.

It is the greatest things that are outlived by their names.

How few of the great fabled places live up to the romance of their names.

I cherish my name, since it forms the small foothold that my self-importance has in speech, as
my birthday is the date that sanctifies the whole calendar. The one spell that works on all of us
is the magic of our own name.
Like a child, I have the knack of pattering coherently about large ideas, though I don’t quite
know what they mean. But I get by with seeming to make sense and mimicking the sense that
the people round me seem to make.

64 Truth is unspeakable
Truth is so unspeakable and indecent, that it has to be secreted in writing. It’s what you can
never say in table-talk. It had to wait for the invention of writing to bare its nakedness.

Writers keep their thoughts to themselves, and share them only with the world at large. ‘Many
things that I would not care to tell to any single person,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘I tell the public.’ Stein
said that she wrote for herself and strangers.

Hamlet’s small tally of made-up and unnecessary words means more than all the trillions of
breathing and urgent ones that are spoken or scrawled each day. Living words soon die on the
air. The few that were never living and were not needed have the best chance of lasting through
the ages. It is only because they don’t matter to us that they can mean so much to us.

‘There really is too much to say,’ as Henry James wrote. So why is it that most of what we do
say might just as well have been left unsaid?

‘We are truer to ourselves,’ notes Beausacq, ‘when we write than when we talk, because we
write alone.’ I make my words my own when I write. When I speak, I compromise with the words
of others. The speaker wants to be understood, but the writer expects to be misread, and
always will be.

65 The lie in the ear

Truth is too weak to cross the three feet of space between speaker and hearer. The ear of the
hearer makes the truth stick in the throat of the speaker. And yet the truth can vault the gulf of
the centuries in the text of some obscure script.

Truth gets warped by the gravity that joins two people.

In the presence of an audience we can’t help but lie. And we always have an audience, though
it may be just ourselves.

You can talk nothing but drivel to an audience of fools. ‘It takes two to speak the truth,’ as
Thoreau wrote, ‘one to speak, and another to hear.’

Heart does not speak to heart. Tongue speaks to tongue. And what it says is, These are the lies
I want to be told.
If the hardest thing, as Dostoyevsky said, is to speak a new word, it may be that the next
hardest is to hear it.

Truth may at times rise to our lips like vomit, but we have learnt how to keep it down. And we
dare tell it only to those whom we don’t know or don’t care for.

Most people can’t speak the truth because they don’t know what it is, a few because they know
it all too well.

66 We blame words
It is not words that mislead me but the motives for which I use them. But then I blame words for
waylaying me.

We feel even more dishonestly than we speak. The lie goes deeper than the word. We don’t just
tell lies, we feel them. A hundred lies can pass from soul to soul in a flash, and not one word
spoken.

If they lacked speech, people would have found some alternative way to dissimulate. A world in
which they told no lies would still be one riddled with fraud, though much more dim and wintry.

67 We inflate our words and feelings

We overstate how much we feel and how much we have learnt from life. And then we curse
words for being too weak to tell what we feel and what we have learnt. But we find them
adequate for one task at least, to say how inadequate they are. We vie to work up fresh and
forceful tropes to voice how language can’t voice our passions. But the one thing too large and
terrifying for us to put into words is our littleness. We profess to despair of language, while
employing it to play up our poignant despair.

My words prove to me that I do indeed feel what I know I ought to. And I know what I ought to
feel because I have heard the words that others never fail to intone on such occasions. I think
that I want my eloquence to match the intensity of my own grief or joy. But in fact I want it to
match the force of others’ eloquence. I strain to make my tropes equal not to the event but to
the tropes that I have heard used at such times.

68 Our feelings are emptier than our words

Our deepest and most visceral beliefs are too shallow for words.

We say that an experience is too deep for words because we are too shallow to draw from it any
thoughts that are worth putting into words. Our feelings seem so intense that we claim they
leave us speechless. But they only leave us as thoughtless as we were before.
Philosophers complain that words are too strong for our frail reason. And enthusiasts complain
that they are too weak to match their grand passions.

Those who have starved ideas carp that speech is too thin and bloodless to do justice to all their
profuseness.

Our age sets great store on self-expression, yet we take it that the deepest feelings can’t be
expressed in words. And so we fill the gap with a lot of wordy slush and sentiment.

69 Words are too strong for our weak feelings

We make a world of superlatives. And we treat words like our children. Our souls may be
shrivelled and dislocated, but we still live expansively in language.

When I write, I search for the most forcible terms to match the strength of my thoughts. But
when revising, I come to see that my thoughts don’t deserve to speak so loud. ‘Of two words,’
Valéry counselled, ‘always choose the lesser.’ The vehemence of its vocabulary is not what
makes a style intense.

We hollow out speech by inflating all our feelings and their expression.

Why do we claim that language wastes us like a disease, and that we would live so much more
richly if we could find a cure for it? We don’t weary our moods and convictions by externalizing
them, we flex and feast them. They look less ashen when they have been out in the enlivening
sunshine of others’ gaze.
KITSCH

Contents

Dead civilization

Capitalism’s style

Effects of kitsch

Novelty and nostalgia

Sentimentality

Clichés

DEAD CIVILIZATION

1 Culture, civilization, kitsch

First culture, then civilization, now kitsch. First myth, then poetry and prose, now cliché. At first
tradition, next reason and imagination, now ingenuity and images. First the tribe, after that the
state, last the borderless and atomizing market. A culture is soon crushed by a civilization, and
a civilization is soon consumed by kitsch.

For primitive peoples life drums a rhythm, for the civilized it sounds a melody, but for us it
makes mere noise. And all we want is to make it more and more raucous. We have declined
through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, and have at last reached the age of plastic,
cheap, mass-made, characterless and toxic. ‘Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye,
Rome.’

In a traditional culture society is a solid. In a civilization it is a liquid. But with us it is a gas. Each
atom, loosed from its tight molecular bonds, jiggles with a febrile energy, rendering the whole
volatile, unstable, ephemeral and thin.

A culture is a whole form of life. But a civilization is precious for a few great works made by rare
minds in which it concentrates its creative force. It is not a unified form of life. It is the sacrifice of
life for the sake of the things that will outlast its own death.
2 Kitsch and the death of civilization
Civilization is extinct. It died out midway through the twentieth century. But its embalmed corpse
is still laid out respectfully in museums and concert halls, or is gaudily rouged and lit up for mass
amusement. ‘It is,’ as Connolly wrote, ‘closing time in the gardens of the west.’ There has been
no great novel since Céline and Faulkner, no great poem since Yeats, nor painting since
Matisse or Pollock, nor sculpture since Brancusi, nor building since Mies and Le Corbusier, nor
science since Einstein and Heisenberg.

Civilization will prove to have been the most short-lived venture of the most short-lived species.

In five hundred years the americas have hurtled through all the phases of history. In old times
there were the rich cultures of its first peoples. Then came the civilization which beat them
down. And now we see the reign of the barren and mercenary kitsch which has hollowed it out.

We rip from native peoples their rich culture, and leave them with nothing but indigenous kitsch
to assert their lost identity.

3 Waiting for the barbarians

Too little civilization, and art won’t germinate. Too much, and it goes to seed. Art is at length
killed by the same conditions that give it nourishment. Emerson forewarned that our race would
die of sophistication. And, as the Goncourts said, it needs a jolt of barbarism from time to time to
bring it back to life. But now that global kitsch blankets the earth, where will the scythians come
from, to reinvigorate it with their untamed sap and sinew? There are no more barbarians. We
are all just avid consumers. ‘If mankind does not perish through passion,’ Nietzsche says, ‘it will
perish through debility.’

4 The death of the soul

We are gilded flies which buzz and blow on the offal of a necrotic organism. How cheerfully we
live on, having killed the things of the spirit. ‘Is it with such insects as this,’ Cioran asked, ‘that a
civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?’ Twelve thousand years of patient
cultural ripening will soon be sucked dry by twelve billion frantic parasites. Yet when we have
emptied it of its own beauty, and crammed it with our own ugliness, it will seem to us more
lovely than ever. So when the human race soon wipes itself out, it will be finishing off a body
which long ago lost its soul. The twentieth century made an end of culture. And the twenty-first
will make an end of nature.
5 Kitsch is degenerating
We are past the stage of the conquest of art by kitsch. Now kitsch itself is degenerating. Year by
year what is cheaper, brassier, more crass, seductive and juvenile drives out what had been a
bit less so. We are a long way beyond the age of mere decadence.

Each year kitsch lowers its standards and broadens its appeal. It began by imitating art. Now it
imitates itself. Having begun in the academy, it soon moved into advertising. It started as a
technical expertise. Now it is just the slick tricks that fool the public.

A new movement in art used to be a rigorous exploration of the possibilities of a medium. But a
new form of kitsch is just a cheap exploitation of its commercial opportunities.

The elite used to prefer bad art to good. Now, like the rest of the public, it prefers kitsch to any
art at all.

It has never been easier for anyone to be an artist, now that it is impossible for anyone to make
real art. And though we don’t so much as know what art is, each one of us, we are told, is a
born artist.

Now that there is no such thing as bad art, there is no real art at all.

Even bestsellers are not what they used to be, now that all we read is bestsellers. They are
written for adolescents or for those whose taste was formed in adolescence.

6 We take in everything as kitsch

Kitsch is the aesthetic of juvenile consumer capitalism. It is the mode both of all that it makes
and of how it takes in all that it meets with. People have ceased to touch the world save through
a greasy synthetic gauze. Even if what they experience is not kitsch, their experience of it is. But
how could they discern that this is what it is? Not only is kitsch all that they see, it is the eyes
that they use to look at it all. Their viewing turns art itself into kitsch.

Kitsch is not a style of art. It is the one style in which everything comes to us now that art is
dead.

Kitsch began as a backward style of art. Now art is just a backward form of kitsch.

Kitsch, which promiscuously makes use of all styles, is now the one style that all of us embrace.

7 The idols of kitsch

Kitsch is an imitation of an imitation. Every place on earth has now been imaged so many times,
that it has waned to a hollow image of what it once so gloriously was.
We have emptied the world of real imagination, and clotted it with hyperreal images. The
saturation of likenesses has bleached both life and art, which are too thin and pale to match the
bright spectres projected by our devices. And these have devoured our dreams and memories,
desires and vision.

Mass society has turned art to a sham and the virginal earth to a wilderness of death. Good
riddance to nature and art. They had nothing in them to amuse us. We will swap the earth and
our dear-bought civilization to gain one hour more of mindless fun.

The world is now full to the brim with kitsch, as the seas will soon be overflowing with glutinous
blobs of fluorescent jellyfish. The superb predators, which once awed the forest and savannah,
will soon live on as trademarks to sell luxury junk.

CAPITALISM’S STYLE

8 The style of capitalism

In every society the economic base shapes the cultural superstructure. But in capitalism it
swallows it whole and spews out kitsch. And where culture colours all sides of life, it’s clear that
it must be dead.

Kitsch is the artificial system best adapted to profit from our naturally bad taste.

Kitsch, like the capitalism that spawned it, is indestructible, since it can stay what it is while
incorporating the most irreconcilable tendencies, rural nostalgia or citified chic, the sincere and
the inauthentic, the morbid or the manic, pretty or punk, levity or schmaltz, the homespun or the
exotic, the folksy or the bombastic. And what can’t be killed is sure to eat up all that is too good
for it and more frail.

Capitalism and kitsch have reduced the world to a factory and a funhouse.

Art was a vocation. Kitsch is big business.

The function of kitsch is to stimulate demand for all the products of capitalism.

9 Consumer kitsch
An age can make nothing but kitsch, when consumers and not creators set its taste. And in art
the consumer is always wrong.

Art gave us nothing that we wanted. Kitsch gives us all that we crave so as to goad us to keep
on craving.
We have lost the capacity to create. All we can do is consume. And what we consume are the
second-hand copies of second-rate originals.

We run mad with our frenzy of consumption, and we feel that we are inspired by the fire of
creation. All that we now have the strength for is a pacified levelling sterility or the huckster’s
frantic hurry, which buys and sells but can’t create.

An age of decline is marked not by exhaustion and stagnation but by manic activity and
innovation.

The spirit of the age shows up more in its advertisements than in its art. And foreign countries
are now known more by their consumer brands than by their culture, which is marketed as one
of their deluxe consumer brands.

These days it’s not beauty but advertisements that are the promise of happiness.

10 The memory of money

Money has no memory, and leaves none. It is the solvent of time. 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? Our world and its predatory scheming
will soon be consigned to the oblivion which is all that it deserves. The world that we hand on
will prove how much we craved and how little we mattered. What we leave for our heirs will be
not a lavish civilization but a meagre economy.

How could capitalism make anything that lasts, when it puts no value on work that is not for
immediate gain?

Greed is the voracious now labouring to fill the future with its sieve of gold.

11 The solvent of civilization

Money acts like an Archimedes lever, which has wrenched the world from its rightful station.
And nothing now could put it back in its proper place.

When we are rich enough to get all that we want, we will grow used to choosing the worst that is
on offer.

Money cheapens everything. And now we have so much money, it all gets cheaper by the day.
Our age has left off aspiring to the best. And so all we can do is try to grab hold of the most. And
thus we will soon hack our way to the worst. ‘It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one
place,’ as Blake says, ‘but not make.’

For art and thought to thrive, there must be a vertical discontinuity of class and a temporal
continuity of tradition. But capital has dissolved class distinctions, and severed the ties that join
one age to its past and to the next.

Capitalism has an accelerator but no steering-wheel. It keeps us zooming so fast, that we can’t
change our course. And if it were forced to put on the brake, it would crash.

Why strive to make a thing that might last for the ages, when this world won’t last for one or two
more centuries?

12 The suburbs eat the city

Civilization was born in the city, and has died in the suburbs.

Kitsch is the style of suburban happiness.

Most architecture is kitsch. It can’t copy nature, and so it naturally copies its own past. Most of
the old world is not old enough, and most of the new world is not new enough. The old world
imitates an older world, and the young world imitates these imitations and its own facsimiles of
them. London or Paris are copies of old cities. And New York or Shanghai are copies of modern
ones or of themselves.

The cities that were once the cultural capitals of the world are now the mere centres of kitsch,
finance, fashion and advertising.

13 Global kitsch
In the world market all styles are available for use, and all are mutations of kitsch.

Art never grew to be universal or even cosmopolitan. But kitsch has fanned out all round the
globe. It has turned out to be the one worldwide style.

Art takes no thought for the details of time and place. But kitsch is at once topical and eclectic,
localized and globalized.

We aren’t stay-at-home bumpkins anymore. Now we are all cosmopolitan philistines, globe-
trotting suburban provincials.

We are proud to be provincial replicas of spectral junk made in Los Angeles.

America took its place as the cultural capital of the world when its brand of capitalism ate up
culture.

Our hunger for travelling to exotic spots will soon make all of them identical. Each place will
soon look the same as all the rest, and nothing like itself.

In the past there was temporal continuity from age to age, but diversity from one place to the
next. Now there has been a total rupture from all previous epochs, but a homogenization of
locales.

14 High and low kitsch

High and low culture are now just various grades of kitsch.

One of the chief tasks of galleries, orchestras and theatres is to give us permission to enjoy art
as if it were kitsch, and to revere kitsch as if it were art. We praise as benefactors those who
drag down the high standards that hold in any field.

People like going to look at art more than the art itself.

High culture has ceased to spurn low culture. It now apes its winning ways to cadge some of its
leavings.

In the past a few in the upper class aspired to the love of art, which none in the lower class had
means to know. Now all alike love only kitsch, whether they call it art or entertainment.

You can now tell the taste of one stratum of society from the next by how dear they pay for their
kitsch. All that most of us aspire to is a more select class of it, be it the hushed urbanity of the
boutique, or the flashy tat of the mall. When it costs a lot, we call it stylishness and elegance.

When all are rich enough to get as much beauty as they want, even the elite will have a taste for
nothing but kitsch.

15 Cool, elegance, sublimity

Real cool used to be the style of demotic nobility. But teenage kitsch now takes the place of
cool, as middle-aged kitsch takes the place of elegance. Pop songs epitomize the tawdry
dreams of adolescence. They are knowing but callow, up-to-date but outworn, frothy, arousing,
disposable, faddish, immediately desirable and narcissistic.

Elegance is kitsch in a lounge suit. Cool is kitsch in a tee-shirt.

Fashion keeps such a hold over us because our tastes are so pliant and our vanity is so
constant.
Young people confuse style with the latest vogue. And old people confuse style with the vogue
that held sway when they were young.

The sublime is now just the high style of kitsch. It’s a sham which moves us far more than the
real thing.

We never had eyes to see the true sublime of nature. But from now on a perverted version of it
will be on show everywhere in the colossal and terrible chaos wrought by our control of it.

The most inspiriting orators, such as Lincoln, Kennedy or King, dealt from a thin pack of
majestic and vacuous platitudes. And a piece of oratory can now soar only by cadging a few
gaudy feathers from the great speechmakers of the past.

Sober and prosaic America, as Tocqueville showed, is drunk on its own grandiloquence and
tears. Its writers, though wedded to the colloquial, still lust for the sublime.

16 Kitsch and technology

Civilization added technology to culture. And we have now subtracted civilization from
technology. Our appliances have electrocuted the muses. ‘The machine,’ as Rilke wrote, ‘is a
threat to all achievement.’ Our doltish fantasies and smart devices have devoured imagination.
As civilization’s sun goes down, an imbecile neon twinkle fills our sky with its dazzle. And in our
miraculous age of kitsch there will be no end of dazzlement, but a dearth of real wonder.

We have lit up the wasteland of western culture, and packed it with shows, games, attractions
and amusements, and opened it to all comers.

We love the lucrative magic of technology but not the hard truths of science. And we wallow in
the sickly sentiments of kitsch, but we spurn the exacting formality of art.

It used to be our ethereal creeds that distanced us from the real world. Now it’s our mundane
devices.

We laud as civilization the mass affluence which has drowned it. ‘The telephone is his test of
civilization,’ Wilde wrote of the middle-class philistine, ‘and his wildest dreams of utopia do not
rise beyond elevated railways and electric bells.’

We are not all artists, in spite of what maudlin people say. But our devices make each of us a
curator of kitsch.
17 Political kitsch
The public realm has always been theatrics. But each age fears that it is uniquely stagy,
because it is irked by the tawdriness of its own histrionic style. Each kind of regime has prinked
up its own style of prancing kitsch. Fascism made it colossal and belligerent, absolute kingship
triumphal and ostentatious, and democracy syrupy and snivelling.

Flags are patriotic kitsch. They are hoisted everywhere when the old conception of a country
has been pulled down, while anthems sound a rousing requiem over its bones. We bow down to
the empty symbol even as we do dirt on what it stands for.

Fallen states used to be survived by the art that they made. Now they are survived by their
kitsch.

Revolutionary movements borrow the style of their kitsch from the capitalism that they aim to
bring down. And when they fizzle out, that’s all the glow they leave behind.

18 The style of democracy

Democracy, which we hail as the zenith of civilization, has marked its demise. Our unstoppable
material and moral progress has put a stand to it. An age that is sure it’s progressing can turn
out nothing but kitsch.

The modern state hands over the things that are most worth caring about to those who don’t
care about them.

Civilization was for the few and for the long age. Kitsch, like democracy, is for the many and the
jittering now. No wonder there is so much money to be made from it.

Civilization was the oppression of the many by the few. And as soon as the many won their
rights, it was goodnight to civilization. And what has followed it is the oppression of the earth by
all of us, and we won’t loose our stranglehold on it till we have killed it and ourselves.

Art daunts us with its cold demanding dullness. Kitsch indulges us with a cosy democratic
largesse.

Kitsch is the sole contribution that democracy has made to culture.

19 Conservative kitsch
Conservatism is now mere kitsch. It purports to preserve the inheritance of the past in a society
which has sloughed off all its old forms.
A country that has turned its back on its traditions is obliged to stage a constant round of noisy
commemorative extravaganzas, with brass bands, bunting, tolling bells and tear-jerking
orations.

It’s no longer the case that things happen twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. They are
farce the first time they take place, and this is then repeated in ever more coarse and gaudy
forms.

Our atavisms are not a recrudescence of age-old tribal lore. They are the prejudices that were
current a decade or two ago, brought back to life and spread by the most up-to-date devices.

20 Hunger for stories

We love stories. We want them to whisk us from one episode to the next with no need to think,
expecting to be surprised by some new twist. And we want to live in the same way.

We delight in anecdotes, but we have lost the relish for art.

All of us love stories, but few of us care for literature. We are all spellbound by images, but few
care for paintings. And all of us love a tune, but few love music.

These days we consume the whole world through story, and stories urge us on to keep
consuming. If you want to spruik anything, you have to package it as a narrative. Capitalism and
bourgeois individualism fill the world with billions of proliferating stories of progress, personal
growth, obstacles overcome, and final triumph.

21 Performance
Every work now is made to be staged as a performance. And every performance must spark its
instantaneous effect.

Kitsch turns each event into a facetious or poignant story to be performed for mass amusement.

Performers have come to be stars now that makers have ceased to create. There are no more
great playwrights, composers or painters. So we lionize entertainers, mimics, piano-players,
divas, crooners, fiddlers, baton-twiddlers, directors, conservators and impresarios as if they
were artists.

Celebrity is a plastic fame, inane, broadcast, lucrative and anecdotal. It is the triumph of the life
over the work, of media over art, of the mass over the elite, of personality over character, of
publicity over privacy, of vulgarity over tact, and of commerce over creativity. Stardom is a kind
of conspicuous insignificance.
EFFECTS OF KITSCH

22 The immediacy of kitsch

Art works by slow revelation, kitsch meets with instant recognition. ‘We fail to grasp at once truly
rare works of art,’ as Proust points out. People spot and fall in love with the blatant charms of
kitsch straight off. But they need to learn to make out the rigorous beauty of a work of art. And
then they are as apt to resent it as they are to revere it.

Art is for the long ages, kitsch is for the crowded now. ‘Farewell, you infinitely slow works,’ as
Valéry said in his adieu to the past.

The art that appeals to us at once must be kitsch. We love what we can grasp or what grips us
at first sight. Art must run in the channels of form to reach imagination. Kitsch keeps to the
smooth paths of fashion to go straight to our hearts.

Kitsch is as instant as life. Art is patient as the grave.

As Valéry remarked, all the world reads what all the world could write. We have Shakespeare,
and we just scroll through newspapers. But we’ll make do with gold if we have to, when we can’t
get our hands on dross. We have ceased to write holy books, but we churn out magazines and
blogs.

23 Kitsch is on the side of life

Kitsch is on the side of life. Art, like truth, is on its own side. And life is always on the side of
false taste. Art may be affirmative, as Nietzsche claimed, but what it affirms is not life but art.

All the stimulants of kitsch exist for the sake of life. And yet kitsch has reduced life to simulation,
fantasy and sham.

If you want to learn about art, you have to seek out works of art to teach you. But all the world is
a school of kitsch in which each of us learns to mimic its cheap tricks.

We used to need art so that we might not perish from the truth, as Nietzsche said. But now that
we are immune to truth, all we need is kitsch.

In kitsch story trumps thought, emotion trumps imagination, sentiment trumps form, personality
trumps tradition, sincerity trumps honesty, fantasy trumps reality, and reality trumps truth.
24 Kitsch makes it whole
Art and irony disintegrate the personality, kitsch and good faith make it whole. Kitsch is candid,
art is self-aware.

Kitsch connects us to each other and binds us as one. Art leaves us on our own.

Kitsch is coherent, art is at odds with itself, with its maker, and with the world. Art is dissonance,
kitsch is harmony. When artists try to make it whole, they make it kitsch, as Eliot did in Four
Quartets.

25 Kitsch fills the heart

Kitsch is so congenial to us, because it works on the same lines as our unconscious.

Art wells up from the depths of hell. Kitsch springs straight from the soul, which craves crass fun
and thrills, but can flourish with no help from truth or beauty. When the heart was freed to ask
for what it yearned for, kitsch was born. ‘All bad poetry,’ Wilde wrote, ‘springs from genuine
feeling.’ The inmost stirrings of the heart speak in the honeyed kitsch of cheap religion, cheap
amusement or cheap romance.

Kitsch is feeling and sincerity, art is form and artifice.

The songs that heal our hearts are sure to be treacly, and the truths that warm them are sure to
be lies.

By long cultivation we may learn to see the worth of what is real and great. But by some natural
affinity we still choose what is saccharine, confected, phony, garish, slick and impermanent.

Kitsch is the froth and effervescence of humanity drunk on its own power and fine intentions.

26 We love kitsch and are indifferent to art

Art was a luxury, kitsch is a necessity. Kitsch is irresistible and indispensable. But art is
unwanted and superfluous. Kitsch gives you what you think you want. Art gives you what it
thinks you need.

Art is excessive. Kitsch is economical. It is necessary. It expends the least effort for the most
return, rousing the most intense effects by the least exercise of skill. And it functions as part of
the system of consumerism.

Art doesn’t care for us, and we don’t care for it. But we are so pleased with kitsch, because it
makes us so pleased with ourselves. In spite of what Rilke said, the archaic torso of Apollo
doesn’t give a damn whether or not we change our life. That’s why it is worth our reverence.
Most people now would be bored and sickened to be served up anything but kitsch.

27 Art against pleasure

Kitsch yields us far more pleasure than art. Our famished hearts, which would be wearied by a
poem, lap up the syrup of a pop lyric, and are moved to unseal their deepest moods in crude
and trite scribblings. They brim with stale images, jellied sentimentalism and panting
phantasms. So how could they be touched by anything but kitsch? Like Madame Bovary, we
swoon at sensations more than art, from which we have to squeeze some use of our own. We
welcome only those works that thrill us or amuse us or tell us how fine we are.

28 Kitsch is vivid, art is cold

Art exists to make objects of the mind. Kitsch exists to rouse subjective feelings.

Art is cold and affectless. But kitsch is eager to please.

How bland and unaffecting a piece of art looks, when set alongside the blare and
sensationalism of kitsch.

Kitsch fills each minute of our lives and lights up all four corners of the earth, as art and religion
never did.

We now taste life in so many artificial flavours, that if we were to come across a thing in its
natural form, it would seem to us as bland and disgusting as cardboard.

Art to most people seemed like a dim shadow of life. Kitsch is brighter, more iridescent and
more glamorous than life.

All we desired from art was that it should adorn and flatter life. And now we have found that
kitsch does this far more lavishly and cheaply.

Cultural life has never seemed more vibrant as now when we make nothing but moribund kitsch.

29 Kitsch the enemy of form

Kitsch is naive in its form, but calculating in its effects. We take in art half-heartedly, but flock to
kitsch in fads and crazes.

Kitsch has no deep form, and so it is free to fashion a sleek surface.

Kitsch is emotionally callow but technically sophisticated. Why else would it be such a perfect fit
for us?

Our greed for sensations is far greater than our taste for form.
Kitsch is formula without form, sentimentality empty of real feeling, and images void of
imagination.

Some artists turn out the slick kitsch of another’s style, as Cocteau did Picasso’s. And some,
such as Hemingway or T. S. Eliot, end by turning out the smug kitsch of their own.

30 Art against beauty

Kitsch makes things that are alluring and familiar as representations but repulsive as art.
Modern artists made things that are brutal and unfaithful as representations but beautiful as art.
In the same way modern scientists have uncovered a world of bewildering asymmetry and
uncertainty. But they have charted it in simple, precise and beautiful formulas.

Picturesque scenes catch the eye of bad painters, as poetic emotions win the hearts of bad
poets. ‘One never paints a portrait of the Parthenon,’ as Picasso said. ‘One makes paintings
with a village of the midi or an old chair.’

Artists are now loath to go to bed with beauty, for fear that they’ll wake up with kitsch.

The real enemy of art is not ugliness but banality, as the real enemy of truth is not ignorance but
conviction and common sense.

In merely good paintings, such as Renoir’s, you have to squint to see the art for the prettiness.

Rainbows and sunsets are tokens of God’s lack of taste.

31 The ugliness of beauty

Kitsch is not ugliness but a sad aspiration to beauty. And the world is in love with kitsch, since it
tells the world how lovely it is. We colour the grey vapidity of life with the glamorous vapidity of
its depictions. Industry has made the world so hideous by overstuffing it with functional things,
that we try to beautify our lives by ornamenting them with fancy trash. How ugly we make the
world by seeking to overlay our cheap squalor with a more squalid opulence. And if, as
Lawrence says, ‘the human soul needs beauty more than bread,’ why have we made the world
and our own souls so ugly, just to cram ourselves with more bread?

32 The audience of kitsch

The audience corrupts everything. It clamours to be fed pap and then to be flattered for its fine
taste. And it bows down to those who know how to court it most cloyingly. And the most corrupt
audience of all may well be our own self.
A work of art is shaped by the formal demands of its medium, a piece of kitsch meets the
crowd’s demand to be amused.

A crowd might be a good judge of what is served up to it. But where the crowd is judge, all that
is served up to it will be dreck.

Preachers are more liable to be corrupted by the crowd than the crowd is to be saved by them.

Each age has its own style of spectating as well as of creating. And the style of this age is at
once hysterically fawning and yet mawkishly self-flattering. We learn at second-hand how to
respond to a performance from the sort of responses that we have seen others make. The
crowd must be trained how to clap, yell, whoop and whistle on cue.

Those who aim to affect others must first act as their own audience. So stirred are they by their
own playing that they form a persuasive model for their real audience to copy. They intoxicate it
by their own self-intoxication.

An audience is electrified more by its own applause than by the skill of the performance. The
roar of its own ovation bears it aloft.

NOVELTY AND NOSTALGIA

33 The modernist rearguard

After the rigorous experiments of modern art, kitsch has restored story to literature, figuration to
painting, tonality to music, and reference to architecture. Is it any wonder then that the mass of
people love kitsch and don’t care for what is authentically modern?

Art has at all times run more swiftly than beauty, as Cocteau said. But in the twentieth century it
had to speed up so much to keep in the fore of kitsch, that it came to look graceless and
unshapely. It is now kitsch that sets the pace of beauty.

Kitsch is candied romanticism. It is a confection made to please the sweet tooth of the masses.

The victorian age was the vanguard of encroaching kitsch. And modern art was a doomed
rearguard campaign against it. It was not a crisis of representation. It was a last efflorescence of
autonomous imagination, before consumerism turned the whole world to kitsch. But present day
artists are in league with kitsch, and it pays them well for their collaboration.

It’s no marvel so many of the great modernists were reactionaries in politics, as modern art was
an aesthetic reaction against the progress of kitsch. It was kitsch that was the avant-garde of
modern times.
Modernism gave art a shock treatment which killed the patient.

34 Kitsch is up-to-date but not modern

Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that is not modern. And that is by far the most of it. All
race to keep up-to-date, but no one knows how to be modern. Artists now have neither the
discipline to keep to the old ways nor the daring to shape what is new.

Kitsch is the slick that was left coating the whole world when the wave of modernism went out.

Kitsch is the lurid corpse light given off by the mouldering cadaver of dead forms.

Photography memorializes the sadness of time in a medium that claims to prevail against it. In
photography technology takes the place of artistic form, and sentiment and sensation take the
place of artistic feeling. It paints the icons of our narcissism. The camera is the ever-open eye of
our consumer cravings and the mirror of our self-infatuation.

The camera acted as the cannon of kitsch, which battered down the ramparts of art and
authentic experience. We now pose and perform our lives for its eye.

35 Novelty and nostalgia

Novelty and nostalgia, being the pulse of desire, form the rhythm of kitsch.

Culture has died at both ends. We pay no heed to the past, and we can make no work for the
time to come. So we forge the kitsch that will fizzle for a day and go out.

These days fashion is the foe of what is new, and nostalgia is the vandal of the past.

Nostalgia is the style of an age that has to keep on reinventing everything and yet can’t make
anything new.

We now dose ourselves with the stimulant of novelty and the soporific of nostalgia. We want to
ride into the future cushioned by our cosy reveries and propelled by our rage for newness. So
we look forward to a future engineered by our sleek machines and upholstered with a twee
cottage handicraft.

Even as we junk the past, we wallow in nostalgia. And though there is no future now for us, we
can’t wait to race towards it.

In kitsch’s hall of mirrors we divide our time between the latest fads and the hollowest nostalgia.

Nostalgia now recalls us not to a richer and more authentic reality but to the artificial images of
technicolour kitsch.
People are mawkishly nostalgic in proportion to their rootless mobility.

People now are in thrall to a nostalgia leached of tradition, and they hunger for novelty devoid of
newness. They want all things fresh and all familiar.

36 Juvenile and senile

Kitsch is the puerile style of a senile culture.

Kitsch is restlessly innovating, ceaselessly obsolescing, yet never original.

The world has grown old, but it has not grown up. It has skipped straight from childishness to
senility.

Kitsch knows how to play on all our childhood memories. And our memories of childhood make
up an anthology of kitsch. The aroma of the same dead flowers will delight us for the rest of our
lives.

Your tastes are fixed for life in early youth when you are most attuned to the hackneyed
attractions of kitsch.

37 Kitsch memories
People are more stirred by truisms than by new concepts, and by revisiting one of their old
haunts than by visiting a spot for the first time. They respond less to the thing as it is than to
their own prior response to it. So they weep when they picture how they wept before. ‘We are
moved,’ Pavese says, ‘because we were previously moved,’ or even because we were not, or
because somebody else was.

I melt at reminders of objects whose originals would leave me cold.

A choice piece of kitsch marks each stage of your life. And you recall your milestones by their
associations with it.

38 Consumerist nostalgia
Our consumer nostalgia tells us that our memories are unique. But all we have now are the
common memories of consumer nostalgia. As Lampedusa predicted, in the world that was
coming no one would have any unusual recollections.

Your nostalgia makes you feel that you must be immortal. What other barque could lug this
cargo of precious memories through till the end of time?
Even our nostalgia is now just a hunger for the junk from the day before yesterday. Its date
grows shorter and shorter in this accelerated and forgetful world, where all is preserved and
nothing is remembered. Kitsch is personally nostalgic but culturally amnesic.

As our taste grows worse, fashion dates more quickly, and the recent past seems to us
intolerably gauche, even as we’re on the point of reviving it.

39 The death of tradition

In our senescent age of forgetting, the old ways persist as an undead kitsch. They flatter us that
we are preserving the past, while we are at work constructing our rootless and ruthless future.
Having junked our age-old customs, we trump up fatuous replicas of our own and other cultures.
So we cherish antiques, bibelots, christmas, dead ceremonies, re-enactments, anniversaries,
souvenirs, museums, revivals, eclectic bric-a-brac, marzipan monarchies, and all the scraps of
heritage.

We now refuse to be bound by tradition, but we keep up a yearly round of small personal
routines to solemnize our consuming.

Kitsch is the sickly sweet odour exuded by the corpse of a civilization which has been
embalmed in sugar.

Virgil was the prissy kitsch of Homer, as Rome was the pious kitsch of Greece. The New
Testament was a kitsch rewriting of the Old. And post-modernism was the belated kitsch of
modernism.

We can conserve only by creating, and we can renew only by preserving. A culture lives by
what it hands on, but ours will die by what it eats up. It’s too exhausted to build anything, but it is
hungry enough to devour everything. ‘To carry on a tradition,’ Lawrence points out, ‘you must
add something to the tradition.’

SENTIMENTALITY

40 Sentimentality
Mawkish people don’t claim to feel a real emotion, they really do feel a confected one.

Sentimentalists tell us that we are all conjoined as one. Realists know that each of us is on our
own. Optimists trust that we can slip our isolation and affirm our connectedness. But the
disconsolate see that our connectedness won’t save us.
Human victims touch us most poignantly when they are portrayed like animals, speechless,
guiltless, bewildered, forgiving. But animals stir our tears most when they are shown to be like
us, with an identity, a story and a name.

Sentimentalists, like sycophants, are sickened by any sentimentality that smells unlike their
own. Each age must concoct a new style of mawkishness to set it off from its predecessor’s, so
that it won’t see it for what it is and feel ashamed of it. In our day artists cook up an egalitarian
schmaltz to cleanse their palate of the cloying schmaltz of their parents and grandparents.

41 Producing sentiment
It takes less skill to coax people to mimic what you feel than it does to move them by the real
cause that made you feel. We weep not because we see the victims aching, but because we
see the onlookers weeping. We are touched more by the tears of the bystanders than by the
pangs of the sufferers.

People gaze on the anguish of others as a show to arouse their emotions. And then the
spectacle of their sensibility melts their own hearts. They consume sentimentality in producing it,
and produce it in consuming it. ‘The orator,’ Montaigne notes, ‘will be moved by the lilt of his
own voice and by his feigned imagination. He will let himself be drawn in by the mood he is
personating.’ His own excitement inflames him, and this brings his flow of words to the boil.

We are fooled by our own feigned moods, and warmed by frigid images. ‘Nothing tempts my
tears like tears,’ Montaigne says, ‘not just real ones but tears of any kind, in feint or paint.’

Sentimentalists are moved by the sight of how much their gestures of sentimentality have
moved their dupes.

‘Tears in the reader only if there are tears in the writer,’ as Frost wrote. But they are both fake
tears.

We are disgusted by the stench of others’ mawkishness as much as we love to sniff the heady
bouquet of our own.

42 Loss
Mawkish people swoon at the small and understated, at blanks and absences, erasures and
their sad traces, at fractured, maimed and unfinished things, the overlooked, exile and
displacement, at what they’ve lost and what they’ve dredged from the wreckage, the melancholy
of failed crossings and failed connections, intersections of hurt and splendour, brief respites of
grace and small redemptions, the grandeur of transcendence and the poignancy of not attaining
it, frail affirmations, gaps and silences, the forlorn poetry of dates, maps and lists, the sadness
of fine intentions, since they all miss their aim.

People are in love with loss. They have lost others or they have lost their own selves. They’ve
lost youthfulness and innocence. They have lost their roots. They’ve lost paradise. They have
lost home or their faith and all the days that they have let slip away. Modernity is an elegy of
loss and longing, and rupture is its pathos. And those who aim to seem modern try to pass off
their nostalgia as a yearning for the new.

43 Cynical sentiment
Sentimentality is the winner pretending to be a loser, the brutal pretending to be bruised by their
own fine feelings, the uncaring pretending to care, the actorly repressing itself as the reticent,
the dry-eyed squeezing out tears for their own and their viewers’ delectation.

Cold-blooded creatures love to bask in the genial sun of sentimentality. Frigid hearts thaw out in
tears, which veil their calculating and lure others to serve their behests. A callous sharper can,
like Carroll’s walrus, weep thankful millstones for the nobleness of some sorry wretch whom
he’s piously defrauding of half his life’s work. Hard hearts make their dinner on the sloppiest
mush. A nice man may be a man of nasty ideas, as Swift said. But a nasty man is sure to be a
man of mawkish ones.

We justify the harm that we do our foes by calumniating them. And we hide the harm that we do
our friends by our praise of them. We act kindly towards some people, so that we can think
cruelly of them. And we think fondly of others, so as to hush our qualms while we’re swindling
them.

We are hard-hearted and softheaded.

Our maudlin and abject souls love underdogs, so long as they come out on top.

44 The swindle of sentimentality

Sentimentalists don’t have emotions that they don’t wish to pay for, as Wilde claimed, they have
emotions in the hope that they will be paid for them. They whip up a specious effect by
converting a fictive defeat to an affecting moral victory. So they gain power by feigning
weakness, and milk a lost cause to make an unwarranted triumph of self-display. They are
swindlers who take in their dupes by pretending to be at the mercy of their own emotions.

These days you can garner a hoard of money or votes for your own use by assuring
individualistic customers and electors that we are all in this together.
Maudlin writers make a show of conscripting art to fight for the good, but they just use a sham
goodness to mock up a heart-warming tableau.

45 Mawkish irony
Some writers use cynicism as a jet plush to set off the paste beads of their sentimentality. And
some build up a large balance of irony and scoffing so as to have a long line of tearful credit on
which to draw. Mawkishness thrives in dry and harsh climates. It flourishes both in the
blathering perplexity of Beckett’s plays and in Hemingway’s swaggering tough guy self-pity.

Self-mockers pretend to have mastered their emotions, maudlin souls pretend to have been
mastered by them. It’s hard to tell which of the two is the more deceived by their own pose.

Irony and sentimentality each work by indirection and disavowal. Sentimentalists are as arch
and crafty as ironists, and ironists are as self-satisfied as sentimentalists. Sentimentality is a
sugared irony, or irony is soured pathos. Mawkish people draw attention to their sighs by
pretending to stifle them. But the sardonic use a sly hyperbole to deflate overblown fools.

46 Restraint
Sentimentalists pretend to feel less than they pretend to feel. The neophytes of pathos revel in
excess, but its veterans revel in austerity and inarticulacy. They flaunt their tears most
touchingly by their brave efforts to stem them, as David does in his threnody for Absalom. Our
hearts melt at the sight of someone struggling courageously to get the better of a distress that
they hardly feel. They seem to refuse to yield to a mood which they don’t quite feel, to lure you
to feel it in their stead. But they are then touched by the response that they set off in you.

Maudlin and garrulous authors and eras resound with the babbling praise of silence. As Morley
wrote of Carlyle’s clatter, ‘The whole of the golden Gospel of Silence is now effectively
compressed in thirty-five volumes.’ Most of those who praise quietness mean other people’s.

CLICHÉS

47 Clichés
Words are a wilderness, which we make a home in with our clichés.

Some people’s stock opinions can be elicited as predictably as the saliva of Pavlov’s dogs.
Speak the right words, and their lips will dribble the reflex formulas that you have heard each
time before.
The trunk of language is now held up only by the clichés which are throttling it, and the sole fruit
that it yields are catchphrases.

I trust that I have mastered a theme or a style when I can fluently improvise its overworked
idioms.

I loathe others’ jargon and verbiage as much as I love my own. And I label their views as
platitudes if they sound foreign to my own. But I’m dazzled by any that deviates an inch from the
standard ones and that damns them as cant.

People are not more commonplace on supreme occasions, as Butler claimed. The supreme
occasion just shows up how commonplace they were the whole time, as Eichmann made clear
at his execution.

48 Political clichés
People will always think and speak in stale phrases. And so each kind of regime has to
manufacture the artificial ambience of accepted claptrap which will sustain it. In a dictatorial
state the public talk in the cant of dictatorship. And in a democracy they talk in the cant of
democracy. A democratic leader who thought and spoke in any form but platitudes and clichés
would be lost. A depraved state is maintained by its murderous lies, a good state by its benign
ones. The propaganda of tyrants appals us because it is so vile, while the fables of
egalitarianism are so well-meaning that we take them to be true.

A regime tries to make up for the banality of its concerns by the pomposity of its rhetoric.

49 Sloganeering
Though we shut our hearts to principles, we keep up a passionate faith in our slogans. For if we
let these go, how could we grasp or recall what it is that we are to believe? ‘The crowd,’ as
Tocqueville wrote, ‘relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has
learned.’ They remind us of ideals which we don’t much care for, and help us to digest the
creamy and savoury slop we make of them.

‘Man,’ as Stevenson said, ‘is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by
catchwords.’ Our ideology does our thinking for us, and our slogans tell us what our ideology
means. And now brand names mean even more to us than slogans.

Kitsch keeps up our faith in all the fine ideals that we know are not true. And, as Dostoyevsky
points out, ‘people can’t do without grand words.’
Empty symbols fill our minds, even to the point where we will fight and kill for them, because we
are as empty as they.

It’s those who have no feeling for language that are bewitched by brash slogans, pretentious
titles, nomenclature, hackneyed tags, brand names and doggerel. And it’s those who scorn
mere words that turn out to be their most egregious dupes.

People mention the brand names of the things they own with the same smugness that they yap
about their friends. Are their possessions like friends, or are their friends like possessions?

50 Only craft can save us from the clichés of the heart

All the commonplaces on a theme as commonplace as love are true. And all the truths on a
theme as empty as death are commonplace. ‘All sensible talk about vitally important topics,’
Peirce says, ‘must be commonplace.’ A hit song has as much to teach you about love as one of
Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Each of us feels that love makes us new, and yet love has inspired none of us with a new
thought.

Love and death are two topics that give a free pass to our bad taste.

The heart speaks in the language of clichés. And how snugly our roomiest emotions fit into the
threadbare suit of our starched opinions. Our lustiest sensations talk in the weariest tropes. But
the worked-up passions of poets find the most durable words to voice what we feel. Only those
who are not in love are free to craft a fresh discourse of desire.

51 Clichés old and new

A traditional state is ballasted by its time-tried prejudices. But an innovative state is thrust on by
its new-fangled prejudices, which it has to keep refurnishing and restocking. Conservatives and
progressives differ primarily in the vintage of their fixed views.

The herd lives its inherited truisms, but talks its new-minted ones. ‘Every generation,’ notes
Thoreau, ‘laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.’ We keep venerable
wizened clichés in place of wisdom, and voguish ones in place of wit. And we love old clichés
for their elegance, and new ones for their cleverness.

We love fashion because it is a compilation of the most up-to-date clichés.

52 Accelerated clichés
In our age of accelerated banality we produce, distribute and discard our spicy clichés as rapidly
as fast food. Our coinages turn to clichés the instant that we mint them. They sparkle like pop
songs, trite yet effervescent, modish, flashing and saleable. They used to fetter our minds to the
past. Now they fetter them to the forgetful present. We think in tired platitudes, and speak and
write in set phrases. Our motley vernacular imparts to our thoughts a variegation that they have
not earned. Our speech grows more miscellaneous as our vision shrinks and shrivels. Though
our thoughts are barren, our words twitch promiscuously.

We all love to read the latest books, since they are patched up from current clichés to pander to
the platitudes of the hour. As Burckhardt wrote, ‘the shams of today are addressed to us and
are therefore amusing and intelligible.’

53 The proof of repetition

We are won over more by repetition than by reason. ‘Tell a lie once and it stays a lie,’ Goebbels
said, ‘tell it a thousand times and it becomes a truth.’

We keep descanting on our views, in the hope of convincing others or at least of convincing
ourselves. ‘By often repeating an untruth,’ Jefferson notes, ‘men come to believe it themselves.’
And our own iterations persuade us better than another’s.

When I trot out my readymade thoughts, far from blushing at how outworn they are, I gloat that
I’ve proved them right once more.

54 The pride and pleasure of repetition

I stoop to pick up the opinions of others, and I take pride in reprising my own.

‘He that knows little,’ says the saw, ‘soon repeats it.’ Others have to keep reasserting their
views, because they have such a dearth of them. But I feel entitled to reassert mine, since they
make such rich sense of the world. Who would not choose to reutter their own ragged
falsehoods rather than learn a new truth? ‘The creeds are believed,’ Wilde said, ‘not because
they are rational, but because they are repeated.’ We take more pleasure in reaffirming our
illusions than in excavating the facts.

My own refrains soothe and amuse me as much as those of others anger and irk me. My dried-
up phrases sound to me as wise as proverbs and as witty as jokes. And I’m sure that they do so
to others too. So I feel a duty to use them as often as I can.
People love to harp on their convictions, because they think so little about them and so much of
themselves. They can’t keep off their hobbyhorse, not because they think so seriously about it,
but because they think so trivially about everything.

We keep recapitulating our ideas, not because they contain so much matter, but because our
heads contain so little.
GOODNESS, TRUTH AND BEAUTY

Contents

Moral amateurs

Banality of goodness

Love of truth

Cruel truth

Redemptions of art

Representation

Need of art

Art gives meaning

Life for art’s sake

We keep murmuring goodness, truth and beauty, as if they formed the motto of a country from
which we have been exiled, or the three last words of a dialect that we have ceased to speak.
These are the values that we think we live by. Our beauty is accidental, our good is economical,
and our truth is superficial.

People don’t want truth but the information that brings power. And they don’t want beauty but
the luxury which they use to flaunt their success.

Every day the world proves how determined it is to spoil any beauty that it finds and to shut its
ears to any truth that it is told.

If we really died for want of truth or beauty, the world would have been unpeopled an age ago.
But we are more likely to die from their possession.

Codes of good and evil are concerned with souls and individuals. But what gives life is systems
and things with no soul, forms, traditions, ecologies, works, ideas and styles.
Of course a human being is a machine. The question is, What is the machine able to make?

The cosmos is many not one, dynamic not static, corporeal and not a spirit, contingent not
necessary, disjoint not unitary, amoral and numb to what is just, godless but numinous. It is
ceaselessly becoming. Not one thing stands still. All is flux, change, strife and commotion. It is a
machine, conjured out of nothing, with no designer and no purpose.

MORAL AMATEURS

1 Virtue corrupts
By dedicating ourselves to a categorical code of right and wrong, we will debase humanity and
despoil the virginal earth. Moral ideals warp the type, but are too weak to rehabilitate the
individual. ‘As mankind perfects itself,’ said Flaubert, ‘man degrades himself.’ By struggling to
set up a pure justice we will tread down all that is delicate and precious. Yet we still won’t make
anyone happier or more virtuous, though we will diminish the world by trying.

People are perverted by ideals of virtue as much as by examples of vice. ‘When the great way
degenerated,’ Lao Tzu says, ‘human kindness and the moral law ensued.’

Some people’s hearts turn to iron by carrying on a slow struggle for a just cause. ‘That which is
crooked cannot be made straight.’

To be virtuous is one of the few things that human kind is not quite unnatural enough for. But it
is just unnatural enough to think that it can be.

2 Justice is a means, not the meaning

No virtue is an end in itself. They all must have a function. Courage without a worthy object is
mere foolhardiness and daredevilry. To be good, a quality must be good for something.

The operations of life may be moral, but its meaning is not. Right and wrong make up a small
component of life, of how we ought to live, of how we should judge and be judged, of what will
pain or please us. The pressing daily question, how am I to live, rarely has a moral answer. And
if it did, it would be a lot less worth living.

You may do no wrong, and yet your life may still be all wrong.

Few people act for the reason that they want to do good. Yet most of them can’t act without
assuming that they are doing good.

The state does not exist to establish equity. It makes use of it as an expedient to preserve its
own being. People don’t live in groups so that they can act justly. They act justly so that they
can live in groups. Justice is a means, not an end, however much moralists may say otherwise.
It serves as traffic control for our wants. But it is not the objective that we set out for.

3 The necessary pretence

Moral laws are regulations which guide how you ought to act. They are not propositions which
are true or false. So they correspond to nothing in nature, and describe nothing real. They are
like the rules of any game, like tennis, croquet or cricket. You must abide by them, or there
would be no living in society. But they have no existence or validity outside it. The rules of the
game are not the purpose of the game. And though all good athletes must play by them, the
best are not the ones who stick to them most conscientiously.

We could not live with our fellows, if we did not possess a false image of justice. But we could
no more do so, if we had its true form.

Virtue is like clothing. It doesn’t do much good, but we need it to disguise ourselves from each
other, so that we can put up with one another.

There are as many justices as there are tastes. But we have to speak as if there were no more
than one, so that we can live in peace. And there is only one taste as there is only one justice.
But we posit that there must be a gamut of them, so that we can live in peace.

4 Moral amateurs
The first task of the moral law is to fool us that we are moral beings. And so its first article of
faith is a lie.

People are moral beings by bare chance. They are intrinsically creatures who will, strive, desire
and compete, who crave fulfilment and never find it.

How much courage or cowardice you show is more a result of chance than of character. And
your character itself is the sum of all the chances you have met with.

Few of us devote ourselves either to good or to bad. ‘Great vices and great virtues are
exceptions among mankind,’ said Napoleon. We are reluctant conscripts of virtue and cheap
amateurs of vice. These are like any one object, and we have ten thousand such objects on
which we’ve set our hearts. ‘Most evil,’ Arendt says, ‘is done by those who never make up their
minds to be good or evil.’ But this is no less true of most of the good that is done. Specialists in
getting on, how could we be more than dilettantes of integrity or iniquity? These are instruments
that we use. They are not the end to which we pledge our lives. ‘I for my part,’ Confucius said,
‘have not yet seen one who had a real love of goodness, nor one who execrated wickedness.’
5 Reluctant virtue
I do good reluctantly, but I do evil with relish.

‘Man,’ as Leopardi wrote, ‘is almost always as wicked as he needs to be,’ though most of us act
honourably where we have no choice. Most people are as good as they have to be, and as bad
as they can get away with. They have the means to do more good than they wish to. And they
wish to do more mischief than they dare to. They are willing to be as vile as they need to be. But
most of the time they need to be less vile than they are willing to be. So expedience reduces
them to a reluctant rectitude.

God gets our bodies, but the devil gets our souls. In the doing of any evil deed, the spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak. People are too timid to dare all the wrong that they would like to
do. And they don’t want to do all the pedestrian good that their own profit might prod them to do.

The malice of our schemes is held in check by our incompetence more than by our propriety.

Our better qualities are ready to lay down their lives for the sake of our baser ones.

BANALITY OF GOODNESS

6 Moral mediocrities
We do such scant evil and such scant good, and we intend still less. Yet we are judged by what
we never aimed at. Very few of our acts are done with a moral end in view. And yet we are
happy to submit to this test, since we don’t doubt that we do act from moral motives.

Most of our virtue consists in prudently refraining from doing the wrong that we might do.
Goodness is cautious, parsimonious and negative. We are self-serving, but not criminal or
saintly. Right and wrong are late-born and sickly.

Ambition and self-interest persevere. Virtue and vice faint and falter. There are far more moral
mediocrities than moral monsters. ‘A dwarf in evil, a dwarf in good,’ as Ibsen styled it. Our
conduct is couched in a thin and crude ethical idiom.

How nobly I would have behaved, if I had been caught up in a real storm, such as a war. But in
this low pass I have no spur to act better than the insect that I am.

One thing to be said for wisdom and the rest of the virtues is that they never go to excess.

When I act for my own ends, I project the profit. But when I act for the sake of others, I count the
cost. So I’m as brisk and busy in my own interest as I am sluggish in theirs.
Our technical expertise has not outrun our moral insight. Knowledge of all kinds has outrun our
care. But did it not do that a long time ago?

7 The banality of evil

It is not evil that is banal, but people, the saved no less than the sinful. Evil becomes as ordinary
as the state makes it. The third reich made devilry utterly routine, and so society grew utterly
devilish. And a just regime, if it aimed to do as much good as Germany did harm, would need to
enlist its Eichmanns of plodding virtue.

The most banal thing about evil might be the platitudes we use to respond to it.

A great abomination such as a world war seems to purge the age of its banality like a blood
offering. But the crimes against humanity, which we deplore, tempt us to deplore the whole of
humanity and deduce that it may deserve the crimes that have been done to it.

We make holocausts, not when a few of us choose to behave with inhuman brutality, but
because most of us are humanly unmoved by all but our own hopes of gain.

An evil genius, such as Hitler or Stalin, though quite nondescript himself, may be the cause of
stupendous effects.

Those who childishly crave approval cravenly idolize transgressors. Timid and ailing people, like
Nietzsche, make fools of themselves when they cheer on the crimes of the strong and hearty.

8 The banality of goodness

Good is no less banal than evil. And if either of them does rise above ordinariness, it is by
fighting with an overpowering foe. It is the struggle and not the cause that lends the lustre.

The motives that prompt miscreants to do evil are often as trivial as its effects are prodigious.
But both the motives and effects of the good that the just do are equally trivial.

is banal because it is so natural. And good is banal because it is so conventional.

Good is as ordinary as evil in its causes, but it is far less spectacular in its consequences.

The masterpiece of banality will prove to be the wrecking of the globe by so many well-meaning
people striving so hard to hand on a better life to their children.

The saints as much as the sinners are sustained by their slogans and catchphrases, not by the
truth. These show them where their duty lies, or at least ease their mind when they fail to follow
it.
There are numberless vain and irritable pedants of virtue, but no geniuses, though there are
plenty of adepts of instinctive self-sacrificing affection.

If a great number of people practise a virtue, we scorn it for its cheapness. And if few do, we
scorn humanity for possessing such a paucity of it.

9 Circumstance is king
My moral nature runs so shallow, that the least churn flowing from a fresh fancy or a change of
luck is enough to muddy it.

We are not simply generous or kind or honest. We are generous or kind or honest to this person
and not to that, in this way and not in that, at this time but not at that. Our virtues are partial,
specialized, arbitrary, conditional, malleable and circumstantial.

Virtue itself must consent to be corrupted before it can do any good in this world. The saints
don’t know how much they owe the devil for the completion of their work.

All our traits, both straight and skewed, bend to wheeling chance. ‘Circumstance,’ as Twain
notes, ‘is man’s master.’

Things seem so complex because they shift at the whim of the least change in their
circumstances.

10 Necessity
Necessity may make an honest man a knave, as Defoe said. And yet the need to live in peace
with others keeps many a knave honest.

We feel so hard pressed by our own wants, that we presume we have a right to press hard on
all around us in our raving to sate them.

We don’t doubt that we are free yet necessary beings, in control of our own compulsions and
aware of ourselves. But in truth we are contingent yet unfree, the dupes of our own drives and
ignorant of our own motives. We are assortments of contingencies. Yet we are sure that our
path is destined and that our will is free. And it is those who see that they are puppets that gain
the freedom to play.

11 Moral conformity
We conform even in our crimes. ‘Men are as the time is,’ as Shakespeare showed. We covet
what our neighbours covet, and lie as they lie. We murder in murderous times. In time of war
cowards are the first to take up arms. The hard thing would be to stand out from the bellicose
herd. ‘The virtue in most request,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘is conformity.’ My self-interest and my
stupidity lead me to comply in my moral acts as they do in all the rest. We are chameleons, who
take our moral tinge from our surrounds. Few of us turn out to be much better or much worse
than the world in which we move. ‘If people had no vices but their own,’ Chesterfield wrote, ‘few
people would have so many as they have.’

‘The whole morality of the world,’ Multatuli wrote, ‘could perhaps be summed up in the words,
Do as others do.’ The herd shields itself from the individual by its codes of right and wrong. And
the individual defies the omnivorous claims of the collective by insurrection or by indifference.

The most refined prescriptions of right and wrong reproduce the first precepts implanted in the
nursery. Thus, as Dryden wrote, ‘the child imposes on the man.’ We crib our most exalted ideals
from crude and puerile sources.

12 The rewards of virtue are fixed by the state

People are neither good nor evil. They simply seek their own ends. But the state decrees which
kinds of acts they will profit by. And so it is not nature but social arrangements that make reward
follow on right action and happiness depend on virtue. A government can’t make its citizens just.
All it can do is bar them from being rewarded when they act unjustly.

The inhabitants of a just state do right from the same motives of habit and self-interest that
induce those of an unjust one to do wrong. In order to be virtuous, all they need do is calculate
and conform. But you can be sure that you have dropped into a fiendish world, if in resolving to
act rightly you have to do more than compute what will best serve your own ends. In a wicked
society the just have no choice but to act like heroes.

When the state turns society to hell, people will act like devils to fit in or get on.

13 The sterility of virtue

Since life is at bottom unjust, to seek to set up justice as the sovereign good would be to strike
at the very roots of life. It would shrivel its fruits, and set in train a course of events which will
end in the death of the earth.

A moral code is a needful hygiene, a drilling in what is clean and unclean. But this would in its
turn grow to be a baleful distemper if we gave it too much leeway. ‘Be not righteous overmuch.’
Everyday virtues are disseminated almost as contagiously as everyday greeds. The air swarms
with a haze of righteous viruses of fine feelings and angelic intentions, which your coldness
alone can save you from catching.
Our callousness keeps us in sound moral health, as our immune system keeps us in sound
physical health.

We are God’s songbirds. And he cares nothing for our flat virtues and clanging sorrows, but only
for how sweetly we sing.

This magnificent civilization which has been built up by bloodshed and grim exploitation will
soon be pulled down by happiness, good works and freedom.

Why make yourself a eunuch just to be stupidly good? Purify the will, and you sterilize the
imagination. But if you can craft a rarity by becoming corrupt, won’t it be worth the cost? In the
kingdom of the imagination salvation is through sin, and the pure in heart have no place.

14 Virtue makes us small

To set much store on right and wrong would be to stunt the myriad wondrous gifts that we might
excel in. Justice, like money, cuts everything down to barren quantity and measurement. It
would dry up all our lusher endowments, and drown our minds in empathic trifles. Seek to be
scrupulously just in small things, and you grow unjust to large ones. Purity violates all our more
exalted aims. It is the chauvinism of morality.

By straining to act like a do-gooding archangel, you don’t turn into a devil, as Montaigne
claimed. You merely grow mediocre in all other arenas.

Life would be unliveable if you did not abide by some minimal code of right and wrong. And yet
it would not be worth living if you tried to live by the true one.

Nothing great is good, and nothing good is great. And the price of our straitened integrity is
creative sterility. Morality is the domain of the mediocre.

The mischief that we do may not be worth much, but we would be worth nothing at all were it
not for the mischief that we do. You should do as Blake urged, and put off holiness to put on
intellect.

There’s enough righteousness in the world to narrow our vision, but not to make us do much
real good.

Ours is not an age of steep moral decline. It is an age of a dizzying decline into morality.

15 Virtue against truth

We have mandated greed to propel us to act, and moral preening to fence in how we think.
Thought erodes virtue, and virtue arrests thought. ‘Every virtue inclines toward stupidity,’ as
Nietzsche wrote, ‘and every stupidity toward virtue.’ The law sows the imagination with salt.
Thought liquefies moral codes, and they ossify intelligence. The sole reason to think about them
is to learn why they are not worth the thought that we spend on them. ‘Any preoccupation with
ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct,’ Wilde wrote, ‘shows an arrested intellectual
development.’

As soon as we start to think morally, we become stupid, commonplace and self-justifying. As

Rimbaud wrote, ‘morality is weakness of the brain.’ A sound mind is allergic to moralizing. And
yet moral and political gossip are the closest that most minds come to thought. Virtue makes
living safe but thinking small. Truth stays clear of the righteous, and they stay clear of it.

Righteousness is born of mental poverty, and festers into moral depravity.

First the gods stupefied us by their limp miracles in a world that was so much more miraculous.
Now they do so by their stern and restrictive codes of good and evil in a world where they have
let loose so much mischief.

Truth lies hidden in the depths of hell. The saints stay in heaven with all their illusions.

16 Redeemed by evil
It’s hard to know which has been Adam’s more fruitful legacy to us, sin or death.

Shame and pride, sin and death, lust and rebellion. All these good things we owe to our fall.

A society needs the virtues to keep it in order, but it needs its vices if it hopes to thrive.

Artists use their pulsing desires as decoys to fix their attentiveness. By making art they don’t
sublimate their sexual energy but keep it on the boil, so that they can make more art. What else
have they to spur them into song? ‘The lust of the goat,’ as Blake states, ‘is the bounty of God.’

Civilization does not consist, as Baudelaire claimed, in the curtailment of the vestiges of original
sin, but in their enlargement and upraising into towering arrays of meaning and glory.

Why expel your dark angels? Learn from them. They have more to teach you than your wan
rectitude does. ‘The world,’ says William James, ‘is all the richer for having a devil in it.’ Life
would be a dull dough if it lacked the leaven of malice and wickedness.

You discipline your heart by resisting temptation. But you widen your mind by giving way to it.

The stance of the thinker should be a decent outward obedience and a licentious inner freedom.

LOVE OF TRUTH
17 We don’t love truth
Most people know enough of the truth to see that the truth is not what they want. And they want
so many other things so much, which they know truth will not give them.

We have a great gift for seeking out the truth, and then for turning our back once we’ve found it.
We may catch a glimpse of it, but when we try to make it part of our life, we turn it into a lie.

People so love truth, as Augustine said, that whatsoever else they love they have to dub it truth.

Speak your truth defiantly, since no one will have ears for it anyway. Their lack of interest sets
you free. Don’t worry that you have laid bare to them your inmost self. So caught up are they in
their own cravings, that they won’t have noticed or cared much.

In the far-flung provinces you are no one. And that frees you to spend your nothingness to make
some work that might be more than nothing.

Truth is a stranger to all but the few who are strangers in this world.

Truth is a social commodity. But most of the time it has no social value.

18 Unthinking reed
If our glory lies in reasoning, as Pascal said, then what is our life but a long disgrace?

For most of us the unexamined life is the sole one worth living, and undoubtedly the sole one
worth dying for. Yet philosophers tell us that life void of the search for truth does not befit a
human being. So who is mad? We unheeding sleepers, deaf to the dignity of truth? Or they who
prescribe a duty that most of us shirk, and who do so in order to sponsor the latest daft system
of their own, which lands them farther than ever from the truth?

Thinking is one of the rarer symptoms of the human disease. And it afflicts most virulently those
who are not quite human.

We have made it too easy to talk and too hard to think.

Think for yourself, urge philosophers, since they don’t doubt that if you do so you are sure to
think like them.

Most people tell you, ‘I’ve thought a lot about this.’ Thinkers know how little they think.

19 We seek our advantage, not the truth

Most people think only as much as they need to get what they want.
We have no wish to hear the truth, so by what miracle does it so often win out in spite of our
unwillingness? Our illusions gain us so much, that it takes some greatness of soul to pay truth
any mind at all.

We may be most willing to face the truth about the things that matter, since they are the ones
that matter least to us.

We can tell the truth about the things that we have no stake in. But we don’t doubt that most
things do. And so it’s rare that we are free to tell the truth at all. We circle round the truth, but
swoop straight for our gain.

Some of us are not shrewd enough to gauge which lies will best serve our need, but none of us
is so naive as to think that it will be served by the truth.

The knowledge that adds to our power is now the sole kind of knowledge that we care for.

20 Fun, not truth, is what we’re out for

The brave fight and die so that cowards might live in peace. And the wise search for the truth so
that dabblers and time-killers might snack on it as a titbit now and then.

People don’t care for truth. But they can’t get their fill of trivia, news, gossip and useable facts.

The most piercing truths just snick the skin of our shallow souls, whilst the dullest blots and
errors sink deep in and dye them.

We tipple such polite sips of truth, but swig down deep draughts of intoxicating lies.

We clutter our hearts with so much other sludge, how could they have room to love the truth?

21 The world hates the truth

A daring mind can’t hold out against the world’s vast imbecility. And taste and beauty can’t hold
back the tide of its vulgarity. Art can’t compete with kitsch, and we shove truth aside for thrills
and distractions. The more delicate goes down to the more coarse and loutish. The essential
stands no chance in its clash with the urgent and frivolous. And the earth stands no chance in
its duel with the world. ‘Against witlessness,’ Schiller wrote, ‘the veriest gods feud in vain.’

The real world is too brutal to be pierced by the truth. But truth can easily be crushed by brute
reality.

One sure way to bore or depress or offend people is to tell them the stark truth. You don’t know
the world very well, if you think that you can speak it and get off scot free. Those who know how
to use their eyes must learn to shut their mouths.
The world gives a home to your duplicitous creed, but will leave you houseless if you dare to
stay loyal to your treacherous truths.

22 Bored by the truth

Tell people the truth, and they are bored. Tell them that the truth offends them, and they are
offended. But tell them the lie that they love the truth, and they will love you.

We can’t bear the truth about ourselves, and we are bored by the truth about anything else.

Most people need to have truth diluted so much, that they can’t taste it. And then they find fault
with it for being so bland.

Most people would be bored by the truth, and yet their illusions are not very interesting, though
they are flattering.

The flesh fascinates us even when it is repulsive. But the truth bores us even when it is
beautiful.

23 Truth and conceit

Is it truth that we cherish, or the conviction that we alone have got it in our clasp, and the sweet
spectacle of the rest lost in their darkness? ‘No pleasure,’ Bacon says, ‘is comparable to the
standing on the vantage ground of truth, and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and
tempests in the vale below.’ But we want more than that. We want them to acknowledge that we
know more than they. As Hazlitt said, ‘We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove
others to be quite wrong.’

Like all goods, the goods of the mind gain their value from their scarcity.

People gird their opinions not with shaky corroboration but with unconquerable conceit. And
they take pride in their illogic, as if it shows they have bent reason to their own strong will. They
hold uncompromising ideas on a point, not because they have formed their own view of it, but
so that they won’t have to.

People take themselves so seriously, how could they afford to take ideas seriously, since these
would show them how light and trivial they are?

We think an idea true, if it gives meaning to our own lives. But it does so because it is our
egoism that gives meaning to ideas.
24 We love our dogmas, not the truth
People hug their dogmas, not because they long for surety, but because they hate to think.
They don’t crave the taxing certitude of proof but the factitious assurance of their own
congealed opinions. So they love certainty more than truth, and self-confidence more than
certainty. And certainty and self-confidence are easier got by ignorance than by knowledge.

What I venerate is my own dogmas. And what I abominate are those dogmas that I don’t hold. I
don’t treasure truth but my truths. And I don’t love God but my own god. The true God is my
god. The gods of others must be false gods. We don’t love an idea because we know it to be
true, we take it to be true because we have made it our own. I care for truth no more than
generals care for the regions that they have crushed.

25 The vanity of originality

Like a jealous suitor, each thinker wants to be both the first and last possessor of this darling
thought. And a truth that yields to anyone else’s wooing must be a whore.

I prefer my own errors to others’ truths. And my own truths I prefer because they are mine and
not because they are truths. ‘Each theorist,’ Rousseau said, ‘knows that his own scheme of
thought rests on no firmer underpinnings than the rest, but he upholds it because it is his. Not
one of them would not choose his own lie before the truth that someone else had found.’ They
are Pygmalions who, revolted by the fakes modelled by their rivals, fashion and fall in love with
their own.

26 Truth is made by conformity and conflict

Most of us take up our creed out of conformity, and keep it warm by our hostility. It’s only the
shared heat of our herd conformity or the factitious heat of a contest that gives ideas any
warmth at all for us. Like our sympathies, we suckle them with our animus. ‘When a thing
ceases to be a subject of controversy,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘it ceases to be a subject of interest.’
Extremists would lose half their fervour and stridency, if their foes ceased to assail and deride
them. How torpidly we love truth, yet how fanatically we loathe what we class as error. I have
my adversary to thank for reassuring me that I have right on my side.

Fighting is viewed as the supreme test of faith, and winning is viewed as the unarguable proof of
truth.

You take most of your notions from your allies, and you draw most of the passion with which
you defend them from your opponents.

To think with the majority is not to think at all.

How would you know what verities to love, if your antagonists did not teach you what lies you
hate? I know that truth delights me, because I feel that lies disgust me. ‘To be a real
philosopher,’ William James tells us, ‘all that is necessary is to hate someone else’s type of
thinking.’

27 Truth is a weapon
Facts are an instrumental good. Illusions are a social good. Truth is an anti-social good.

A lie is a truth that you don’t want to hear. But the lies that your side tells are a requisite tactic to
steal a march on the more insidious deceits of your opponents. ‘Nothing has an uglier look to us
than reason,’ Halifax wrote, ‘when it is not of our side.’ A falsehood that helps to confound our
enemies counts as a fact for us. As Nietzsche remarked, ‘how good bad music and bad reasons
sound when we march against an enemy.’ And when facts rebut our faith, we redouble it to
show that we are not to be cowed by mere evidence.

28 Changing minds
Most of us are ready to change our mind, except when someone gives us a good reason to do
so. We don’t come to believe because we have been convinced by proofs. We think that we are
convinced by proofs once we have already come to believe.

All opposition makes us more obstinate in our beliefs by irritating our self-regard to defend them.
‘How seldom is any man convinced by another man’s argument,’ exclaimed Johnson. ‘Passion
and pride rise against it.’ You know how fervently you love a cause from how fiercely you hate
its foes.

Truth excites us only when it becomes the subject of a quarrel. But once it does that, it is lost.

Even the most hypnotic orators are unable to induce us to take up an idea that we don’t already
hold. The most they can do is make us see that our own prejudices are congruent with their
crooked lies. Passion persuades only those minds that already share it.

The leaders from whom the crowd takes its views have the sort of mind that attends to the views
that interest only a crowd.

Passion and self-interest cue us to say what we don’t mean, so that we can make others accept
what they don’t believe.

We may praise and record the noble words spoken in a grand cause, but the words that change
minds at the time are the low ones meant to serve petty schemes.
Arguments change no one’s mind. They just needle them to make up counterarguments, and
entrench them in the same position.

CRUEL TRUTH

29 Truth is cruel
Truth is fragile but implacable. Illusion is elastic and forgiving. Truth fractures you. Your
pretences make you whole. Truth won’t relent, and death is the sole thing that you can rely on to
release you from its grip. ‘Truth has very few friends,’ as Porchia says, ‘and those few friends it
has are suicides.’ Like straining eunuchs at the close of a lifetime of arid devotion, they fall as
unregarded offerings to an indifferent god. Truth cares for us even less than we care for it.

However much you may love truth, truth, like the god of Aristotle, does not love you in return.

One person may be cheated by a barefaced lie, but we all feel diminished by a bald statement
of the truth.

We prefer evasions which flatter but diminish us to an honesty which would harrow but enlarge
us. ‘The lie that exalts us,’ Pushkin wrote, ‘is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.’ Truth
makes the wounds for which our lies must find the cure.

Truth has two seasons, its bleak midwinter and its scorching dog days.

Faith is a pillow, truth is a stone.

30 The sickening dish of truth

Truth is the most sickening dish that can be served up to a human being.

Truth is salt in the wounds. It may not cure, but it does clean.

Truth is not the stuff out of which we weave the fabric of our lives. The one garment it could
make would be a hair shirt.

You must be in dire straits, if you are reduced to relying on the truth. Or if you aren’t now, by
being so rash, you soon will be.

You must choose between loving life and knowing it. To know it is the more intelligent course,
which no one but a fool would take.

If you think that truth will save you, you will never find it. And if you did find it, you would be lost.
Truth consumes those who seek it as a flame consumes a candle, leaving nothing but snuff,
and then guttering.

Those who are happy have no reason to think. And those who think have reason to regret it.

31 Truth kills the ones who love it

It’s the deep souls, like strong swimmers, who drown, since they sally out too far. Truth kills the
finer specimens, the few who love it. The rest are resistant to it. Its virus has two strains. The
prevalent one, our everyday plain-speaking, is harmless and may inoculate you against more
hurtful truths, so that you can live and thrive. The second, scarce as leprosy, will cut you off
from the living and devour you. In this enlightened age truths still infest us like lice, but we have
learnt to tame the pernicious germs that they spread. They grow less deadly as they infect more
and more people.

People don’t doubt that they know what truth is like long before they have found it. They trust
that it will make them free or blessed or good, and that if it fails to do so, then it can’t be true.
But since they hold this, how could they reach the truth and why would they need to? They feel
no impulse to find it, since they are so sure that they have already got it.

32 Lies are shameless

The world garlands truth, and then cuts out her tongue. Lies strut up and down in the open, but
truth must be smuggled in like contraband. Lies swank and swagger, truth sneaks and scuttles.
‘Superstition, sacrilege and hypocrisy have ample pay,’ Luther wrote, ‘but truth goes a-begging.’
What need have we of truth, when our generous deceits give us all that we want? In this world
lies are gold and truth is lead.

Our lies make us loquacious. Truth strikes us dumb.

Honest people have not learnt the arts of self-deception by which the sincere win the trust of all.
And we withhold our faith from the few who have had the honesty to doubt themselves.

What gives an air of authority is sincerity and certainty. And liars have far more of these than
honest people. Tell the lies that you need to speak and that your listeners want to hear, and
you’ll feel at peace in playing your part, and you will win the love and trust of those for whom
you play it. ‘Dishonesty,’ wrote Dickens, ‘will stare honesty out of countenance any day of the
week.’
33 Truth makes us ashamed
Shame goads us to seek out the truth, and then truth makes us blush to utter it. It makes us feel
unclean and dooms us to isolation.

Good moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld or Pascal, chill all that they touch. They set off
epiphanies of embarrassment and disaffection, to ‘make mad the guilty, and appal the free.’
They hope to freeze the world’s heart with shame as it has frozen theirs with revulsion. But the
world is too shameless to smart at their acidulous truths. They work with a pitiless lucidity, and
would be glad if they could wipe out the whole of reality with a single rigorous book. So they free
us to think, and shame us for failing to, though few of us use this freedom or feel much
ashamed. Such an inquirer of desponding honesty would be a jansenist with no faith in God, a
doubter with no faith in reason or in doubt, a humanist with no faith in humanity.

Those who fight with truth on their side fight with one hand tied behind their back. They know
that there is so much that they must not say, or the whole fabric will come tumbling down.

Thinkers are the bad conscience of our race. So we pay them no heed. They would make us
more abashed and more worthy of our best selves.

34 The exterminating angel of truth

Truth is an exterminating angel. Truth, as Wilde says, ‘is often pitiless to her worshippers.’ It
would have quenched the last spark of life long ago, were it not that it comes down to earth so
infrequently. ‘Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet,’ Emerson warned.

Truth is too light and fine to touch us. But it is heavy enough to sink us.

If you don’t find the truth, you still have to fight for your illusions. And if you do find it, you will
have to fight for your life. We would do well to take to heart Shelley’s warning not to lift ‘the
painted veil which those who live call life.’ The facts of our sad lot are easy to trace but hard to
bear. The sole life worth living would be one spent in the hunt for truth. And yet truth, when
found, will inform you that life is not worth living.

You search for truth as a haven from life’s discouragements, and then, if you catch it, you need
to search for a haven from its desolations.

Only when you’ve lost the world can you find the truth.

The flash of truth is apt to irradiate what it illuminates. ‘Life,’ as Valéry said, ‘blackens at the
contact of truth.’

Truth would hollow life out. Lies fill it up.

35 The revenge of truth
Those who are cursed to think seek their devious redress by uncovering the desolating truth.
Cassandras of uncaring, their truths don’t help, because they don’t take the trouble to search
out the truths that might.

If truth has ravaged you, what cruel relief do you have but to infect others with it in turn? A
thinker can’t forbear passing on the execrable blight of truth, as parents can’t forbear passing on
the heinous contagion of life. ‘I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.’

The one comfort that thinkers have for the hard and dry life that thinking thrusts on them is to
think. All that they do and suffer makes life seem more intolerable, except the one activity that
shows them how intolerable it is.

Thinking is the least intoxicating addiction. But it makes all the more enjoyable ones seem not
worth enjoying.

Truth is an addiction, and its seekers are junkies. At first they find it hard to bear, till at last they
can’t bear anything else.

A thinker can endure life only by seeking out truths which make it unendurable.

For the purpose of tormenting those you hate, a truth will do as well as a lie.

36 No escape from the truth

What could be more awful than to speak and think the ruinous truth for so long, that you start to
believe it for real? When it has caught up with you, what asylum could you hope to find? ‘In
much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’

Life is a brute beast that is devouring you. You can’t stop it, but you can stick in its craw by
seeing it for what it is.

Truth blinds you, first with its brightness, then with its gloom.

It’s not we who chart a path to great truths. They hunt us down and find us out.

Truth doesn’t care for you or wish you well. It scalds and skins you, and strips you of all that you
have, and leaves you battered and humiliated.

Some people have to take up residence in hell, as the one place where they hope the truth
won’t find them.

What afflictions you have to wade through to find the truth. And the last and worst is then to land
on truth’s desert island.
37 The damage of ideas
The world, though so brute and unreasoning, can be turned on its head by an idea, but only by
one like christianity or communism which is as banal and false as itself. An ideology in the real
world spills as much blood as splintered glass in a kindergarten. Ideas are merciless. Even
those who give them no thought may still be snared as their prey. And whole countries, such as
Russia, though unmoved by ideas, have been brutalized by the most chimerical creeds. ‘Ideas
are dangerous,’ Chesterton wrote, ‘but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of
no ideas.’

‘Amusement is the happiness of those that cannot think,’ as Pope said. But might it then be just
as true that thinking is the amusement of those that cannot be happy?

38 The truth will not make you free

Honesty follows a devious calling. It is indifferent, but wants to make you different. It holds out to
you the promise of freedom, but it binds you to a stern obedience. Though it tempts you to
doubt yourself, it prods you to think for yourself. It lives in answers, but appears in questions. It
might make you happy, yet it shames and perplexes you.

The truth won’t make you free. It will only mock your bondage, which your falsehoods alone give
you the steadiness to bear. Ideologues, pent in the den of their dogmas, don’t doubt that the
truth will unshackle you, since they know that it has done so for them. And they deem it their
mission to build real gaols for the impious who lack their light.

It is lies that make us free. Truth yokes us to a harsh servitude.

Zealots are so sure that they hold the inerrant truth in their hands, that they presume they have
a mandate to juggle with it. Having brought it down from heaven, they must use all the wiles of
the serpent to set it up here on earth. Their faith is the only thing that justifies them, and so they
think only so much as might serve to justify their faith.

REDEMPTIONS OF ART

39 The blessings of form

Art is not beauty. It is the redemption of chance by form and of familiarity by imagination.

‘Poetry,’ wrote Novalis, ‘heals the wounds inflicted by reason.’ Knowledge desolates the world.
And only the most bountiful dreams can replenish it.
‘We have art,’ Nietzsche says, ‘lest we perish from the truth.’ Truth is a gorgon, which will do
you no harm, so long as you eye it sideways through the lens of art.

Those artists who seem to belittle life by portraying it so meanly still enlarge you by enlarging
your vision. Howsoever sadly they describe the world, their music and mastery still exalts us.
The poet may curse the world, but the poem is still a blessing.

The intellect dances, even when the heart is sad. It works in joy, so long as it can work. It may
tell of horrors, but it takes delight in chronicling them.

‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ What matter if you curse or bless,
praise or blame, so long as you do it all with gusto and relish? ‘Energy is eternal delight.’

40 Beauty makes us sad

How sad to think of what this unlovely world will make of beauty. Its ‘dearest veriest vein is
tears,’ as Hopkins wrote.

How strangely we or the world are made, that even beauty makes us sad. ‘The beautiful,’ Valéry
said, ‘is that which fills us with despair.’ Does it pierce us more by its vulnerability or by its self-
possession, by how close it comes to our hearts or because it is already so far out of reach?

Could anything be so desolating as perfection, or so poignant as imperfection? Unable to

discharge the overflowing joy that they move you to feel, you feel instead all things dissolving.

Beauty rakes you with a sad rapture and a wounded elation, reminding you of all that you have
lost or will soon lose. It tells you that you are a stranger in this world. Rilke described it as ‘onset
of terror we still have just the strength to bear.’ The silkiest grace hurts us, while the truth
delights us even as its spikes puncture our flesh. How could you relish all the world’s fragility
and loveliness, if you have not felt all its damage?

Beauty is less a promise of happiness than a shock of distress.

41 Truth is not beauty, beauty is not truth

Truth may be abstractly elegant, but it is lies that seduce, excite and delight us.

That truth is beauty is one of the beautiful lies we love to mouth because we know so little of
either.

If you think that truth is beauty, then you don’t know much about either.

Ugliness may not be truth, but it certainly makes up a large part of brute fact.
Truth may be beautiful, but it is lies that are useful. And in this ugly world of utility we care far
more for use than for beauty.

Truth and beauty coexist like man and woman, now in peace and now at strife. They may
become one flesh, but they still don’t give up their own selfhood.

When the mind meets with beauty, it knows it can make no fair return for the miraculous gift,
and so it tries to answer it with truth, which may turn out to be the ugliest thing in the world.

Beauty demolishes us deliciously on the spot by the shock of the senses. Truth dissolves us
agonizingly and gradually by the acid of the intellect.

42 Art will fail us

The cult of beauty, like the cult of truth, is as false as all the rest, not because beauty is an idol,
but because it is an idol of which we are not worthy. Life disappoints us because it is not good
enough for us. And art disappoints us because we are not good enough for it. And yet art
belongs to the world, and so it too will fail our worldly hearts.

Art won’t save you, but it may be the one divinity that is worth the loss of your soul. It is
powerless to help us, which is why it is so precious, and why it takes such a large heart to love
it.

The sorrows of art do not wound us. But they prepare us to be wounded by life in deeper and
more subtle ways.

A poem is a personal torment that has found its impersonal technique.

Literature is a wound which has found the words to utter all our wounds. It is Dickinson’s bird,
‘singing unto the stone of which it died.’ It dramatizes the downfall of all the dear things that we
shut our hearts to in life. Kierkegaard wrote that the poet’s ‘lips are so formed that when the sigh
and cry pass through them, it sounds like sweet music.’

Literature does not heal us. It prods and probes our wounds, and keeps them open and
bleeding.

REPRESENTATION

43 Art is not imitation

Art is not imitation but imagination.

Life imitates life, art just pretends to.

Art does not try to copy life, but life does aspire to match the glamour of kitsch.

Literature is not a bleeding slab of life. It is a carefully composed ragout of leftover literature.

Life might look like a drama or fiction, were it not that it lacks plot, character, thought and style.
These are the flawless circles of art which form no part of our formless existence.

Repetition is the threat of futility. Life emptily repeats at the behest of its stagnant habits. Art
repeats designedly to build up grand signifying patterns. It reclaims repetition by permeating it
with shape and meaning.

44 The truth of art

Art is more true than life, because it is less real than life. And when it strains to be as real, it
becomes as false. Art empties the world of its reality, to fill it up with meaning. All the codes that
we use to make sense of life make it seem less real. Fiction is stranger than reality, because it
lays bare more of the truth. The dumb world has no way to make clear to us what it means. And
so artists can do this only by refusing to share the inarticulacy of life. They use the trappings of
the day-to-day life that we lead, to disclose the true life which we don’t lead. Art borrows from
life its body, and life steals from art its soul. Life has too coarse a taste to copy art, and art has
too fine a taste to copy life.

45 Literature articulates life’s meaning

A drama is not a representation of an action, as Aristotle claimed. It is a representation of
characters thinking and discoursing on an action as no one would in life. The one salient act that
takes place on stage is speaking. But it is a style of speaking like none of those we use in life.
‘The people in Shakespeare,’ Hardy notes, ‘act as if they were not quite closely thinking of what
they were doing, but were great philosophers giving the main of their minds to the general
human situation.’ And he contrives the events of the tale just to give full play to their thoughts
and eloquence. Shakespeare is always generalizing and metaphoric. Greek drama is
particularizing and literal.

We say nothing of weight in day-to-day talk. And great authors don’t write a line that could be
said in day-to-day talk. They have to use the forms of casual speech to convey the thoughts that
you can’t broach in casual speech.

Choice works can articulate the great truths of life because they do not try to be true to life.

Great texts are deep not because they brim with submerged meanings, but because they bring
all their meanings to the surface, and find adequate words to sound them.
46 Life is a cliché
Life itself is a second-hand fiction. And when art follows it, the best it can make is third-hand
melodrama. ‘Art does not imitate life,’ Brodsky wrote, ‘if only for fear of clichés.’ And it does not
copy real people for fear of stereotype or caricature, though most of us are too vapid and
forgettable to be as vivid as that. And though life may not shadow art, it does arrive later.
Picasso was outlining Guernica before a bomb had been dropped.

Comedy is full of stock types because it is so close to real life.

47 Art is not truth to real life

Artists raid life like buccaneers to plunder it and enrich their visions. Art resembles life as
embezzling from a bank resembles taking out a loan. And they treat the great works of art of the
past in the same way.

Life is made of accident, engagement, affect and ambition. Art is made of choice, detachment,
poise and vision. Life is arithmetic, particular and actual. Art is algebra, abstract and illimited.
Life is thrust on by desire and regulated by routine. Art is animated by imagination and shaped
by order.

The world is both more crowded and more empty than art, more varicoloured yet more
monotonous, more pressing and more pointless.

Life sprawls like an aggregation of suburbs, cosy though flat and featureless. Art is a methodical
yet bewildering city like St Petersburg. From afar life may look picturesque. But the closer you
get, all you see is its dour banality. As Van Gogh found to his dismay, it ‘has the tinge of
dishwater.’ Why else would he have had to colour it in such opalescent blues and yellows?

48 Art holds the mirror up to custom

Most people assume that a piece of art must be like life if it is reminiscent of the rest of the
works of art they have seen. They say that a portrait has plumbed the soul if they can read into
it their own trite notions of a type of character. So they are keen to find that a pope or cardinal
looks worldly and world-weary, that a baron must be smug and supercilious, fonder of his
hounds or horse than of his wife and litter, that a thinker is voyaging through strange seas of
thought alone. They mistake what is natural for the conventional forms which they are wont to
see.

Most of our so-called instincts about art are little more than learned errors.
Why do we assume that if a canvas or a story seems vivid then it must be a realistic picture of
life, and that if it looks more graphic than the real world then it must be more real than the real
world?

Crude books gratify us by holding the mirror up to the flattering lies by which we live.

Literature is our common confession, heartfelt and unsparing. But, like all confessions, it is at
the same time artful and self-exculpating. ‘An artist chooses when he confesses,’ as Valéry
wrote, ‘perhaps above all when he confesses.’

NEED OF ART

49 Art is not a natural need

Real things, such as art or truth, are so uncongenial to us, that they need an elaborate
scaffolding of snobbery, prestige and institutions to hold them up.

Snobbery is the means by which good taste lures conceit to do its work.

If art couldn’t bank on the good will and patronage of people who don’t much care for it and
don’t understand it, how could it last from one year to the next?

If there were no serious readers, there would be no serious writers. And so great authors can
write up to the top of their talent only by expecting too much from those who might read them.

A book has no hope of lasting through the centuries, till we have been lessoned to read it as if it
will. Had we not learnt to revere Shakespeare as the most sublime of poets, we would snicker at
him as a pompous windbag. And if Picasso and Matisse had not been certified as masters by
museums, we would have deemed them clumsy daubers.

50 The social machinery of art

‘It needs a complex social machinery,’ Henry James said, ‘to set a writer into motion.’ And it
takes an apparatus of class, syllabuses, snobbery and institutes to set a reader on to read great
books. But they need no prompt to read bad ones. ‘For even the most trifling revelations of art
need preparation and study,’ as Nietzsche points out. ‘There is no immediate effect of art.’

Nature will hatch the egg of genius, but culture must fertilize it. Penury may not keep a Milton
mute and inglorious, but it and any number of pitfalls may stall him from becoming a Milton.

We need forms, to force us to curb our worst appetites and to fire our best aspirations.
Now that people all make more money than they need, they feel contempt for anyone or
anything whose sole aim is not to make money. If a thing doesn’t pay, they deem it rank
snobbishness to indulge in it for any purpose more ennobling than fun. And yet if snobbery
didn’t nag us to prove that we are better than those round us, we would all remain contented
pigs.

ART GIVES MEANING

51 Art alone gives meaning

Art is one of the few things that is worth living for. And yet art tells us that life is not worth much,
and that it gains its value only by being recast as a work of art.

An artist should strive to enrich life without affirming it, to esteem it without falsifying it, not to
claim that it is worth living, but to make it a touch more worth living. Honest art should
transfigure the instant, but should not presume to transfigure the world.

Artists make art, not by culling the fat and waste from life, but by packing it with more marrow.
They supply the world with the sense which God forgot to put in. Art distils what life leaves out.
It brings out its significance by paring it to its pith.

If life had real worth, we would have no need to strive to build up the works which live beyond
life, and which give life its purpose. And if life were poetic, there would be no poetry. And it is
those who see the formless ugliness of life that feel the need to shape the lovely forms of art.
People who find life beautiful have no need to make art. And we need to make music because
life is so cacophonous. Life may be many things, but it is not beautiful.

52 Meaning is a fiction
A play of three hours may get nearer to the heart of life than life itself does in seventy long
years. Don’t you live more significantly in Troy or Elsinore than you do in your real locality on
earth?

Life hurtles with a flaring urgency. Art stands still in cool significance. No wonder we find the
least details of our paltry lives so enthralling, and art so boring.

An artist keeps at bay the world’s importunate futility by fashioning works of superfluous lustre.

Art is like neither life, in which everything is real but not one thing is significant, nor religion, in
which nothing is real yet all is made to seem significant. Artists make our lives mean by making
meaningful lives which are not ours. It is only by creating fictions that we make life mean
anything at all.
The world trades on the accepted coin of illusion. We recognize truth solely in the game of
fiction or in the inhuman realm of science. It is only in art, where nothing is at stake, that you can
afford to wager and win what is priceless.

Why do those who are glad to be cheated by life berate art for being mere fiction?

Our life gains its significance in the telling.

53 Art redeems suffering

What is art but a contrivance for converting misery to meaning? The sorrows of art solace you,
since they are not real and yet they still signify. But the sorrows of life are so desolating,
because for all the deep scars they leave they mean nothing. Art glows with lambent anguish.
Life is fraught with a dim jauntiness. A poet senses the immense sadness behind each joy, and
joyfully foresees the fearful loveliness of each heartbreak transfigured by form.

Some see the terror, some see the glory. A few see both the terror and the glory. Fewer still see
both the terror and the glory as one. The highest artists take in the full glare of life’s ghastliness,
but have a binocular vision which is able to fix and focus it as a beam of supernal beauty. ‘We
stroll on the roof of hell,’ as Issa wrote, ‘gazing at flowers.’

54 We put art to the meanest use

‘The aesthetic,’ as Borges points out, ‘is inaccessible to most people,’ and this now goes for
most artists as well. The public takes an interest in all aspects of a work of art except the
qualities that make it art. And what entices us least in art is what is most integral to it, that is, its
form and playfulness. What captivates us is what is most adventitious, its entertainment and
impact, its vividness and verisimilitude, its plot puzzles or its platitudinous moralizing. A choice
work of art is a lightning show put on for the blind. They may feel the house rumble, but they
can’t see the glory.

Just as we dote on a large mind such as Einstein for the quaint traits that denote a trashy
celebrity, their peculiarities and peccadillos, dress and gestures, so we love the best books for
doing what unexceptional books do much better, for contriving suspenseful plots, pronounced
effects, figures with whom we identify, a vivid portrayal of a time or place, and slick sermons
which confirm our own fine prejudices or subvert the herd’s.

55 We want art to flatter us

Life, like Narcissus, gazes into the pool of art in order to admire its own face. Literature is a
great glass which shows us larger than we are.
What people want from art is flattery and make-believe that they can take for truth. They expect
it to tell them that they are ample and anguished, that they are afflicted because they are grand
and grand by the grace with which they endure their afflictions.

Kitsch plays the anthems of our self-admiration.

LIFE FOR ART’S SAKE

56 Art does not affirm

The sole thing that a work of art affirms is the plenitude of its own imagination.

Art is not a stimulus to life, as Nietzsche claimed. It is a stimulus to more art. It is kitsch that is a
stimulus to life. And art is the refuge of those who have seen through life and are sick of it.

57 Salvation through style

Style is salvation. But it is the salvation of the work, not of the artist or the audience.

Style is half the significance of a work of art, and form is half its meaning. It is the bright ideal
that shines through in the most sombre piece. It is the one irreducible quality left when cold
thought has done its work of devaluing.

Good style is a bare cool justice. And fine prose, like Austen’s, works by its own code of right. It
is serene, since it wants nothing, cheerful, as it feels no need to impose, and kind, as it doesn’t
disdain to please. But only someone who has been seared by the mad vehemence of poetry
would trust in the frail justice of prose.

58 There is nothing serious but style

For true artists there’s nothing serious in mortality but style. ‘To those who are preoccupied with
the beauty of form,’ Wilde points out, ‘nothing else seems of so much importance.’ They take
such pains to carve out a style, that they grow stonehearted to all else. A misplaced comma
would offend them more than an act of cruelty. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk politics,’ Joyce
pleaded. ‘The only thing that interests me is style.’ For a writer, life has no point, save for the
residue of words that it leaves behind it.

We look to artists to give form to the inner meaning of things. But for an artist a thing means no
more than the form that they give it. The only values that matter to a painter are pictorial values.

What exhilarating torment writers must feel at the dizzying contingency of each choice of shape
or texture, word or phrase, chord or cadence, and at how it will ramify out and out through their
work and readjust and reconstitute the whole of it. The drama of moral choice is a trivial
substitute for the serious business of aesthetic discrimination.

59 Artists love only art

True artists must be false to every cause except their art.

Painters would cordially set the world on fire, if they think it would light the least of their
daubings more impressively.

Musicians hold that if there is a high way to God it must be through their own music. The deity
that they worship must love music more than anything else, and it must love their own kind of
music more than all the rest. And the reverence that they feel for him is a dull after-echo of the
awe that they feel at their own craft. Art may have many gods, yet the artist has but one, which
is art. And if you don’t serve your art as the one true God for which you would be content to lose
your soul, then you are no true artist.

Great church music, such as Bach’s, is not the use of music to praise God. It is the god of music
using human piety to glorify itself.

Artists are proud souls who would lick the lowest dust in the service of their art.

For true artists, living is a mere sleep which intermits their ardent dreams of creation.

60 Art for the artist’s sake

All that artists love they love for the sake of their art. And they love their art for their own sake.
They cherish fame more than art, as industrialists love their merchandise for the financial gain
that it yields.

An artist or a god is superabundant but not self-sufficient. Their needs are as extravagant as
their capacities.

A writer lives to write, and feels sure that the rest live to read, and that the world is here to be
written. ‘Everything in the world,’ Mallarmé said, ‘exists to end up in a book.’ And in our age of
hyperreality it all exists to be filmed and photographed. Perhaps the Lord put on the whole show
just so that he could dictate his scriptures.

61 The work is more than the life

The high things which prove life’s worth were the work of the few who were sure that it has
none. The makers make life worthwhile, but they place no value on it themselves. To them it is
so much tripe and scrapings.
Those who make art are least able to weigh life’s value, but best able to represent it. So it’s a
good thing for us that they feel they must make it out to be far dearer than they prize it. And it’s
a good thing for them that their artists’ instincts make them prize it as dear as they feel they
must make it out to be. They have to make something worthy out of life, because they know that
life on its own is so worthless. ‘They seem to be fighting for the sake of the dignity and
significance of mankind,’ Nietzsche says, ‘but in truth they refuse to give up the assumptions
that are of most use for their art.’

Some authors use writing as a means to put off dying, and some use it as a means to put off
living. ‘Literature,’ Pessoa wrote, ‘is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.’

Art is a way of grasping and embracing life, while still holding it at bay.

Art may claim to show the triumph of life over death, but what it in fact acts out is the triumph of
art over life.

62 Artists love the world for the sake of their art

Artists care for the world as it gives them the scope to show off their art. And if they wish to save
the world it’s only to have beholders for their own works. And they don’t doubt that their own
compositions are the one force that could save it. When they seem to be exalting life, it is their
own poetic might and mastery that they are exalting, which brims over and blesses the
unhearing world with its bounty. Artists love the world as God does, ‘the glad creator.’ They
hope to redeem its unmeaning squalor by their own abounding grace.

Artists don’t paint the world because they love it. They love the world because they paint it. A
crowd-pleaser like Renoir may open your eyes to the beauty of the world, but a true painter
such as Cézanne opens your eyes to the beauty of paint.

Artists think that the world was made for art and not art for the world. They look on the world as
mere metaphor or material for their work. If the first, they rejoice to see it seated as an
imperishable artefact of shapely calm. And if the second, they love to watch it rock with riotous
mischief. ‘All under heaven is in unmitigated disarray,’ Mao said. ‘The situation is excellent.’ The
artist must play the world false in order to stay true to the art that lends the world its one frail
justification.

63 Art is the meaning of life

What have we to set against life’s infinite littleness but the little infinity of art? It hurls a rapturous
vitality in the face of demeaning absurdity or pounding affliction, and so makes them seem
worth bearing.
Art does not unfold to us the meaning of life. Art is the meaning of life.

Artists, when asked for a loaf, would not give a real stone. They cheat you, and make good their
frauds by conferring untold wealth.

The artist drifts like a ghost amongst the ghosts of the living, to bring them news of a world more
true.

We think that the artist’s job should be to give meaning to experience, but the artist thinks that
the meaning of experience is to give material for art.

A sickly aesthete, such as Pater, makes a toy of art by treating it as a mere trimming with which
to bedeck life. But a strong artist knows that life is a foul dung good only to be ploughed to
fructify art. To read for the purpose of living, as all bookish advisers tell us to do, seems a waste
of good literature.

We don’t need to read in order to learn how to live, since we already live as we read, with the
same greedy and distracted glibness and impatience.

If anyone were to read in order to live, they would do well to stick to airport novels, comic books,
fantasies, teen fiction, cheap biographies and self-help pamphlets, which is just what they do.

64 Live to read
Writer to reader, ‘Why do you bother to live? You are here to read my books. We both live for
writing, but you can’t write. What could be more pointless than to be forever reading, never to be
read?’ Reader to writer, ‘Why do you bother to live? You are here to make books for me to
munch on, as the silkworm is kept in the dark to spin silk. We both live for reading, but you
deem reading vain.’ They form one joint ring of uselessness. Writers live to be read, though they
set no value on reading. And they toil to enjoy an afterlife of misquotation, to win the brief
continuance of a name. They hope to be delivered from the contempt and neglect of the present
to the veneration and neglect of posterity.

The chief duty that writers owe their readers is not to think of them. ‘He who knows the reader
does nothing further for the reader,’ as Nietzsche wrote.

A writer is a tireless scribe who keeps meticulous records for oblivion.

Life is a poor substitute for literature.

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

Contents

Rivalry

Our nothingness

Means and ends

Purposes

Fun and money

Futility

Superfluity

Suffering

Wisdom

RIVALRY

1 Others give us our purpose

Other people, who are not quite real to us, are the source of all our reality. I do all I can to make
my own life mean more than that of others, by trying to make it mean more to others. I am sure
that their lives have purpose only if they add to the purpose of my own. And yet my own life has
purpose only if it means something to them. So high and so low do I rank my own standing and
that of my fellow beings.

Anything, however purposeless, seems worth doing so long as someone else is watching. And
nothing, however purposeful, seems worth doing if no one is. And each of us knows what is
worth watching. It must be whatever the rest of the world is watching.

We need meaning because we are gregarious or pack animals. Dogs have a very strong need
for it. That’s why they are so dependent on their keeper.
We are self-willed but not self-reliant. And we are self-conscious but not self-aware. I don’t know
what matters, but what matters to others is good enough for me.

We don’t make our own meaning. We let others make it for us.

2 Rivalry gives us our purpose

Our purpose is competitive. We don’t need a meaning. We need a goal to strive for, and a rival
to vie with. Life has all the importance of a futile but ferociously contentious game.

I don’t much care what the purpose of life may be. But I do care if my own life appears to have
less purpose than that of others.

People don’t want to get what they esteem. They esteem what others want to get, and then they
try to get that.

We know full well that the things people seek are a sham. But we still hate to see others get
more of them than we do. The sole goods that we prize are those that we can compete to win
more of than our rivals. We waste our lives hustling to grab the expensive fakes that all the rest
have their eye on. However hollow we find the world, we still know it to be the one thing that can
fill our hollow hearts.

3 Our immense ego fills the immensity of space

I feel infinitely more diminished by the insignificant margin by which some close-by insignificant
person might surpass me than I do by the infinite disparity between my own dim nothingness
and the immensity of space spangled with all its suns. We measure our size and worth not by
the scale of vast nebulae and constellations, but by the small huddle of people round us who will
die so soon.

Most of us are affrighted not by the enormity of space, as Pascal said he was, but by the
imperceptible interval by which others overtake us. We gaze up at the stars and know that we
are nothing. But they are silent and far off, and everything that is close at hand shouts to us that
we are all in all. It’s not my own triviality that torments me, but the trivial comparisons I make
with the trivial people who chance to be next to me.

4 Our ego measures our purpose

Few people feel a strong need to give a meaning to their lives beyond their own careers and
pleasures. But the creeds tell them that they do and then supply them with a thin stopgap to fill
it. Religion is a patched-up answer to a question which most of us fail to ask.
What wrings my soul is not the doubt that life in the main might have no value, but the fear that
it may have less value for me than it does for everyone else. Would it cause me such anguish, if
I played a more prominent part in it? Yet people prize goods proportionate to the stake that they
have in them. So if they are engaged less and achieve less, it’s not they who seem to count for
less but the world.

If the value of the human race were summed from the estimate that each of us makes of our
own life, it would add up to more than ten billion worlds.

It is not the emptiness of infinite space that ought to frighten us, but the gaping void within our
own hearts.

5 Low purpose, high pretences

Our horizons of time and space are fixed by our egoism and not by our awareness. We may
think like philosophers whose souls float serenely above the fray. But we must feel and act like
men and women, embroiled in a fierce daily wrestle to keep our head up in this world.
Copernicus and Darwin revealed to us how small we are, but to make us feel it was beyond
them. We have not shrunk one inch in our own eyes since we found out that the cosmos is
made up of billions of galaxies, and that we are just one transient and fortuitous form of life
among millions.

We may have had all the metaphysical props which promised us that we were the centre of the
world knocked out from under us, but we still stand as tall as ever. Our immaterial soul, immortal
life, the care of providence and free will have all vanished, but we are firm.

We put the best things to the worst use. And the worst use of all is to garland the sacred ass of
our own ego.

6 The lives of others

Most people can’t see any good reason why most other people live.

We see how vain the lives of others are, but we can’t feel their anguish. And so we fail to grant
their significance or to sympathize with them. But we feel our own griefs piercingly, but we can’t
see how vain our life is. So we deem that we are fraught but important. I’m certain that my own
life streams with deep pain and rich sense, while others beam with joy but don’t mean a thing. I
care too languidly for them to wince at their pangs or to grasp how much their concerns count
for them. I can’t guess what elation or unease they might feel, not just because I lack self-
forgetting imagination, but because I don’t share their hungry perspective.
How could I see that such small nuisances or satisfactions look so large to them from up close,
since my own sight is narrowed by the small nuisances and satisfactions that press so close
round me? We can’t guess how such a trivial cause could make others so happy or unhappy.
And they can’t see how trivial it is. And of course no cause that touches us can be trivial. It’s not
hard to view the lives of others sub specie aeternitatis.

It must be so easy for others to live or to die, but it’s so hard for me to do either. My road is
rugged but necessary, theirs is smooth but leads to a dead end.

7 The sham of our success

For most of us the meaning of life is the career of our egoism. And the sham of our success is
the sole truth that we live for.

People all know what the purpose of life is, or they act as if they do. It is to get as much as they
can into their own hands, and to leave as little as possible for their rivals.

We may know quite well that we are nothing, but in the rough and tumble of the world we jostle
with rivals who don’t doubt that they are all in all, and we can’t bear to be thought less than
them.

Life jams your satchel with junk. And you don’t shuck it off, since you feel it weigh so heavily on
you that it must be laden with gold.

8 The worthy purpose is the one we are aiming for

When people win the game, most of them judge that the game must be worth playing. And
many of them judge the same by playing it. They don’t do things because they know why they
are worth doing. They know that they must be worth doing because they do them.

We spend every effort to bring our schemes to realization, since we are loath to spend the one
slight effort of assaying their true value. ‘It is humanity’s worst flaw,’ Hebbel averred, ‘to strive
passionately for things before it finds out what they are worth.’ But don’t we reckon them so
precious only because we strive so avidly for them? A purpose does not fill my vision because it
is so vast. It looks so vast because it fills my vision. And it fills my vision because it stands so
close to me. People don’t set their hearts on a thing because they judge it good. They judge a
thing good because they have set their hearts on it.

For most of us the purpose of life, which we never lose our faith in, is whatever it is that we plan
to do next. It’s always just in front of us, yet it’s still just out of our reach.
9 Our self is our meaning
Though many of us query if life has a purpose, no one doubts that their own does. And the less
life as a whole means, the more you have to cling to the one thing that seems to give it a
meaning for you.

It’s wonderful what a vast sum of value egoism adds to things. How the whole world lights up,
when I add the small pronouns I and me to it. Nothing that happens to us would matter, if it were
happening to someone else. Fiction tells of what matters immensely though it has happened to
no one.

Suicide may be the sole serious philosophical question, as Camus said, but are there any who
have put an end to their life because they gave it a philosophical answer?

The reason that people don’t kill themselves is that they have never felt the need to find a
reason to live. If we did need a real reason to live, none of us would last till the morrow.

10 Our own vocation gives all life its purpose

Most of us are sure that whatever lends meaning to our own life must be what lends meaning to
the whole world. By some professional vanity people take it that the rest of the world aspires to
the very thing that their own vocation vows to provide. So the philosopher feels sure that all the
rest of us long for wisdom, and the priest that we thirst for faith, and the poet that we would
starve from lack of poetry sooner than from lack of bread. But we all grow more and more obese
in this prosaic world.

Our narrow metier is broad enough to make all the room that our yawning paltriness has need
of.

How jealous people are of the honour of their own profession, most of whose other practitioners
they feel an unqualified scorn for. And though they may not think much of the rest of the human
race, they think a great deal of themselves for belonging to it. And though parents may not think
much of their children, they still think very highly of themselves for being parents.

If it is the case that you make your own meaning, then a murderer makes meaning by
murdering, and a torturer by torturing. A race commits genocide not as an outburst of
unprompted barbarity, but to impose sense on the world by affirming its own kind.

OUR NOTHINGNESS
11 We are nothing
How could we guess how empty we are, when we are all so full of our own projects and
importance?

Life rages like fire, and vanishes like smoke. Our years scud like gusts of wind rustling through
the trees. And soon there will be no trace that they once blew so high.

Life is a spume playing for an instant on unfathomed oceans of death. Like enchanted
swimmers, we drown, and cease to feel the tumult of the years as they roll above our heads. ‘A
thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.’

If you want to grasp how little you matter, think of what the world will look like ten days or ten
minutes after you’re gone. And if you want to grasp how little most of your fuss and schemes
and perturbations matter even to yourself, imagine that you are ten miles or ten years clear of
them. So short a space will have turned them to smoke. And though they may still grime your
skin, they will have left no trace on your soul. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’

12 To know that you are nothing

It’s not hard to be one of the billions who are nothing. The hard thing is to be one of the handful
who know it. What could be so easy as to be nothing, but what could be more insupportable
than to know it? Few people have the largeness of mind to guess how small they are. To see
that you are nothing may cost you all that you have. And yet if you believed it for real, you would
know that you had nothing that could be hurt.

Our nothingness is the one firm foundation on which we might build a true sense of our worth.
But it’s the one ground that we can’t stand on.

I think, therefore I know that I am nothing. And yet only when I think do I for a brief time get free
from this knowledge that shows me what I am.

If a louse could explain itself, its one thought would be that the whole world exists for it. We can
take a wider view, yet we don’t see that it doesn’t exist for us.

It’s not hard to bear your lot like a hero when you know that you are great. The hard thing is to
bear the mere weight of the air, when you know that you are lighter than that.

13 The pride of knowing you are nothing

Only our pride can endure the knowledge that we are nothing, against which our pride revolts.

You need a special kind of pride to see that you are nothing. So it’s a good thing for us that we
have only the common conceit which tells us that we are all in all.
My insignificance is the one significant fact in the universe for me, and my own nothingness is
everything to me, though these are the easiest facts to forget. I have no doubt that it’s easy for
others to be nothing, since they mean nothing to me. But it’s so hard for me to be nothing, since
I am all in all to myself. On good days I know that I’m a failure. On bad days I think that my
failure matters.

Once it dawns on you that you are nobody, what can you do but long for the day when you turn
back to a sod? We have one hope left us, which is the end of all hope. I’m ground to powder
under the cold stone of my nullity.

We are stranded between the truth that we are nothing and the faith that we are all in all. And
the ingratiating faith duly drives out the heart-parching truth.

14 Trying to be somebody
We make life a touch worse than the nothing that it might be, since we spend it in the frantic
striving to show that we’re a bit more than the nothing that we are.

What sad nobodies we are. And what a flat nothing we will make of the earth, in our vain quest
to prove that we are not. We will go to any length to try to make something of our nothingness.
And we don’t doubt that everything does. We squander our vain existence to cram it with
enviable vanities. And so we will crunch up the broad earth to add a gram to the weight of our
own bustling importance. Those who have nothing will fight like tigers to keep hold of it.

We start with nothing, and end with nothing. And in the interim we stop at nothing to get a little
more of what won’t satisfy us, for the purpose of proving that we are a little more than nothing.

How much fuss and racket we make in our short journey from silence to silence.

Nothing is harder to conquer than the nothing that we are. We fight it all our lives, but it always
wins in the end.

How do we bear the stress and strain of being such blanks? By labouring at such a press of
duties and desires, that we dream that we must be wholes.

We are so empty, that we will swallow the whole world, and we still won’t be filled.

15 Being nobody is harder than being nothing

Most of us are sure that we are somebody, and that we are like no one else. But in truth we are
nobodies, and we are just like everyone else.
If the thought of my nonentity solaces me, it’s because I know that those who seem to be more
than me are nonentities too. We are content to be nobodies, so long as we seem to be worth a
bit more than the nobodies whom we vie with. We can bear the knowledge that we are nothing,
so long as we are something to someone. And we don’t mind that we might be objectively
nothing, so long as we are not social nobodies. Though we may not care to be immortal, each of
us still hopes to be a jot less mortal than the rest of our sad clay.

We are perched between the void and the inferno, between the simple nothingness of what we
are and the tangled misery of what we aspire to be.

16 Finite to fail but infinite to venture

Always seek that end which, if won, suffices, if unattained, ennobles. ‘The aim,’ wrote Browning,
‘if reached not, makes great the life.’ Most of us have failed before we’ve made a start, since we
don’t dare to dream of the high ventures that might justify our unsuccess. If you can’t win,
dedicate your days and hours to the one thing you know to be worth failing at. ‘Try again. Fail
again. Fail better.’ It will waste your life, but what of that? It was not worth much in the first
place. You might as well lavish it on some high cause as let it leak away on the trail of some
mean gain. And if you get no return for your time, you at least get rid of it. ‘What we pay for with
our lives,’ Porchia says, ‘never costs too much.’

What you love will strip you of all that you own, and leave you with no recourse but to love it
more. We are done in by what we adore, which is all that keeps us alive.

You pass your life’s pilgrimage most pleasantly by fastening your eyes on a distant target and
busying your hands with the daily task.

Human kind by its striving can degrade the grandest object or dignify the meanest one.

MEANS AND ENDS

17 Our purpose eats our life

Life seems not worth living, if it lacks a goal to strive for. But once life has a goal, we cease to
live it and use it as a mere means to reach that goal.

We are the playthings of our purposes. We seem to choose them, and then they shape us.

The universe has found its purpose in fostering a form of life which has figured out that it has no
purpose. And the end aimed at by mindless evolution seems to have been to rear up a species
with a mind to put an end to it for good. The mind or soul that made this cosmos seems not to
care much for mind or soul.
Your purpose and projects can keep you company as well as people. But when they turn cold,
they too will break your heart and leave you bereft.

No living thing can stay in the moment. To live is to have a purpose, and this purpose is ever
drawing it into the time to come. Life’s aim is to persist in its being, and it must put off living from
one instant to the next while it does so.

18 Our means eat our purpose

People have a prodigious capacity for confusing means and ends which is primed by all the
force of nature and all the fraud of custom. They make use of most real goods as mere means
to an end. And most ends are not worth all the pains that they take or cause to come at them.
All our ends are by-ends. We hug our means, but dare not know or name our aims.

Where the goal is a worthy one, such as happiness or our salvation, we lose sight of it and glue
our eyes to the low road that we have singled out to lead us to it. But where the journey is the
thing, as in living, travelling, experience or learning, we streak through the passage and keep
our minds fixed on the pay.

Most people lose sight of their purpose. They fix their eyes on the means that they use to attain
it or on the perquisites that they hope to reap from it.

19 The madness in our method

People plot meticulous strategies to carry through schemes which they took up without a
thought. And so they won’t rest till they puzzle out the best way to the worst end. ‘Perfection of
means and confusion of goals,’ as Einstein said, ‘seem to characterize our age.’ And these days
our means are so dazzling, that they need no goal to justify them.

Our goals seem rational, since we scheme so ingeniously how to get to them. A minor
functionary might say with grand ungodly godlike Ahab, ‘All my means are sane, my motive and
my object mad.’ There is more madness in our method than method in our madness.

The heart too has its reasons, as Pascal said. If it did not, how could it stay so fixed in its
perverse schemes? And clever people have better reasons than fools. But having reasons at all
is enough to trip them up.

People persist in elevating illusions into ideals, which they then fail to live up to because they
cling to such low habits. They set a noble purpose to strive for, but then they map out a hundred
byways which will lead them away from it. So they have to give a pretext for these by
elaborating rubrics and protocols, mumbo-jumbo and observances, insisting that they can reach
it only by adhering to these. Some men take Tolstoy as their moral model, and so they grow a
beard and don a peasant smock.

PURPOSES

20 We need the illusion of purpose

How hard it is to walk the smoothest road, if you see no goal at the end of it. We have to trudge
on and on, just because we have no object.

You need illusions if you are to have a hope of being happy. And the illusion that you need most
of all is the illusion of purpose.

We glut our hunger for meaning with the coarsest fare. Any activity makes us feel that we have
a goal. And any goal makes us feel that we have a worthy purpose. Because we need
meanings, we also need lies. Most of our meanings we patch up out of our shared self-
deceptions.

People stand in such pressing need of a goal, how could the one that they hit on be more than a
sham that they shape to fill this need? Where we are egged on by a strong imperative, be it for
love, truth or purpose, we will seek out some inane replacement to meet it. ‘It is our usual
custom,’ as Swift says, ‘to counterfeit and adulterate whatever is dear to us.’

21 We feel no need to know life’s purpose

Most of us are agnostics on the great questions, not because we find it so hard to make up our
minds what we should think of them, but because we give them no thought at all.

Important general truths are those that are of no importance to the generality of people.

Few of us think enough to be perplexed by life’s mysteries. We’re just scrambling to ride its
rapids with as few bumps and overturnings as we can manage, while scooping up as much as
we can of the rich jetsam that floats past.

Our path is lit up not by the dim rushlight of truth but by the blaze of our own egoism. And all
that lies outside this is gross darkness.

The human mind, with all its great gifts, is more contentedly occupied in shopping than in the
contemplation of truth or beauty.

Most of us don’t want to waste the small sum of thinking that we are willing to do on mere ideas.
We save it for what matters to us, our scheming and self-congratulation.
22 We live for purpose not for pleasure
We think too superficially to grasp that we live for some end much deeper than enjoyment.
Pleasure may be the bait that lures you, but purpose is the hook that holds you. From minute to
minute pleasure leads you on. But from day to day and from year to year you toil on the trail of
your goals.

Who of us could long stand the strain of ease and comfort? The one environment to which we
were not able to adapt ourselves was paradise. As Tocqueville wrote of citizens in democracy,
‘Life would lose its savour, if they were freed of the anxieties which harass them. They appear to
cling to their cares more than upper class people do to their pleasures.’

If life weren’t so hard, it would be unbearable.

To try to live solely for pleasure would impose on us a discipline more strenuous than that of the
most self-denying monk. We would be sure to fail, but in the process we would become dried-up
empty shells.

Most of us never find peace. The plain pleasures which we enjoy don’t satisfy us. And few of us
enjoy prosecuting the more serious career which we trust will meet all our needs.

23 We need a purpose to oppress us

If you didn’t have some stern purpose to oppress you, how could you endure life’s intolerable
oppressiveness? If the gravity of your goals didn’t hold you down, you would float off into empty
space. It’s our weightiest burdens that keep our hearts light.

Enterprising people believe that they bear with their elected servitude for the purpose of
snatching a few delights. But they want to get these only to help them bear the servitude which
is so dear to them. Those who think that they live for pleasure and not for purpose are like
mules that suppose the owner who works them is there to feed them hay.

What makes life unendurable alone makes us endure it. People are harassed by the selfsame
wants and hopes that they live for. And so they pay with their happiness to get what they deem
they could not be happy if they lacked. Like moody Ahab, they are ‘damned in the midst of
paradise.’ We long for peace, and we are all the while conducting this one last push to secure it,
while we fight to fend off the death that will give it to us.

If life’s purpose is to be happy, should we not leave it to the animals? They are so much better
at it than we are.
24 Our purpose devours our life
The meanest purpose is large enough to eat up all my hours, and convince me that the world is
worth sacrificing for it. If a cause seems worth consuming my life for, then I don’t doubt that it
must be worth consuming the world for.

The purpose of life is not what you make of it. It is what you make with it. And this will use up
both it and you, and leave you with nothing.

With what zeal and dedication we serve the emptiest cause.

If life is an art, it’s the one for which we show least aptitude. And if living is the goal, we would
do well to leave it to the animals, who live so much more beautifully than we do.

We grow happy by striving for a goal which we won’t reach. And why should we care how
unhappy we make the people round us by our striving?

Deem a single purpose all in all, and you will soon deem the whole world nothing at all.

What dry stalks of purpose stoke the raging blaze of our meaning and importance. And we will
incinerate the globe to keep it alight.

25 A purpose beyond living

The human race is an experiment to test if life is worth more than the living it. We need a
purpose to thrust us on through life, since we see no point in the mere living it. The purpose of
any human life must lie outside itself.

Life is worth little or nothing in the mere living. It is only in making works which take the place of
living and might outlast it that it gains its purpose.

Our life depends on having something to do as if our life depended on it. Don’t we all need
some ample unavailing obsession, as a screen to hide our hollowness?

26 Diversion
Our proneness to ignore the essential is one of our few essential qualities.

The essential is the one thing that all are busy neglecting for their own sport or profit, as the
great books are the few that no one wants to read. Isn’t the life that none of us dares to live the
sole one that would be worth living?

People are in a great rage to waste their time. But they are set on wasting it solely in the way
that they want. And they lose patience with you if you try to make them waste it in some manner
that they don’t wish. But they love those who help them to waste it in just the fashion that they
like. Even those who have nothing to do won’t hesitate to knock you down if you dare to get in
their road while they’re doing it.

The triviality of life would crush me, if I weren’t rapt up in the trivial schemes which prove to me
how much it means. ‘We are so trivial by nature,’ Céline wrote, ‘that only our diversions can stop
us dying for real.’

The value of life is worn away by the mere act of living.

I wish to seem diverted still more than I wish to be diverted. But I wish to seem to be aspiring to
some purpose more serious than mere diversion.

27 The triviality of life

Life is trivial, transitory and shallow. If it were not, what place would it have for us?

Life comes and goes in a long series of brief trivialities, ‘a quick succession of busy nothings,’ as
Austen put it. Once they have reached their close, the happiest and unhappiest lives weigh
equally in the scale of futility. They may have felt quite different, but they mean the same.

‘A thing there was that mattered,’ Woolf wrote, ‘a thing wreathed about with chatter, defaced,
obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.’ We think that trivia gets
in the way of us living our real life. But what is real life but trivia, chatter, lies and corruption?
And it is only the ferocious promotion of a career that gives our lives any unity and purpose at
all.

There is so little to both living and dying, why do I find it so difficult to do either?

It’s just as well that we have been entrusted with no boon more precious than life. Think what an
unhallowed mess we would have made of anything more pure.

28 Life seems precious because it’s all we have

People might not be so sure that life had such an incomparable value if they had anything with
which to compare it. Would it seem so precious, if it weren’t the one thing that they can call their
own? They assume that it must be all in all, since it’s all that they have got.

What mendicants we are, that all we have is life. And what misers we are, that all we want to do
is hang on to it.

Life is a false perspective, which the angel of death will soon set right.

FUN AND MONEY

29 The world and our wants
The world belabours you like a brainless tyrant. Give in and learn to collaborate, or it will thrash
you.

The world is always too much and never enough for us. We are too small to hold out against our
lust for the world, but we are too large to let it fill us. If we had a shred more pride, we might not
need the world. And if we had a shred less, it might suffice us. Like Caliban, we are bewitched
by airs which waft to us from a place where we don’t belong. Life overwhelms and disappoints
us. It affects us too violently and yet means too little, till the end comes and engulfs us in its
vacancy.

Life is disappointment. That is why we can never get enough of it.

Disappointment is the best that you can hope for from life. When life turns on you, it’s fixing to
do a lot worse than disappoint you.

30 The sad carnival of life

We were just a bubble of desires and self-deceptions which death will soon burst. As Montaigne
writes, ‘We are not so full of iniquity as of inanity. We are not so miserable as base and menial.’
This world, being so hollow, is just the thing to engross our own hollowness. ‘There is no lack of
void,’ as Beckett said.

This life would be hell, if it didn’t end, purgatory, excepting that it won’t mend us, and paradise, if
you could feel all its shuddering bliss. And so it is just this flat existence, where no one is saved,
and few even do the things for which they would deserve to be damned. You visit it like a sad
carnival, its shabbiness veiled by the conniving night, your eyes dazzled by its uncouth foolery.
So you perspire, feel ill and giddy, lose your bearings, and stay too late. You hope that it will go
on and on, and you just wish that it would stop.

God made life so sad, and we’ve spared no pains to make it stupid and frantic as well. We
found the night gloomy, and we turned it to an idiot twinkle to cheer us. The lamps pulsate and
the music blares in this house of fools. But it is mortgaged to death and daubed with the blood
of all that lives.

31 Fun and money

The world now welcomes only what is useful or what is amusing, money and fun, fun and
money. If we are not making money, we expect to be having fun. We sack nature for our work,
and consume kitsch as our pastime. We spend half our days being false for profit, so we can
spend the rest being false for pleasure. The world bribes you to drudge for barren usefulness by
recompensing you with frivolities and relaxations.

We are all now lotus-eaters. And we have just enough energy to elbow our fellow addicts out of
the way in our fever to pounce on more of our drug of fun and money. ‘Amusement,’ as Pope
wrote, ‘is the happiness of those that cannot think.’

Everything now must either amuse us or must pay. And each year the wealth banks up, and the
fun grows more furious.

People are no longer pilgrims but commuters shuttling noisily between self-promotion and play.

Most people put up with long stretches of boredom in their rage to be amused. But they soon
lose patience with the arduous things which might lead them to the truth.

32 Leisure and the purpose of civilization

Imagination languishes as an unloved recusant in this cold empire of utility. A person, caste or
age is worth just as much as it makes of its leisure. We make nothing but fun, and that too has
to pay its way.

The task of a high civilization is to breed a class that has the time and brains to be bored. But
each of us now is lashed on so fast by our lust for pleasure, that none of us feels the ennui that
might stir us to think or create.

Art and poetry, like the rest of the savages, have been hounded from the world by mechanized
utility, and roped off on a few state reservations. Art is feral, kitsch is tame.

As the human race gets more senile and rich, its desires grow more juvenile and crude. What it
craves is pert chit-chat, junk food, screaming music, cut-price sightseeing, spectator sports and
vulgar fun.

What a world we have made. We have shaped a life that is ruthlessly real and worthlessly
factitious. We bow down to the vacant icons of kitsch and the brutal solidity of money. This
world is what we have fashioned because we don’t care for the real things that it purports to be
a means to.

33 The idiot angels of technology

All our clever devices have made labour more productive and leisure more sterile. We have so
many functional appliances which save time, that we need to keep inventing amusing ones to
waste it. How could we do without our machines? They procure us so much money and so
much fun. They have made a world as shallow and vacuous as our own hearts.
We count on our new digital playthings to divert us, while our old industrial machines finish us
off. Kitsch is the brightly illustrated hoarding behind which our demolition of the world goes on
apace.

The task of technology is now not so much to make production more efficient but to create new
ways of consuming and therefore new kinds of human beings to soak up the excess goods of
capitalism.

We use the most advanced technology to broadcast music to a mass audience of sophisticated
consumers, and so we have caused it to regress to the crudest and most simplistic forms.

‘People in general do not willingly read,’ as Johnson points out, ‘if they can have anything else
to amuse them.’ And these days they have a whole toyshop full of things that amuse them far
more.

34 Ingenious stupidity
Technology makes us more restive, rapacious and distracted, more divorced from all but the fun
that we crave right now, more disembodied and more in bondage to our appetites, more self-
obsessed and more connected, more equipped to kill the earth and too weak to stop ourselves,
more smug and inventive, less wise and imaginative. It and the kitsch that it serves will render
us more mawkish and more brutal. We have become the tools of our tools, as Thoreau said,
and the greedy dupes of our own know-how.

The speed and efficiency of our means seem to make up for the poverty of our purposes.

We have devised such smart appliances so that we can be more efficiently stupid. Our
ingenious prostheses extend the reach of our ravening inanity.

Our machines will have scorched the face of the earth, before they help us to make a single
fresh thought.

Human beings are now reached such a pitch of decadence, that they should be at their most
intelligent and creative. But our machines are so pristine, young, strong, hard, efficient and
unyielding, that they make us stupid, childish and sterile.

35 Machine children
As soon as the masses had learnt to read and had the leisure to do so, electronic toys had to be
devised to waste their time more amusingly and vacantly. Where they get hold of a means of
mass edification, they will soon drag it down to serve as a means of mass entertainment. Mass
leisure, culture, education and media do not raise the masses. They lower all leisure, culture,
education and media.

Our devices add to our loneliness, and hollow out our solitude.

Technology has rejuvenated our old race, and infused it with the restless skittishness of spoilt
adolescents.

In the age of faith it was God who knew us better than we know ourselves. Now it’s Google. It
used to be an illusion. Now it’s an algorithm. And what could better show how shallow we are
and how little there is to us?

Our species will come to ruin not through its stupidity but through its ingenuity.

Our machines will bring us to ruin, not by the moral corrosion with which they blight our minds,
but by the material destruction that they wreak on the natural world.

36 Humanism
Humanism flatters us that we are exceptional in our nature and central to the purpose of the
universe. No wonder that we are all now humanists, puffed up as we are with our own sacred
afflatus. It is the apotheosis of a species divorced from the earth and drunk on its own power.
The idol that it bows down to is a self-adoring and suicidal deity. Since we have grown mightier
than all the old divinities, not even a god could save us. We are as pitiless as gods, and just as
doomed. The mortal animal has grown or shrunk to a baffled god, distracted by joy, or dazed by
woe, lost amid the wreckage made by its all-powerful prostheses.

Human kind has no timeless universal essence, and no special place in the world. It is not
radically good or infinitely perfectible. There is no goal to which it is progressing or mission that
it is fulfilling.

Secular humanism has tamed and gelded our kind far more effectually than any creed could
have done.

To swap theism for the cult of humanity is to exchange a god of imagination for the idol of our
self-admiration. Human beings can’t help believing that individually and collectively they are the
finest things in creation.

FUTILITY
37 Choice or chance
You raise up the house of your being brick by brick from each choice that you make. And some
find too late that what they have built is a narrow stockade.

Character may make your destiny, as Heraclitus claimed. But it is chance that makes your
character. All that we suffer comes from our own character. But our own character comes from
what is outside us. External ills can harm only those who are left open to them by their inner
disposition. But their inner disposition may be one of the worst external ills they could have the
bad luck to be prey to. You won’t be happy, if you try to direct what is not in your control. But
your own self and will are two things that are least in your control.

Each accident makes me more what I am, since most of what I am is a concatenation of
accidents.

We are a morass of fortuities, set ways, happenstance, dry lusts and diminutive ardours,
strange twists, kinks and vacancy. ‘According to our meriting,’ as Montaigne shows, ‘we can
never be despised enough.’

Chance holds such sway in our lives, just because no single chance has much impact on it. In
cheap fiction it’s clear that fate has the steerage of the characters’ course, since one small
accident can send them off on a new trajectory.

Luck deals you not just the cards but the skill to play them. Our faith in our own free will is one
of the haughtiest delusions that our pride has fashioned for us. Others include our codes of right
and wrong, teleology, the gods and the soul.

38 Futility and purpose

Life is squalid, arduous and futile. So we seek out gaudy luxuries to deck out its squalor and its
lack of purpose.

The ecstasy of living distracts us from the emptiness of life.

The heftiness of our sorrows at least hides from us the hollowness of our futility.

Life, like the cosmos, is more full of nothing than of something.

I use up my gifts in striving for paltry and despicable goals. I say goodbye to a thousand ill-spent
days. We make anything an apology for why we forgot to live. We link one vain day to the last,
and hope that they will add up to a chain of purposeful years.

Our own lives are so brim-full, how could we grasp that the world is so empty?
We lead our vacant or full lives in order to escape from the vacancy which might have taught us
what we are.

No doubt you should not waste your strength in a fight with undeserving enemies. But what
other kind does life give you?

39 Our futile urgency, our pointless purpose

The oppressive instancy of life proves to us that it must be worth living. We spin so dizzyingly,
that we can’t see that all we do is vanity, ‘disguising our insignificancy by the dignity of hurry,’ in
Johnson’s phrase. The mad dash that makes us futile makes us sure that we are not. All that we
do spares us from perceiving the nothings that we are.

Life is a long tussle between the worthwhile and the urgent, till death looms as urgency’s final
victory. We at last lose a match that was never worth the winning.

To look on these speeding, surging, bustling, pushing, cackling, charging, grasping crowds, out
for fun and on the make, and to think that the great danger to human kind was once feared to be
sloth, apathy and ennui.

Those who get nothing done are nonplussed by how little others get done.

We make so much noise, not to muzzle our self-doubt, which knows not to speak too loud, but
to fill up our vacancy.

Life, like news, drives us on and diverts us with all its scurrying inanity. How could we make out
the low hum of our futility beneath the clangorous hubbub of our desires?

40 Our sad futility

Our futility would be poignant, if it didn’t rattle with such uproarious self-satisfaction. And yet if
we didn’t make so much pointless noise, we might fear that life had no point at all.

Life is so nauseating, that you can keep it down only by adding to it big dollops of self-
satisfaction.

Life, like a good party, is so loud and whirling, that you can’t hear what you think or what anyone
else says.

How could we discern how dark the world is, when our own beaming self-belief lights it up so
brightly for us? And our own lives seem so freighted with purpose, how could we see how futile
life is? And most of us are too self-delighting to feel how sad it is. But a few make so little of
their own life, that they see through the littleness of all life.
41 Perpetual motion
People don’t mind where they’re heading, so long as they have to career faster and faster to get
there. They prove their significance by the speed that they race at and the racket that they
make. How would they know they were living, if they didn’t raise such a ruckus? All their bustle
makes them feel alive. Yet it will bequeath nothing but death.

Beauty and nobility used to bid us go slow. Now greed and kitsch urge us to go ever faster.

Our velocity acts as the gauge of our greed and self-consequence. But all that we’ll leave of our
fevered hurry will be our patient dust. ‘Demanding all, deserving nothing,’ as Carlyle wrote, one
small grave is what we’ll get.

Moving fills for us the space of meaning. Their lives seem to mean most who move quickest.
Since we have nowhere to go, we have to keep on the move. ‘Our nature is motion,’ as Pascal
says. ‘Unrelieved inactivity would be death for us.’

We have now learnt to go so fast, we take it that to go fast must be the purpose of life, and that
our speed must be the measure of our success.

You may know that you’re on the road to nowhere, but why would you let that stop you?

42 Unredeemed
Why is it that thinkers such as Pascal, who diagnose our predicament so truthfully, then
prescribe such unconvincing correctives? He was half right. Our nature is unregenerate. But
there is no redeemer. It’s clear that there is no hope for us, because we are always so hectic to
sink our hopes in the next messiah. The sole divinity that might be worthy of our devotion would
be one that lacked the power to deliver us. It’s the false messiahs who swear that they can save
our souls.

The first step on the path to true salvation would be to accept that there is no such thing, and so
to give up the hope of being saved.

We have no cure but a mere sequence of insidious diseases, which vary and so give us respite
and the feeling of a cure. ‘This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by a desire to
change beds,’ as Baudelaire put it. Such is our hopeless plight, with all its vain religious and
philosophic therapies. ‘When a large number of treatments are proposed for an illness,’
Chekhov said, ‘you know that it is irremediable.’ The palliations that people clamour for show
that they have no wish to find a cure for their sickness. They just want to be rid of its
bothersome symptoms.
Each new blow makes us forget how badly off we were before. Our maladies at least take our
minds off our true malady.

SUPERFLUITY

43 The purpose of superfluity

Necessity may be the mother of innovation and invention, but superfluity is the mother of
imagination and creation. ‘The superfluous, a very necessary thing,’ as Voltaire put it.

Only what is superfluous can be truly serious, since only what is superfluous can be an end in
itself. So the most serious thing in the world is imagination. Yet we assume that what is serious
must be useful, and we use imagination to do the frivolous work of dreaming up fantasies to
amuse us.

Only the superfluous can justify the necessary. Only the useless can justify the useful. And only
the exceptional can justify the average.

The one excuse for useless things is the exuberant excess of the imagination that is on show in
them.

44 Grace and necessity

The arts can thrive only in societies that place a high value on form, leisure, ceremony,
hierarchy and all that is supernumerary.

The great monuments of thought and art which lend human life its meaning mean nothing at all
to most people. They find in them nothing to fill their bulging purses or their vacant minds. For
them truth is a far less serious thing than fun. Since we take our own trivial affairs so seriously,
how could we ever be truly serious?

It is the task of civilization to ensure that priceless works are made and passed on to the next
age, in spite of no one caring whether they are or not.

People now have no higher purpose than to live, and so our society will soon die and leave no
work behind it.

Where all that we do must pay its way, nothing that we make is worth the making. And where
everything is of use for something, nothing is of value for its own sake.

People have lost their readiness for the two best adventures, noble action and noble thought.
They gave them up, when they found that there’s no money in them.
We now have the wherewithal to gorge on the most costly things, but we have lost the will to
make priceless ones.

45 Only excess is enough

All things in excess, so that all things balance. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom,’ as Blake wrote.

In order to find the truth, you have to go too far. It lies on the other side of excess. Know
yourself and nothing too much are two commands that pull in opposite ways.

If you lack the daring to go too far, you will never go far enough. All great things are made by
excess.

46 Our true purpose is what we don’t need

All the most precious goods that give life worth and meaning, such as poetry, wonder, or truth,
are short-lived, unloved and contingent. They came too late, and they’re already gone. People
have lost the relish for unnecessary grace. We only cheapen the noblest goals when we call
them needs. We don’t need art or science. Why else would they be of such incalculable value?
But we do need creeds and mechanization and kitsch. And these must be crass and empty,
since they are so well fitted to our use. And we feel no need for truth, though we do stand in
constant want of our truisms.

What people take to be deep personal needs are learned responses to social imperatives and
incentives. They don’t feel much need for art or truth or faith. But conformity, self-interest or
prestige may lead them to think that they do.

If there is one thing needful, you can be sure it is the one thing that none of us feels much need
for. But there will spring up a multitude of things to take its place, which people will feel a real
need for.

We made the gods to answer not some grand metaphysical need for meaning but our gross
physical fears and greed. And if you do feel a personal need for God, it is because he serves as
such a convenient cover for your real personal needs.

47 Dare to be useless
Only what serves no purpose can be an end in itself. And only what is good for nothing else can
be good in itself.

What is useful is ignoble. And all that our age now values is what is useful.
Keep to the essential, and the world will have no need of you. Hope for no reward for your
devotion apart from failure and futility.

You must risk the worst pointlessness, if you aspire to rise above fallow usefulness. ‘The zeal of
thine house hath eaten me up.’ The one fruitful work is the work that you don’t need to do. And
the task that you were born for is the one that will gain you the least pay. A fecund mind has not
found its true vocation till it is doing what no one has a call for. And it should need no fee save
the sense of its own teeming superfluity. It’s those who have least to live for that might make
some work that is worth more than a life.

Only what is useless will last. If it serves a purpose, it will die with that purpose. And since in our
culture all things must have a use, not one thing in it will last.

Where all that we do must serve some need, there will soon be no purpose for living at all.

48 Truth is not a human need

Ideas bore us. Truth disgusts us.

Truth is like a language spoken by so few, that most of us see no point in learning it.

Few people care enough about the truth even to resist it. They are too busy living their own lies
to stop and listen to the truth. And they know that they are safe to ignore or ridicule it. It never
comes so close as to cause them a fright. They are too far away on the trail of money or
merriment.

49 The purpose of art is uselessness

The best authors are the few who are quite expendable. They write the books that don’t need to
be written. It is the unnecessary books that last. But it’s the beneficial and ephemeral ones that
each age dotes on. They serve their time and pass from the world.

Nature, marvellously frugal and monstrously wasteful, works by thriftless courses to get to its
narrow goals. Just like us, it does nothing in vain to fulfil each vain purpose at which it aims. But
art realizes superfluous designs by economical means. ‘All art is quite useless,’ as Wilde said.

Artists fuse the superfluous and the essential, the unstinting and the thrifty, the supple and the
strict, the delicate and the severe, grace and heft. The best, like Milton, Melville or Proust, tackle
truth so directly, that they seem to ramble inconsequentially. They distil its essence by riding a
flood of rich irrelevance. They bless us with their sweet intimacies and their obscure
immensities. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness.’
50 The dead-end of duty
People make their meaning by inflating how indispensable they are.

Indispensable people and books are soon superseded. Each age bursts with its discarded
stockpile of them. ‘The graveyards,’ as De Gaulle quipped, ‘are packed with indispensable
people.’ Make yourself irreplaceable, and you will soon be out-of-date. To race to keep abreast
of the latest developments is the shortest way to become obsolete.

Some of us waste our life on vain schemes since they cost us so little effort, and some because
they cost us so much.

The route of duty leads to a reputable futility. You live your urgent and respectable life by
discharging the duties that the world demands of you. But you live your real and meaningful life
when you do the duties that you demand of yourself.

The pliant self-seeking which makes us futile makes us fit and useful for the world.

SUFFERING

51 Feeling is not meaning

The capacity to feel pleasure and pain is a curse. It is not a test of the value of an organism, as
utilitarians claim.

Subjective states of feeling seem to us the sole touchstone of value. This is why we can create
nothing of real value, and why we don’t hesitate to ravage the feeling earth to enjoy our own
pleasant subjective states.

People suspect that they have ceased to feel intensely because they live at second-hand. But
don’t they assume that they ought to feel intensely because they think at second-hand?

I suffer, and surmise that I must be owed, and owed in the coin that I value, be it love or lucre or
repute. I assume that there are all sorts of goods that I can buy with my woe, as if someone had
need of it and would pay a high price for it.

Pleasure and pain are touchstones used by base souls to guide their base acts. And so of
course they are the only touchstones that we now have.

52 Suffering and sense

The god of this world thumps and pummels your clay. Is the potter moulding you as a glorious
receptacle to hold celestial liquors, or shattering you to strew your dust on the litter heap?
The lives that count for most are those that cost the most to live. And though we all want to be
happy, the only lives that matter are the ones that are not.

Affliction works like a carver to perfect the few who are marble hard. But it mauls those who are
too soft and sensitive. ‘Misfortune,’ Napoleon remarked, ‘is the midwife of genius.’

All that makes life easy to live makes it scarcely worth living. And all that goes to make it worth
living makes it hard to live.

Artists and the elect know it to be their fate to go through trials of fire. But they hope to do it in a
genteel spiritual way that will cost them no actual pain or loss.

Some incorrigible wrong must lurk at the heart of the world, which nothing is able to right. ‘The
gods themselves,’ Melville says, ‘are not forever glad.’ They know too much to be blessed.

To live in this world is to be gruellingly excreted through Satan’s anus.

53 Beautiful suffering nobodies

When we come to the end of our days, we’ll be dismayed to look back on how much we
suffered, and find how little it meant. How mortifying that we have left no mark on this world
which has marked us with such raw scars. My life could scarcely have cost me more, or have
counted for less.

Life is a pearl of great price but small worth. At its best it is somewhat worse than nothing.

What trivial miracles people are. The world swarms with beautiful suffering nobodies.

When all that is superfluous and ephemeral has been burned and purged from you in the fires of
affliction, you will be left with what is primary and permanent. And you will find that this amounts
to nothing at all.

Even if life passes you by, it will still knock you down in its rush. It’s as sickening as the stink of
souring garbage from the lorry as it trundles past.

Suffering has no meaning. It’s those who make others suffer that make their own lives mean a
thing. ‘Not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts acute pain,’ Nietzsche
says, ‘that is the badge of greatness.’

WISDOM
54 Wisdom and purpose
Wisdom is out of tune with all healthy instinct, which rates the worth of a thing by whether or not
it happens to be our own.

The lesson of wisdom is that life is too small a thing to be worth its strenuous lessons.

‘Better be wise by the vicissitudes of others,’ urged Aesop, ‘than by your own.’ The wise know
how to make the most of their own folly. But fools don’t know how to make anything of another’s
good sense.

The wisdom of the ages has been built up by the young daring to bring down the smug
prudence of their witless elders.

Where once the world would have consulted sages for guidance in its great challenges, it now
looks to celebrities, actors and hucksters. And our plight is so dire, they may know as well as
anyone how to deal with it.

Wisdom can’t make any of us strong enough to do without the world. But the world makes most
of us happy to do without wisdom.

You need more sound sense to take salutary advice than to give it, as you may need more
generosity to accept a gift than to bestow it.

Wisdom asks more of the world than God who made the world by wisdom thought to put in it.

55 Wisdom finds the real purpose

The wise value the right goods, at the right rate, for the right reasons, and strive for them with
the right ardency and the right detachment. They know that few things in this world are worth
much more than indifference. Who can tell placid wisdom from impassioned heroism?

You don’t cease to care for the things of the world when you have ceased to prize them. You
still aim at what you have long left off esteeming. And these are the very things that will break
your heart. So you fade to a haggard ghost of purpose, still mad to reach some goal which no
longer means a thing to you.

The wisdom of age, like a veteran commander, has learnt not to waste its force fighting
skirmishes that it won’t win against enemies who are not worth vanquishing for a prize which is
not worth attaining.
56 The wisdom of the intellect and the wisdom of the will
It’s so easy to know what is worthy of your real esteem. But it’s so hard to quell your appetite for
all the junk that you know is not. The wisdom of the intellect does not translate into a wisdom of
the will. Wisdom is not prudent, and the intellect is not wise.

Wisdom is well aware that life is not worth living. But what chance does it have in a duel with the
rampant ego?

We pay more heed to information than to wisdom, and to anecdotes than to information.

Most fools think that they are just ignorant, as Franklin said. And many merely shrewd people
presume that they must be wise. Ignorance might be wiser than knowledge, if it didn’t know that
it is so much more canny.

Wisdom is the health of the mind. Intelligence is its strength. Knowledge is power and
provocation. Wisdom is weakness and restraint. So we of course crave more and more
knowledge, but have no use for wisdom.

The great obstacle to our getting of wisdom is our busy intellect. Wisdom is full, and makes do
with the least. The brain is a relentless machine, which wants more and more raw material to
process.

Our knowledge is the tool of our illusions. And our illusions are the means we use to gain and
keep power.

57 Unwilling wisdom
Wisdom is a clinic, which you go to when you’re stricken, but are keen to vacate as soon as
you’ve rallied. Or else it’s an emergency fund that you keep in reserve and hope you won’t need
to draw on, and which will be no help when disaster skittles you.

We grow wise by necessity. We would far rather have prospered. All of us live by the adage that
‘’tis better to be fortunate than wise.’ We would prefer to land the meanest prize than the loftiest
wisdom.

We may have a vision of the pure light of wisdom. But we are down here in the dust and sweat
of the arena, where all we want to do is gain the upper hand over our rivals. And wisdom won’t
help us do that.

The lessons of wisdom are good enough for others, but my mission is too urgent to be slowed
down by its restraints.
We would rather have the fruits of wisdom than wisdom itself. But we don’t even want its fruits.
They are so sparse and dry, that we would rather have the fruits of cunning. Who would care to
grow wise, if they had the power to please their pitiless will?

58 The wisdom of the grave

We use up our lives in brutal rivalry and self-serving illusion. And we find peace and wisdom
nowhere but in the grave. There we at last cease to care for all the phantoms that we chased
through life. It is the living who are haunted by ghosts and wraiths. Wisdom, as Job said, is not
in the land of the living, and only those who know that they are already dead can bear to learn it.
The true way of wisdom would not be a way of life but a way of death.

A species as mad as ours has to tell itself that it can get wisdom.

59 Too rich to be wise

We would rather have enough money not to need to get wisdom than be wise enough not to
need money. ‘Wisdom is good with an inheritance.’ There will be plenty of time to get wise once
I have got rich.

Most of us are either too prosperous to need wisdom or too poor to pay for it. The needy don’t
doubt that they will find time to be wise once they have earned a few more dollars. And the rich
don’t doubt that they would be free to be wise if they weren’t urged on by the duty to add to their
wealth. ‘The abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.’ Peace of mind is one luxury that
the rich can’t afford.

The price of wisdom we know is above rubies, but who would not choose to have something
less expensive and more workable?

The supply of wisdom has never been large, but it has at all times been in excess of the
demand for it. As Blake wrote, it is ‘sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.’

60 Philosophy and the love of unwisdom

Philosophers have ceased to profess wisdom now that philosophy is practised as a profession.
It is now one more officious and rewarding trade that keeps us from the love of wisdom. ‘We
have professors of philosophy,’ Thoreau lamented, ‘but not philosophers.’

British philosophy has been a department of british philistinism.

Metaphysics is not the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, as Bradley
claimed. It is failing to find solid rationalizations for things which we can’t really believe and
which go against all our instincts.
Most philosophical concepts don’t make sense of the world but only of other philosophical
concepts.

Philosophers are not seeking the truth. They have already found it. So they spend their time
looking for arguments to prove to their colleagues that they are right. But their colleagues are
busy doing the same, and are never convinced.

Most philosophy is a spilt puddle of language which science just steps over.

To philosophize used to be to learn how to die. Now it is just a busy pastime to help us to forget
that we have to.

61 Always a fool
My wisdom shows me what a fool I’ve been, but it can’t make me less of a fool. ‘I said, I will be
wise, but it was far from me.’ It’s as far from me as my own self, which I don’t know and can’t
govern by wisdom. I have to tell myself ten times a day what an ass I am. But I wake each
morning convinced that I’m as clever as can be. ‘A man finds he has been wrong at every
preceding stage of his career,’ Stevenson wrote, ‘only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that
he is at last entirely right.’

I am so far from knowing how to be. And all I know is how to go on stubbornly being this self
that doesn’t know.

Most of us don’t grasp what we had to know from the outset, till we arrive at the end. ‘Life is like
playing a violin solo in public,’ Butler wrote, ‘and learning the instrument as one goes on.’ And
what a humbling, to find out at the last that the strings that we had spent such studious years
mastering were good for nothing but to scratch out a few squeaky notes. It’s so hard to get life
right, that it’s a mercy that it doesn’t matter.

We learn so much in a few green years when we’re young. But all our days fail to teach us what
dolts we have always been.

62 Wisdom is against our nature

Three small things prevent us from becoming wise, our body, our mind and our soul. And the
part they play differs for each of us.

The great way of wisdom is known. It has been set down in many books. But it is so much at
odds with our nature and conduct, that it seems more like a satire on them than the goal to
which they are tending.
The books of sages are like sermons written for fish, telling them to live according to their better
nature and fly like birds, and promising them that God will reward them with a place in the sky if
they do so.

Wisdom does not live in people. It dwells in sentences, which a few people like to quote and
think they believe.

63 The folly of wisdom

The supreme wisdom would be to live for the moment. But how mad you would be if you ever
tried to do that.

My flimsy wisdom has pulled down the props of my vast folly, to demolish my life. We are such
born fools, that to set out to live in congruity with wisdom would be the most foolish thing we
could do. So it’s just as well that we are too shrewd to try that.

The blunders made by the cautious may be just as costly as those made by the foolhardy. My
cool calculations may fool me as fatally as my hottest impulses. My imprudence stoops as low
as the perils which my clumsy caution would sink me in. And my reckless fiascos aimed at no
higher mark than my shifty triumphs have reached.

Wisdom sends the wise mad, to teach them a deeper wisdom. The artist is blessed with a crazy
power to make works of the profoundest sanity. ‘The madness of the wise,’ as Burke wrote, ‘is
better than the sobriety of fools.’

A sage would be too busy spouting wise saws to sit quietly and be simply wise.

Sages must have no more sense than the rest of us, if they expect that their advice will do any
good.

Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, what does it matter whether or not we view things sub specie
aeternitatis?

There may have been a few great sages, but if there have been, no one would have heard of
them.

64 The misery of wisdom

How is it that the great spate of our misery leaves such a thin trickle of wisdom?

You don’t pluck the fruit of wisdom. You drag it with bloodied hands from a tangle of briars. And
then it turns to ashes in your mouth. It dulls the tang of living. Yet it fails to quench your thirst for
more and more life. It won’t heal the smart of your whippings, but it still poisons your triumphs. It
strips you of all the worldly junk which is not worth the having. Cut the bands of your fantasies,
and you’ll still be pinned to life by your despotic desires, though unable now either to fulfil or to
esteem them.

Who knows how to take life with the gravity or levity it deserves? It may be the few who have
made up their mind to end it. ‘The wish to die,’ as Kafka wrote, ‘is the beginning of wisdom,’ as
the Book of Job or Ecclesiastes also show. For one who has seen the truth, to go on living is to
lie.

The thoughtless joy of birds and children mocks our doleful wisdom. Birdsong seems to come to
us from some blessed abode far out of reach of our earthbound sorrows.

65 Prudence as false purpose

The wise know what they are, the shrewd know how the world works. Prudence wants to gain
the world, wisdom lets it go. The wise choose the best end, the canny seek out smooth
expedients to reach a worse one. Wisdom is simple, prudence is ingenious. Wisdom basks in
the bliss which prudence spends all its life saving so anxiously to buy. Calculation shows you
how to grab all the trash that you crave, but restraint releases you from the lust for it. The sage
knows how to be happy, the prudent how to prosper. Wisdom questions your goals and tempts
you to drop out, discretion feeds your desires and helps you to slot in. Wisdom weighs and
refuses, the shrewd flatter those whom they need to use.

66 Prudence against wisdom

The worldly wise warn you not to trust others, true wisdom warns you not to trust yourself.

Sagacity has learnt that life is an empty sieve, cunning helps you to keep on replenishing it.
Wisdom schools you to want no more than you need, cunning guides you how to get what you
don’t even want. The prudent have foresight, the wise have insight. Prudence knows the way to
gain, courage masters its fear of losing, while wisdom trains you not to crave. Yet we don’t want
to learn wisdom, but only the craft to appease our brutish will.

Life is not worth our generous first impulses, and so we give it our prudent second thoughts,
which make it even less worth our effort.

Practical people know the use of a thing, the wise know its true worth.

67 Restraint
The ogre Greed bears the lame dwarf Reason on its shoulders, to guide it how to gorge its blind
imperious cravings.
The collective wisdom of the ages can do nothing to halt the havoc wrought by our short-lived
wised-up age of greed.

Most of us have neither the calm thoughtfulness to rein in our avidity for vile things nor the
vision to aspire to great ones.

Wisdom has saved no one, but our inventiveness will soon rig us out with the equipment we
need to ruin ourselves.

I don’t want more wisdom, since it would stand in the way of me desiring more of all the other
dreck that I want.

Wisdom would teach us to sit still, but that’s a lesson that we have no wish to learn. So we stick
to our curiosity to keep us on the go. Knowledge craves more, wisdom keeps you to the core.
We are too clever to be wise, and too rich to be content.

Wisdom would show us how to make the best use of our time. But who has the time to heed it?
We are all in such a mad hurry to hive away as many things as we can, to waste as much time
as possible.
TIME AND DEATH

Contents

Time

Risk

Loss

Death and dying

Afterlife

TIME

1 The poisoned stream of time

You can’t be happy in the stream of time, and you have no home outside it. It is the element that
you swim and drown in. To be sentient is to fall into time, and to be aware of time at all is to live
in exile from the present. As soon as you wake to consciousness, you cease to live in the
moment, and are condemned to live in time. If you lacked the presentiment of time, you would
be spared three quarters of your woe. Time may heal your wounds, but it will break your heart.
We are crushed by how long our tribulations last and how soon our life will end. Our
pointlessness is proved both by life’s brevity and by its length. Death will make a fittingly futile
close to my futile and trivial life.

God is a timeless being who made this world of time as a means to torment his creatures.

2 Suspended between the present and the timeless

We inhabit neither the instancy of the beasts nor the timelessness of the gods. Caught between
the two, we are never at home in the one time we are in.

The one real eternity is the now. And neither eternity nor the now is real for us.

A blissful afterlife would have to be timeless, not interminable, since time itself is the chief of our
afflictions. But if it were timeless, how could we be fit to live in it? While if it is a drawn-out series
of instants, why would we want to, or how could we bear to? We are no more made to live in the
instant than we are to live for all time or outside time.

Heaven must be a timeless present. And our hope to live in it is the clearest sign that we can’t
live in the present. And even if we made it to heaven, we would spend all our timeless time
regretting what we missed in the past, and planning for the bliss which we hope will soon arrive.

3 Never present
If you could stay in the moment for just one moment, you might give up your dream of the life to
come. It would be a bliss which you would have no need to stretch out. Or it might feel like a hell
which you could not endure.

Each instant it is now or never. And it is never now for us.

We say that it’s never too late. But since we live in the future, it’s already too late.

Death can’t touch this moment. It is only the future that is in its power. But since we live in the
future, we live in death. And yet we still can’t bear to think of death, and are sure that it will
never come near us.

We are suspended between the futility of recurrence and the futility of evanescence. What value
could an event possess, if it does no more than repeat a prior one, or if it will disappear from the
world as quick as it comes into it?

Morality is the forceps that delivers us from the here and now. It considers all our acts as
causes, and traces their consequences into the time to come.

4 The prison of time

People can bear the vanity of life, because they know that they won’t have to bear it for too long.
Yet most of them feel sure that it would not be vain if only it went on for ever. They are such
abject prisoners of time, that they assume they would prove its worth if they could add a few
more years to their sentence.

Time is the best of our possessions and the worst of our afflictions. It is both the prison and the
key.

Sleep is such a relief to us, because it is a brief suspension of the torments of time.

A life without end would be hell. And any heaven would have to be brief. Better a short life of
misery than an unrelenting ecstasy. Our fragile bliss would soon buckle beneath the weight of
all time. A soft night falls on the ones who have gained pardon. They are free to go to their rest.
‘He giveth his beloved sleep.’ The poor can at last throw off the burden of existence which has
pressed so hard on them. It is the saints who are sentenced to perpetual life as a punishment
for their presumption. Pray for those you love, that they might slip through God’s net and not be
cast panting and flapping on the bank of forever.

5 Gone before you know it

How long the years are, and how quick they go. How short life is, and how long it lasts. It slips
from your fingers before you know what you’ve got. We are here for such a brief stay. We stage
a short rowdy interlude in the everlasting dumb show, and then reel headlong back into the
night. Life is a brief turbulence roiling the boundless ocean of eternity.

Might not the same be said of living as Johnson said of dying, that the act of living is of no
importance, it takes so short a time? How little we make of so long a life. And what brief lives
the busiest of us cram into the length of our days.

Our real life fills almost as short a stretch of our being here, as our being here fills of all time.

Life lasts long enough, but each day is too short. And yet, as Colton wrote, ‘many who find the
day too long think life too short.’

Life, like a bad epigram, at least makes up for in brevity what it lacks in depth.

Life lasts just long enough to show how vain it is.

6 Death and futility

The shortest-lived genius finds time to bring the amplest work to completion. Yet the lengthiest
span is too short to house our yawning aimlessness. Life lasts long enough for the few who
know how to put it to its right use. ‘We always have enough time, if we will but use it aright,’ as
Goethe comments.

Our term on this earth is too short to waste it doing what is merely urgent and needful. As
Shakespeare wrote, ‘To spend that shortness basely were too long.’

People have so short a time, that they don’t want to squander it doing what is of real worth. And
the more time that they waste on a task, the more certain they become that it is not a waste of
time. As time runs out, they grow more impatient with the essential, and more in thrall to the
ephemeral. And as the world alters more and more hurriedly, their horizons stay as
circumscribed as ever.

Old people are just like the young. They are as impatient as if they still had some urgent work to
do, yet they still put off life as if they were going to live for ever.
Life is a long fiasco which leaves no trace as soon as it’s done with.

7 The blessing of brevity

If life were not so short, how could we give so much time to the long search for eternal truths?

Life is too long to be happy, and too short to matter. But its fugacity sets you free to dare, and its
duration gives you the scope to make some abiding thing of your daring. How could you spend it
in the quest to trace its gist if it weren’t to close so soon? If it stayed longer, you would have to
waste each minute to build up a solid position and prosperity. If it didn’t fly so fast, you might
have more chance to find the truth, but how could you lend it a welcome?

All the best things are made on the same scale as our small hearts and short lives. Beauty dies
young. Love would wear out its illusions in a few years. And even works of art would lose their
interest for us in time.

8 The blessing of death

How could you stand up to truth’s annihilating radiance, if your long sleep weren’t soon to
swaddle and cradle you in its soothing gloom? How could you put up with the spurns and
ravages of time, if time didn’t sweep you through them so expeditiously? When you know that
you are doomed to die, how could you bear to live, if you weren’t drugged by your illusions? Yet
how could you endure the truth, if you weren’t sure that death would spare you from enduring it
for too long? We can go on living because we know that we are soon to die. But how could we
go on living if we believed it for real?

9 Killing time
People want to waste time, but they don’t want to die. And yet as they go faster and faster, they
make life shorter and shorter, and get farther and farther from their goal. They want to hurry it
on, but they never want it to end.

We live our lives in absentia. We are always elsewhere. People have to rush out of doors to
chase sensations. They are never at home to the moment. ‘We look forward to living,’
Fontenelle wrote, ‘and yet we never live.’ As Kraus remarked, ‘You don’t even live once.’

Rather than raising the dead, Jesus should have set his mind to the far harder task of calling the
living to life.

When you’re young, you dream that life must be elsewhere. But when you grow up, you come to
see that it is nowhere. ‘Once I supposed,’ said Emerson, ‘that only my manner of living was
superficial, that all other men’s was solid. Now I find that we are all alike shallow.’
We can live only in time, but the best use that we can make of our time is to kill it.

Mortals live as trivially as the gods. They are so sure that they were not born to die, that they
can put off life indefinitely and fritter it away on trifles.

When your life is in danger, you do all you can to keep at bay what threatens it, till you can go
back to your old ways of keeping life at bay.

10 The futility of waiting

Waiting is the worst and most degrading dependence. And I spend most of my life waiting for
things that will never come.

We refuse to wait for anything except life. All that ties us to life takes us out of the here and now.

If life has such worth, why do we waste it by neglecting to seize it but perpetually adjourn it to
some undefined date?

How could we live for this hour, when we start out as children who spend all our time waiting to
grow up?

Old people think that they will be ready to die tomorrow, and the rest of us think that we will be
ready to begin to live tomorrow.

I while away my hours preparing for a work which I know I will never start on. Our life is a
rehearsal for a play which would not be worth putting on.

11 Living in the future

We dash into the future, straining to force it to come quicker, and hoping it will have no end. Our
wants make the hours fly, and the gravity of our attachments ricochets us from one project to
the next. So our later years, sped on by all our feverish schemes, pass so much more breezily
than our childhood’s epic days, which seemed to go on for ever since they lacked the single
purpose that would suck them into the future.

We don’t care where we have been, and we don’t know where we are. We fix our eyes on
where we are on the way to. And when we get there, we still won’t know it, since we’ll be haring
off to some new landing place. We are always travelling and never arriving. And yet we see no
point in the mere journey.

You spend each season in a holding pattern. Always next spring or next summer or next
autumn you will land at your true destination, when the sky at last clears.
The dying, like the living, are fighting to put off not death but life. They cling to life by continuing
to defer it.

12 Seize the moment

Nothing but this minute is real. But that is the one time that we lack the presence of mind to live
in. We can live neither for the instant nor for eternity. We will go to any length so as not to live
for today. Some people even write vain exhortations to urge others to do so. May this instant go
on and on receding, so that you will never have to live. It’s always just in the future that we will
begin to dwell in the present.

The present instant is past before it’s come. It’s a sliver of ice which melts before you land on it.
If you want to stay in the moment, you would have to spend life leaping from one split-second
moment to the next.

Dying does not interrupt our life. It sets the seal on our long work of deferring it. We are never in
the moment, least of all when that moment is our last. We die trying to put off death, as we lived
trying to put off life. And we fail at the one as inevitably as we succeeded at the other. We cling
to life. But we would do anything sooner than live for this present hour. And that is all that life is
made of.

We have to live in the future, because we know that we are soon to die.

The one sure way to prolong your life is to live it today. But all we do is truncate it by postponing
it so as to pile up the means we will need to live in the present tomorrow.

13 Grinding the hours

I let the hours leak away by crushing each minute to yield its use. And by striving to squeeze the
good from each moment, I drain the hour of its magic. I am penny wise and pound foolish with
both time and truth.

We are always in a rush because we place no value on time.

Only the few who have great reserves of time can afford to make each second count. Those
who have too little must waste it in a race to reach some goal that they have not had the
patience to test the worth of.

The friction of small duties wears away our time.

RISK
14 Risk and death
Life is too precious not to hazard. ‘It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another,’ as
William James said, ‘that we live at all.’ But life is now so good, that we can’t bring ourselves to
risk it. And so how could we aspire to anything great? Our being is inviolate, so we can no
longer stake it for the ends that might give it meaning. We can only hoard and pamper and
prolong it.

Would the brave risk death so lightly, if love of glory didn’t lead them to hold life so cheap? Like
Yeats’s irish airman, the years to them seem ‘waste of breath.’ Death is not what they stake. It is
what they win in compensation if their bet fails to pay off. ‘Oh well, at least there’s always death,’
Napoleon used to say, and kept a vial of poison in his pocket, just in case.

Death lends life a delicious irresponsibility. It makes all possible, since it makes you strong to
dare, ‘finite to fail, but infinite to venture,’ as Dickinson put it. If you weren’t to lose life so soon,
how could you wager it with such a light heart? The grave limits the stakes, and so sets you free
to gamble. It’s a generous insurer that underwrites all your risks for the single down-payment of
your life.

15 Death is the spur

The nearness of death makes life not worth not hazarding. If life’s so brief and death’s the end,
why do anything? But since life is so brief and death is the end, why not do something perilous
and glorious? Life is worth just so much as what you chance it for. Why not lay it as a wager in a
game with eternal oblivion?

If you were never to die, would you not feel still more need of the undying fame won by lustrous
deeds?

A god craves glory even more greedily than a hero. Would people bear their lack of ever-living
fame so lightly, if they had to bear it longer than this brief lease on earth? And yet they have no
time to do great things, because they live as if they were never going to die.

Birds sing because they don’t know that they are soon to die, we sing because we do. They trill
each one of our moods and humours, mournful or screeching, cheeky or jubilant, laughing or
chatty.

LOSS
16 Loss on loss
Life is a losing game. Either it all leaves you as you pass through it, or it all leaves you at the
end, and you have no more left to lose. It’s just loss on loss, even when you feel sure that
nothing could touch you. It’s a bad bargain, which no one would go into with their eyes open.

You wait like a refugee at an abandoned station. Not one thing that you hoped for will arrive
now, and nothing that has gone is coming back. You can number your days by all the things that
they have torn from you.

As you age, grief and ruin swell to form the throbbing bass on top of which you carol your
ecstatic melodies of desire and delight. ‘A wounded deer leaps highest,’ as Dickinson wrote.

We hoard so much, yet we never win happiness. And we forfeit so much, yet we still fail to
despair. Is it more horrendous to glimpse how much we have to lose in life, or how comfortably
we go on living, when we have lost so much?

Do people cherish what they have lost just to swell the significance of what they still retain?
They have nothing to lose but life, and so they don’t doubt that life must be a thing of great
worth.

17 The stigma of surviving

There are many things more terrible to lose than life. And how terrible that you can lose them
all, and still go on living. ‘In this world,’ as Chamfort said, ‘the heart must either break or turn to
brass.’ Why are we so loath to leave this world in which all that is worth keeping has long since
left us? We stay in the game, because we have the gambler’s knack of recalling our one or two
small strokes of good luck and dismissing all the rest. Most of us are too pleased with how much
we have got to grieve at what we have lost.

We break our hearts over such mean trifles, yet we are proof against the most searing
tragedies.

Each of us is smirched by the stigma of surviving, to which we give the complacent name of
destiny or providence. With what subtle craft our coarse egoism convinces our grief that we
have a sacred duty to go on. God, we declare, is a god of the living, not of the dead.

I know that I am one of the chosen, since I live on when the better ones, the few who deserved
to survive, have met their end.

After all that agony and all that beauty, the world goes on as it has always done, brutal,
distracted, unconcerned by the ruin of so much sweetness.
18 The shame of resilience
Our resilience is a reproach to us. It is a proof not of the wealth of our inner resources, but of the
ferocity of our external attachments. People spring back from each of their shocks, because
they are so mad for their own gains and so cold to the woes of others. They jauntily live down
the loss of each principle or person that made life precious. Like Henry James’s Lord
Warburton, they don’t die of it, but they do worse, they live to no purpose.

Our hearts are lightly rent and lightly mended. They are lowlands deluged by flood on flood of
grief. But they dry out too soon. ‘So we have to go on alone in the night,’ Céline wrote. ‘We’ve
lost our true companions, and we didn’t ask them the right question, the real one, when there
was still time.’

Our inconstancy is our most constant friend. If it ever left us, we would be inconsolably bereft in
this world where all things are leaving us.

We dread to lose what we took no trouble to make our own.

19 Everything to lose
Life gives you nothing, and then takes it all back again. ‘The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,’
as Tichborne wrote. We are born with nothing, and it takes us our whole life to lose it. Life is a
bankruptcy court which is in constant session. In its cruel game you forfeit a thousand times
more than the beggarly stake that you lay. And it’s those who get least that have the most to
lose. They live on as shell-shocked tremblers amid the rubble of their bombed-out life, and are
dragged along by the unravelling catastrophe of their defeat. The longer I live, the less I own,
yet the more that is torn from my grasp. ‘Life’s empty pack is heaviest,’ as Dickinson well knew.

We go through life being stripped of one worthless thing after another. And the last and most
worthless of these is life.

When you’re down to your last cent, you still have everything to lose. And when you have just
one hour to live, you still have your whole life in front of you. And those who have made nothing
of their life still have it all to lose at the end.

DEATH AND DYING

20 Death
Why fear to die, when you have already buried such a long queue of your dead selves? It’s just
the last and least valuable of them that you will soon be interring. ‘Death,’ as Hazlitt wrote, ‘only
consigns the last fragment of what we were to the grave.’
You go to join the great majority by the loneliest road.

We come into the world like children waking fretful and bewildered in an unfamiliar room. And all
our struggles to speak our condition are the anxious wailing of a baby trying to lull itself back to
sleep. You re-enter the void having found your rightful habitation, which you still fail to recognize
as your own. Life is a brief and troubled exile from your long home.

What you try to hold on to shows how soon you will have lost it all. And what you remember
should leave you in no doubt how quickly you will be forgotten. The grass will stay green on
your tomb long after the tears of the few who loved you have dried. ‘What love was ever as
deep as a grave?’ asked Swinburne.

The dead don’t die. They go on secreting their venom through the undying enmities of those
they leave behind.

21 The vanity of forever and the stain of eternity

We are nothing. And if we were immortal, we would be no more than immortal nothings. The life
everlasting would stretch out the ephemeral to eternity.

The kind old earth will soon wash off the deep stain of our failure and burn up the cheap idols of
our success. Death will black out the sad record of our derelictions. An afterlife would taint the
whole of time with them.

We waste all our days clambering up the arduous summit of nonentity. Life is a brief transit from
one eternal void to another. And when we reach our end, as Khayyam wrote, the phantom
caravan will have returned to ‘the nothingness it set out from.’

Life is a bewildering riddle with an appalling solution. And the sum of all our various equations
makes an invariable nought. Better not to have been set the puzzle or not to have found the
answer. ‘Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are
yet alive.’

Death is the state in which our nothingness can at length rest from pretending to be something.

22 Death the final victory

After such deep defeats, to die seems a victory that I dare not dream of. The one sure success
that you can hope for in this dispiriting world is to get out of it. But the one drawback of being
dead is that you don’t know how lucky you are. And was it worth the trouble of being born, just
to learn how much better it is to be dead? Did it repay the cost just to score a zero?
Time is the sickness that we all suffer from. And death is the cure that we can’t bear to take.
Death is time’s pyrrhic triumph, which at last untangles us from the knots of its loathsome
tyranny. It frees us from the outrages of time and loss. Time binds us in such coils, that dying is
the one thing that can unlace them.

The dying have no more tears to shed.

23 Suffering and death

What fires of affliction you have to pass through to get back to the void from which you
emerged. Miles of pain still to go. After all those years of unpaid misery, nature owes us a
death.

How good of God to give us life. And how much more gracious of him to take it back so soon.

Dying is a hateful way by which to exit this hateful life. How much it still costs us to leave this life
which has cost us all that we value. Life is odious because it ends in death. And death is odious
because it puts a stop to life.

If life were not so fraught with pain, how could you bear it to end? And if it weren’t soon to end,
how could you put up with all its pain?

24 Dying all our lives

We are virtual particles, generated out of nothing only to return to nothing after a brief instant of
vain commotion.

The years fret us like a horrid nightmare troubling a long and dreamless sleep.

Life is a dream. But at times it is so hideous that it seems all too real.

Extinction is the worst you have to fear and the best you have to hope for.

Things last longer than we do. ‘The best vitality cannot exceed decay,’ as Dickinson wrote. A
living thing is one that decomposes at a faster rate than one that is not living.

Death accompanies me as the hooded third on all my expeditions. No matter where I trek, it
trails me. And where I lodge, it makes its home in me. It’s at work in me now, like ants in a nest,
silent, unseen and inexorable.

Life is a gaudy mask covering the gaunt face of death.

We are all dying, some too quick, and some too slow.
We are passengers on board a deathward flight. And all we do is scramble to grab the best
seats that we can for the brief hour before we crash.

People race through life, and crawl toward their end. As they have sped up life, they have drawn
out death. They scarcely know that they are alive, yet they sense death approaching for years,
even as they remain as gadding and restless as teenagers.

25 The justice of death

Not one thing in this world ends at the right time. It’s all abortions, untimely deaths and living
corpses.

Why are we punished by being born, before we have perpetrated any crimes? And why are we
then reprieved by death, once we have committed such gross ones?

You would have grounds to complain of death’s unfairness, if there were some who died and
some who did not, and if you were among the ones who did not.

The good die young, sickened by how like they’ve grown to this dry conniving world. What other
reparation do they get in this land of refusals? As Wordsworth wrote, it’s those whose hearts are
parched as summer dust that burn to the socket.

Something unspoken goes out of the world with each one of us at our end.

26 The consolations of death

The one safe place in this world is out of it.

How sweet is death to one who is sick of running but can’t bear to sit still. And how bitter is life
to one who is sick of running and yet can’t bear to die.

At times it seems so rich to die, that you regain the relish to go on with your drab life. Life
derives its zest from what Whitman termed ‘the delicious nearby freedom of death.’

How sweet death’s bitterness makes each second seem. And how bright all things look in its
shadow. If only I could attain in dying the grace of leaves, which float, dance and fly as they fall.
But I’m too dense for such poise.

Death won’t end the things that are of true worth. And what it does end grows more precious by
its ending. ‘’Tis death,’ wrote Browning, ‘that makes life live.’ The finest goods are also the
frailest. Its highest aspirations make life more exhilarating and more endangered. If it were not
so vulnerable, what value could it have?
27 Merciful death
Life shows us so little pity, that we have to hope that death will show us some mercy. But would
life treat us so untenderly, if it didn’t know how callous we are?

‘No man should be afraid to die,’ says Fuller, ‘who hath understood what it is to live.’ Life is such
an atrocious scene, that the exit from it had to be festooned with terrors, to dissuade us from
departing it. God had to make dying so hard, because being dead is so easy.

The part of death that is part of life is, like the rest of life, rugged and bitter. But the part that
belongs all to death is kind and full of comfort.

All lives end happily, since they all end.

28 Fighting deliverance
Death is more tender with us than we are with ourselves. It draws us gently into its welcome
ocean, when we would hold back shivering and frightened on the edge. We shun it, as a rabid
dog shuns water.

When did we ever know what was good for us? Death, which knows nothing, knows our own
good better than we do. Why do we look for a saviour to deliver us from death? Death comes as
our one sweet redeemer, to ransom us from the hell that we have made of this life. As Browne
wrote, ‘We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.’

Death is our neighbour. That is why we hate it. Life is family, and so a thousand times more
deserving of our fear and detestation.

Dying is a duel in which both sides win, and neither gains a thing.

We fight to put off what will free us, and fly to meet what will make us its slave. We love life and
hate death, yet death gives us all that we need, while life fails to give us a thing that we want.

29 Rehearsing death
Dying is so poor a play, how could it rate a rehearsal? And living is a sickness which is not
worth a laborious cure. It will heal itself soon enough. But you should at least abstain from
passing it on to taintless victims. If you try, like the stoics, to get the better of your dread of
dying, you won’t defeat it but surrender to it before it comes.

If death is nothing, then why waste all your strength preparing for it? Why live a long funeral
because your light will go out one day? How could this negligible tenure deserve the effort of
such a wearisome redemption?
Only those who philosophize are truly alive, boast the philosophers. And yet to philosophize is
to learn to die. And if you were ever to find the truth, you would be better off dead.

Death is the one serious and solemn thing that happens to us, and most of us are not there for
it.

30 Death discloses nothing

Life shows us so few of its secrets, that we hope that dying will yield up all its last clues. But
when it comes, you’ll be so busy finishing, that you’ll have no time to ponder it. And you
assuredly won’t get the chance to catch its drift once it’s passed you by. Jesus or Lazarus seem
to have come back no wiser from their stay in the grave. Why would you learn more by expiring
than you do by nodding off to sleep?

Death has nothing to teach us. And even if it did, these days when we meet it we are all too old
to learn.

Like all the things that we go through, death would have to be understood backwards. But we’re
not likely to get much chance to do that.

If you are lucky, death will find you before you have found out who you are. You will have turned
back to dust, before you learn that this is all you have ever been.

Why would dying reveal who you authentically are, when it transforms you irrecoverably into
what you are not?

Most of the courage or cowardice that we show in the face of death is due to what kind of death
we meet. ‘Our resolution in death hangs on so little,’ as Montaigne says. ‘Its being delayed by a
few hours, or having companions, make us conceive of it differently.’

31 Death is our last deception

We cower in a perpetual state of emergency, and so we submit to a permanent suppression of
the truth. A spool of distracting urgencies chokes our life. And dying comes as our last crisis, to
stifle the final truth. If the years have frightened you into illusion, why would the threat of
dissolution embolden you to face the truth? We have fought so long to keep hold of our lies. So
why would we part with them just when we need them most?

Death is a yawning hollow which sounds so solemn, because it echoes back to us our own
hollowness.

The deathbed is our final bastion against the truth. It is the stage on which we play our last sad
vaudeville. Then our epitaph is the last pious lie, which sets the seal on our life of pious lying.
Deathbed scenes with their solemnity and wise words belong to fiction and not to life.

What use have the dying for last words? It is we who live on in this world of cheap scenes that
feel we must make them up.

Some people love to act the philosopher, and boast that they are reconciled to death, even as
they’re doing all they can to cling to the last shreds of life.

32 Death is far from our thoughts

However near death comes to us, it keeps far from our thoughts. If we ever think of it, we do so
as we think of the snow and sleet when we are warm indoors, to add to our comfort by the
contrast. Even in its sinister gloom we still stay brightly frivolous. ‘Our thoughts always lie
elsewhere,’ as Montaigne says. We dread the passage, but can’t fix our minds on the terminus.
There was least need for a sage like Spinoza to urge us to think least of death. We can’t focus
on it long enough to fear it. Why would we think of it when we are young and it’s so far from us?
And how could we bear to think of it when we are old and it’s so close?

Even those who have no more purpose in living than to stay alive never think of death. If they
knew what it was, they might not be so keen to keep out of its way.

The thought of my own death doesn’t trouble me, since it seems so far from me. And the
thought of the deaths of others doesn’t trouble me, since they are so far from me. And yet even
for the most self-centred of us another’s end seems more real and serious than our own. Theirs
has the faraway resonance of fiction, while my own is as banal as life.

Young people feel that they will never die because they will always be young. And the old feel
that they will never die no matter how old they get.

In the midst of life we are in death. What luck then that we are never in the midst of life.

33 In the midst of death we are in life

Our hearts are never more set on the world than when we are on the cusp of departing it,
‘insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal,’ as Shakespeare wrote of an inmate on death
row. We fret more at how our corpse will be handled than at how our naked soul will fare in
gaping eternity. ‘The only worry that I know they had concerned their burial,’ says Montaigne.
Even as I drown, the sunbursts on the surface of life’s shimmering cesspool still dazzle my
eyes. The noose is right now tightening round our neck, as we scan the heedless crowd for
some fresh prospect of joy. ‘The pang preceding death,’ as Goldsmith wrote, ‘bids expectation
rise.’
Will dying come as our last distraction, to deflect our thoughts from the desolation of death? Do
the dying, like the living, dread not the last thing but only the next thing? Do we die as we lived,
perplexed, fraught with hope, not quite aware of what has befallen us? Our going will be made
of the same stuff as life, trivia, banality and make-believe. ‘When we dead awaken,’ Ibsen wrote,
‘we will see that we have never lived.’

Mere living was never enough for us, and so we never really lived at all.

It’s only for those still in the midst of life that death is a poignant thought. For the dying it is one
last disagreeable chore to get through.

AFTERLIFE

34 Immortal cravings
Humans are the only animals that know they will die, and so they duly conclude that they are
sure to live on for ever. Each of us knows that we live for all time, since all time lasts just as long
as we live. Beset by deathless yearnings, we are blessed with merely mortal capacities.

We may know and feel that we are immortal, but like most of what we know and feel, this is sure
to be a lie.

Life can boast that it triumphs over death, because in this one case the loser gets to write the
history.

You have died and been reborn so many times in the course of your days, that you infer that
you will never die for real. As hope has lived on through the demise of each of my hopes, no
doubt I will live on through my last death.

Death is the body’s revenge on the arrogant mind, which brags that, once freed from its fetid
embrace, it will be reborn as the bride of eternity.

35 The eternal ego

Our belief in the life after death stems from the ego’s refusal to accept its proper limits, and the
intellect’s inability to grasp the true nature of time.

We all die alone. But some of us are kept company to the last by our bright complacency and by
that deathless self of ours which we trust will continue to inhabit and delight the admiring world.
Our ego won’t live through our death, but it does get us through our dying, as it has got us
through our lives. Most of us are sure that we are too important to die, and not even dying is
enough to change our minds. We go out in a last spasm of triumphant self-satisfaction. When
the end comes, some people ask, Where did it all go? But most muse smugly, How did I fit it all
in?

Even if you think that being dead is nothing, you still don’t doubt that some part of you must
persist to experience this nothing. If death is a sleep, there must be a sleeper.

We insist that we must be immortal, as one last vain assertion of our egoism to counter the vast
blank indifference of the universe.

The living see each day how the dead are forgotten, and yet they have no doubt that they will be
remembered.

36 The terror of eternity

Some people find life so sweet, that they hope it will go on for ever. And some find it so bitter,
that their worst fear is that it might. This life ought to be sufficient warning not to wish for
another.

Some have suffered too much in this life not to hope for a better one. And others have suffered
too much not to fear a worse.

If the world to come is better than this one, it would be too good for me. And if it is worse, I
would want no part in it.

Some people find peace and comfort in the hope that they will live on for all time. And some
have been so bruised by life’s cruel reversals, that they are soothed by the certainty of death.
They know that they will then be ‘not happy, but safe from ancient sorrow,’ as Leopardi wrote.
Death may cast a pall on your joys. But it shades you from being scorched by the pitiless sun of
immortality. Life with the prospect of death is bad enough. Without it it would be intolerable.

37 Damned to everlasting life

Immortality would be as harrowing as an unabated insomnia. One sleepless night should cure
you of the yearning for eternal life.

Life has played us such filthy tricks, it may be that death won’t be the last of them. Since this life
is hell, it might stretch out for all time. You may wake to find that the nightmare will have no
cease. The thought that it won’t go on for ever is all that could keep a sane person going. The
true sting of death would be a second life spent with the devil who made this one.

Eating of the tree of knowledge made Adam and Eve too wise to eat of the tree of life.

Death, like most good things, comes too late for many of us, but at least it does come.
38 Live beyond life
Find the one thing that you do better than living, and spend your life doing that. Living is for
those who have nothing better to do. And we must believe that life has some meaning beyond it,
because we know that living is not it.

The work is worth more than the life, the product is worth more than the person, the outer is
worth more than the inner, the object is worth more than the intention, the execution is worth
more than the conception, and making is worth more than being.

Death saves alive those who have made an ageless work and aimed at more than mere
happiness. It will raise up the ones who lived beyond life. It’s not a leveller. It cuts down to their
true size the distinctions that seem so large in our small lives, wealth, status and power. But it
sets fast the rift dissevering the few who have done great things from the rest of us. We did no
more than live, and so can do no more than die.

All noble societies know that life is a means and not an end. But our culture sets so high a price
on mere living, that it can add nothing to the value of life, and will ensure that life itself will soon
come to a stop.

Humankind makes good its claim to be here by its few inhuman exceptions. Life is justified only
by what transcends it, and it has been most enhanced by those who had something better to do
than live.

39 Immortality by repute
You live on in the grave as you do above it, only in the hearts of others. ‘A shade,’ says Hardy,
‘but in its mindful ones has immortality.’ You exist in life a wisp more substantially than you do in
the tomb. You are a little harder to ignore. Even the gods gain their brief tenure of eternity only
in the place that we give them in our minds.

One day soon, when all are quite forgotten and all the names are lost, I will be Shakespeare’s
equal. His glory will take an age to catch up with my anonymity. Time, having winnowed wheat
from chaff, will soon burn both in one common fire. ‘Laurel outlives not May,’ as Swinburne
wrote.

Ours is the one species that can form an idea of eternity, and then shrink it to a few hundred
years of fame, and then shrink that to a few years of lucrative celebrity. As Twain joked, ‘by
forever I mean thirty years.’ We want to live for ever, though we don’t much mind how long
forever will last.

The dead live on as they did in life, that is, as lies.

40 Our brief eternity
How droll to hear such beings of an hour bandying about big words like immortality as if they
bore some reference to their own brief span. ‘Immortality,’ as Hazlitt says, ‘means a century or
two.’

The longest afterlife in the minds of others will stave off the oblivion of the aeons for a mere
moment. It is obscurity and not glory that will last till the end of time. And the dead have reached
that an hour or two before us. Remembrance lives for a bright instant. Forgetting will stretch out
everlastingly. ‘For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever.’

Humanity’s lustrous exploits and memorials are spewed out of the whirlpool of all-devouring
time, to be sucked back down a second later. But since we know that art is mortal and love frail,
we blush to cavil when poets claim that art is eternal or makes time stand still, or that love
conquers death and that what will survive of us is love. What will survive of us is so little, and
soon nothing at all. Our works may make a show of defying time, but time laughs at them and
will soon bring them to nought. Life is brief, art is a fraction less so. It’s not immortal, and can’t
make us immortal. It seems to suspend the moment, but only for a moment.

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