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 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 precious goods that they claim to set such a high price 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 their 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 mere semblance of 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 in order to stay true to myself, I have to become 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 proper 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 snaps of themselves in front 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 they see those round them spending 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 ruled 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 false views 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.
By giving my mind up to melodramatic dreams, I pile on my head prosaic debacles. We tell ourselves lies that we don’t believe, and then wreck our lives in a vain bid 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 light. 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. A personality holds us in its spell by the effect it has on other people, not by virtue of some real force that it has in itself.
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 has formed of them. This shallow world of appearances is not the real world. There is an even shallower one behind it. 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 themselves 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.
As Pascal points out, 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.
We assume that we ought to think for ourselves, because others have told us that this is what people do.
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 false views. 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 shamming, since we sham so instinctually.
We lie by nature, but a good 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 Thoughtless imitation
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.
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. Take away the outward form and effects from an idea, and there won’t be much to it, or it won’t mean much to us. All we can see is the husk.
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 its crass facsimiles convince us that it is authentic.
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 Imitation is our nature
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.
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.
Nature, instinct and intuition can’t save us, since we lost them long ago. And reason can’t save us, since it is the lackey of the mad amour-propre which has replaced our nature.
21 Shallow nature
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.
Human nature may stay the same in all times and places. But in that case, it must have very little effect on human life, since human life and its conditions diverge so widely from time to time and from place to place.
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.
22 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.
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.
If human beings did only what was natural and necessary, they would go back to being pure animals.
One of the constants of human nature has been the conviction that most of our fellow human beings do not have a full share in our 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.
23 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, since 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.
24 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, divorced 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 unwholesome 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.
25 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 simple 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.’
26 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.
How could we be present to the real world, if we did not know it as it is? Yet the more we know, the farther are we removed from the real world. ‘Knowledge increases unreality,’ as Yeats wrote. 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 inferences from effect to cause, 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.’
27 The rational animal
Animals have not learnt to live in accord with reason, while we who have learnt it live at odds with it. It is reason itself that prevents us from living in accord with our nature as rational animals. And 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 our most elaborate schemes serve our most childish drives. We can’t ascend to heaven, but no more can we stay true to the earth. So we float an inch or two above it, unable to savour its low pleasures or to rise to a higher plane.
28 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, of gliding, soaring, plunging, darting? 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.
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.
29 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.
We are free to be almost anything, except the animals that we are or the gods that we want to become.
30 Instincts and habits
We call instincts those habits which have been in use for so long that they have taken the place of our instincts. And most of what we believe we believe by intuition we in fact believe by imitation. And we say that a person or a culture has lost its instincts when it has ceased to practise the old customs which we mistook for nature.
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.
Civilization does not weaken people’s instincts, as Nietzsche and Lawrence argued. It gives them fierce though conventional compulsions.
31 Instincts and illusions
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 animals can make do with their instincts. With our more evolved form of consciousness, we require illusions. We need to cling to the illusion of our meaning and purpose, so as to give our brute insensate will a pretext to go on with our struggle. 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.
What complex beings we have evolved into. Yet we are still fooled by the same old simple lies that flatter our vanity.
32 Conformity
Some minds are so heavy, that all they’re good for is to act as ballast for the norms of their herd.
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.
33 Conceited imitation
We prop 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 anxious 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.
34 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
35 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.
36 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.’
Our minds suffer from a chronic dysentery. We need to keep swallowing great gulps of information, because our organs are too disordered to absorb it.
The flash of an event may disorient us, and the glare of particular incidents may blind us to broad truths.
There are so many activities which we might use to think, such as reading, research, travel or talk. 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 are always preparing to think, but not thinking, as we are preparing to live, but never living.
We have no end of toys and sports that stop 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.
37 The imprecision of perceptions
A memory, as Hume showed, 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.
Beings that are perfectly at home in their surroundings do not see them. They just try to pick out the few things that might help or harm them.
We know that words blanch, flatten, dull, generalize and abstract the real world. But so do all our perceptions. And if they did not, we could not know the world.
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.
38 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 you had to rely on your own experience to teach you what the world is like, you would be as lost as a new-born or an idiot. ‘We live by information, not by sight,’ wrote Gracián. ‘We exist by faith in others.’
There may be no innate ideas, but it’s just as true that there are no unfiltered perceptions. We have no direct access to our own minds or to the world.
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.
39 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 is 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.
40 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 a steep 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.
41 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.
42 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.
43 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 shivers slash my skin.
44 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.
45 Prejudice guides us through experience
Our trite worldview 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.
46 We experience our prejudices
Most of the thoughts that we owe to personal experiences 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.
Our views have been processed through so many other minds, why are they still so ill-digested?
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.
47 Travelling imitation
The real world is the one that can forge the most seductive images, and impose them on the most people.
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 the few days we spend in it. 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
48 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 that might appear in a second-rate novel.
49 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 present a false front to the world, either because we feel so ashamed, or because we have no shame at all.
50 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 line with the images that we reflect.
How many rehearsals it takes to perfect our most spontaneous gestures. And still we 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 heartfelt 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.
51 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 feel that they are sincere.
In order to convince people that I am authentic, I borrow a few phony tricks which I try to make seem all my own.
52 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 let fall 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 be a speaking 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.
53 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 a fraud in my own eyes. I pretend that I’ve been fooled, for fear of appearing false. 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 betray the 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 from the bottom your heart.
54 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.
55 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 trivial truths. Fiction reveals the truth by crafting significant lies.
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.
We are so crooked, how could we draw near the truth save by acts of bad faith? Reach it, and you will learn how strong is your need of hypocrisy.
Most of us speak with sincerity but not with truth. A strong mind is truthful yet seldom transparent.
56 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.
57 Feeling lies
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.
A doctrinaire fanatic, such as Hitler, still has to key up his sincerity like a ham actor. Yet the most guileful pretenders lend an unstinting 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.
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 it may be the most poisonous ones that we keep in mind. And if we need to pretend to feel something, we will soon come to feel it with all our heart.
58 Self-deceiving sincerity
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.
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.
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 a clear enough eye to doubt themselves.
What gives an air of authority is sincerity and certainty. And liars have far more of these than honest people.
Most people are sincere, because it’s too much trouble to pretend.
59 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.
Sincere people can’t bear to tell a lie without believing that it’s true. That’s what they call their honesty.
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 by seeming so frank. And their self-belief grows as their deceits gain credence. It feeds on its own sense of success and good faith.
60 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. Such is the claim of all confidence-men. 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.
Conscious hypocrites may come to know themselves. Sincere people know how the world works, and how they must deceive themselves in order to get on in it.
61 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.
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.
62 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 won’t balk at living a whole life of upright self-deception. They are not honest enough to lie with their lips alone. 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?
63 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.
64 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 blatant honesties which scoffers use to malign their 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 chicanes, the one who lies with sincerity.’
65 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 hold to 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
66 Words, things and imitation
Language is the wall partitioning our prison cells which we tap on to signal our aloneness.
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 gown 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.
67 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.
68 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.
69 Don’t 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.
Most of the lying that we do consists not so much in telling lies that profit us but in tacitly and mutually accepting from others the sort of lies that we all tell ourselves.
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.
70 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 force 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.
71 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 the thoughts that would be 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.
72 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.
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.