Purpose

RIVALRY

1 Others give us our purpose

Other people, who are not quite real to us, are the source of all our reality. They, whose lives are a shadow to me, make my life seem real to myself, though it’s scarcely real to them. 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 void of purpose, seems worth doing so long as someone else is watching. And nothing, however full of purpose, 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 sore need of 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.

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.

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.

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. No general theory could pull down our vanity.

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, free will and the care of providence 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 ebullience or unease they might feel, not just because I lack self-forgetting imagination, but because I don’t share their hungry perspective.

7 The selfish perspective of purpose

How could I see that such small nuisances or satisfactions look so large to others 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.

8 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 full 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.

9 The worthy purpose is the one we are aiming for

When people win the game, they judge that the game must be worth playing. And they may judge the same simply 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.

10 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.

11 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.

Storytellers think that they love life because they love telling stories about it, and that a life has meaning if they can use it as material to make a story.

OUR NOTHINGNESS

12 We are nothing

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 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.

13 We do not matter

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.’

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. My life, which was so mean, was all too much for me. On good days I know that I’m a failure. On bad days I feel that my failure matters. What a fool I am. And what an even bigger fool I must be, to think that it matters. And yet there are times when life is so terrible that it does seem to matter terribly.

14 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 nothing could touch you.

How could we guess how empty we are, when we are all so full of our own projects and importance?

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.

Intimations of our nothingness may come to us now and then, but they come to nothing. The sense that we are all in all is always with us.

When the smallness of others reflects back to me my own, instead of seeing what I am, I am struck by how unlike me they are.

15 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, though no fact is easier to forget. And my own nothingness is everything to me. I know that I am no more than a bug which life has squashed. But I still feel that my squashing has been a tragedy of cosmic proportions. We are insects tormented by our own self-importance.

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 flattering faith duly drives out the heart-parching truth.

16 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 excursion from silence to silence.

Nothing is harder to get the better of 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. Were we ever to sit still and do nothing, we might come to see that we are nothing.

We are so empty, that we will swallow the whole world, and we still won’t be filled.

17 To be nothing is easy, to be nobody is hard

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. It ought to be easy to be nothing, yet we still make it so hard for ourselves and for others.

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.

18 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

19 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.

For a living being all things serve as means to more life. Nothing is an end, least of all mere living.

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.

20 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.

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.

What seems to give your life meaning are the ways in which you make yourself a means for others to achieve their purposes, and how you use them as a means to achieve your own.

21 The madness in our method

People plot the most careful 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

22 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 sore 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.’

23 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.

24 No living thing lives for pleasures

Life could never have got going, if living things existed to have pleasant sensations.

The pain of lack lashes on living things to act far more strongly than the hope of pleasure lures them on to do so.

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.

25 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.

Each pleasure is prone to turn into a compulsion, and all compulsions come to weigh on us like burdens.

To try to live for the sake of pleasure might seem to be the most natural thing in the world. But it would impose on us a discipline more strenuous than that of the most self-denying monk. It would be too forced, artificial, unpleasant and arduous for any being to bear. We would be sure to fail, but in the process we would become empty shells.

Most of us never find peace. The plain pleasures which we enjoy don’t satisfy us. Yet few of us enjoy prosecuting the more serious career which we trust will fill our souls.

26 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 which 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.

27 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.

28 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?

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.

29 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 grave than mere diversion.

30 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 fear 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.

31 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 priceless, 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

32 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.

33 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.

34 Fun and money

The world now welcomes only what it can use or what might amuse it, 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.

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.

35 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.

36 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.

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.

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.

37 Ingenious stupidity

Technology makes us more restive, rapacious and distracted, more careless of 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.

38 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.

39 Humanism

Humanism flatters us that we are exceptional in our nature and crucial 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

40 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.

If, as the sages say, we can find no refuge more quiet and untroubled than our own hearts, then we are bound to pass our life in one long storm. Our striving for inner peace and equanimity is as abortive as our rage is impotent.

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 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.

41 Our character comes from outside us

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.

Stoics want to convince us that we should seek to control only what lies in our own power. But what lies less in their power than convincing us?

42 Futility and purpose

Life is squalid, arduous and futile. So we seek out gaudy luxuries to deck 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 it would be a mistake to waste your strength in a fight with undeserving enemies. But what other kind does life give you? As Kraus said, ‘Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.’

43 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 streaking, 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?

44 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.

45 Perpetual motion

People don’t mind where they’re heading, so long as they have to career helter-skelter 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?

46 Unredeemed

Life is so empty, there’s nothing in it that you could use to transcend it. And it’s too low to be worth transcending.

Why is it that thinkers such as Pascal, who diagnose our predicament so truthfully, then prescribe such unconvincing correctives? He aimed to prove that nature is corrupt, but that there must therefore be a redeemer. 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.

47 No cure

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.

Most of the cures that we take up are no more than symptoms of our disease. Yet our diseases are the source of our greatness.

Each new blow makes us forget how badly off we were before. Our maladies at least take our minds off our true malady.

SUPERFLUITY

48 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.

49 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, in which the aim of conduct is to win not happiness but honour. But in capitalism there is no stable class system, the aim is happiness of the lowest kind, we are mad to gain fame by being shameless, and form is suspect and ceremony obsolete.

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. How few there are whose lives would have been poorer, if this or that thinker had not had their great thoughts. 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 wondrous 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.

50 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.

51 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 who of us could do without our worthy truisms?

What people take to be deep inner 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 needs for the things of this world.

52 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 no one asks that you 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.

A cloud of uselessness hangs over what is essential. And a sinkhole of futility waits to swallow up what is useful.

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.

53 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 sense 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.

54 The purpose of art is to be purposeless

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.’

‘Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity,’ as Chesterton said. And it is only luxuries that can deal with the true and essential, while necessities have to cope with the urgent and false.

A writer is a tireless scribe who keeps meticulous records for oblivion.

55 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

56 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.

57 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.

58 Beautiful suffering nobodies

I look back on how much I have suffered and how little it meant. How mortifying that I have left no mark on this world which has marked me 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 something. ‘Not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts acute pain,’ Nietzsche says, ‘that is the badge of greatness.’

WISDOM

59 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 can’t make a thing 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 might 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 give us the means 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.

60 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 any more than their 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 battles that it won’t win against enemies who are not worth vanquishing for a prize which is not worth attaining.

61 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 hold that they are just ignorant, as Franklin said. And many cunning 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 stumbling-block that stands in the way of 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.

The human mind longs to find equilibrium. And as soon as it gets it, it drives straight past it to a new state which will throw it off kilter.

Our knowledge is the tool of our illusions. And our illusions are the means we use to gain and keep power.

62 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 which 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?

63 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. And only those who know that they are already dead can bear to learn wisdom. 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.

Wisdom is not found in the land of the living, and since God is the God of the living, wisdom is not with him. And so how could it have been wisdom that made this mad world?

64 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.’

65 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 simply steps over.

To philosophize used to be to learn how to die. Now it is no more than a busy pastime that helps us to forget that we have to.

66 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. And that makes me act like still more of a fool. ‘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.

A wise person is wise for a few minutes in the day, but a fool is a fool all the time.

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 been our whole lives.

67 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. We prefer to admire wisdom as a genre of literature than to practise it as a way of life.

The books of sages are like sermons written for fish, telling them to live in accord with 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.

68 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.

69 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 embitters 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.

70 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.

71 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. Cunning people know how much it will sell for. The wise know its true worth.

72 Restraint and purpose

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 shame me out of 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.

 

See also:        Religion,              Goodness Truth & Beauty