We keep murmuring goodness, truth and beauty, as if they formed the motto of a country from which we have been exiled, or the three last words of a dialect that we have ceased to speak. These are the values that we think we live by. Our beauty is accidental, our good is economical, and our truth is superficial.
People don’t want truth but the information that brings power. And they don’t want beauty but the luxury which they use to flaunt their success.
Every day the world proves how determined it is to spoil any beauty that it finds and to shut its ears to any truth that it is told.
If we really died for want of truth or beauty, the world would have been unpeopled an age ago. But we would be more likely to die from their possession. And so we go on.
We think that codes of good and evil are concerned with souls and individuals. But what gives life is systems and things with no soul, forms, traditions, ecologies, works, ideas and styles.
Of course a human being is a machine. The question is, What is the machine able to make?
The cosmos is many not one, dynamic not static, corporeal and not a spirit, contingent not necessary, disjoint not unitary, amoral and numb to what is just, godless but numinous. It is ceaselessly becoming. Not one thing stands still. There is no being. All is flux, change, strife and commotion. It is a machine, conjured out of nothing, with no designer and no purpose.
MORAL AMATEURS
1 Virtue corrupts
By dedicating ourselves to a categorical code of right and wrong, we will debase humanity and despoil the virginal earth. Moral ideals warp the type, but are too weak to rehabilitate the individual. ‘As mankind perfects itself,’ said Flaubert, ‘man degrades himself.’ By struggling to set up a pure justice we will tread down all that is delicate and precious. Yet we still won’t make anyone happier or more virtuous, though we will diminish the world by trying.
People are perverted by ideals of virtue as much as by examples of vice. ‘When the great way degenerated,’ Lao Tzu says, ‘human kindness and the moral law ensued.’
Some people’s hearts turn to iron by carrying on a slow struggle for a just cause. ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight.’
To be virtuous is one of the few things that human kind is not quite unnatural enough for. But it is just unnatural enough to think that it can be.
Life is so at odds with justice, that to try to set up a perfect justice would be to put an end to life.
2 Justice is a means, not the meaning
No virtue is an end in itself. They all must have a function. Courage without a worthy object is mere foolhardiness and daredevilry. To be good, a quality must be good for something.
The operations of life may be moral, but its meaning is not. Right and wrong make up a small component of life, of how we ought to live, of how we should judge and be judged, of what will pain or please us. The pressing daily question, how am I to live, rarely has a moral answer. And if it did, it would be a lot less worth living.
You may do no wrong, and yet your life may still be all wrong.
Few people act for the reason that they want to do good. Yet most of them can’t act without assuming that they are doing good.
The state does not exist to establish equity. It makes use of it as an expedient to preserve its own being. People don’t live in groups so that they can act justly. They act justly so that they can live in groups. Justice is a means, not an end, though moralists may say otherwise. It serves as traffic control for our wants. But it is not the objective that we set out for.
3 The necessary pretence
Moral laws are regulations which guide how you ought to act. They are not propositions which are true or false. So they correspond to nothing in nature, and describe nothing that is real. They are like the rules of any game, like tennis, croquet or cricket. You must abide by them, or there would be no living in society. But they have no existence or validity outside it. The rules of the game are not the purpose of the game. And though all good athletes must play by them, the best are not the ones who stick to them most conscientiously.
We could not live with our fellows, if we did not possess a false image of justice. But we could no more do so, if we had its true form.
Virtue is like clothing. It doesn’t do much good, but we need it to disguise ourselves from each other, so that we can put up with one another.
There are as many justices as there are tastes. But we have to speak as if there were no more than one, so that we can live in peace. And there is only one taste as there is only one justice. But we posit that there must be a gamut of them, so that we can live in peace.
4 Moral amateurs
The first task of the moral law is to fool us that we are moral beings. And so its first article of faith is a lie.
People are moral beings by bare chance. They are intrinsically creatures who will, strive, desire and compete, who crave fulfilment and never find it. Yet moralists talk as if we were all in training to be saints.
How much courage or cowardice you show is more a result of chance than of character. And your character itself is the sum of all the chances you have met with.
Few of us devote ourselves either to good or to bad. ‘Great vices and great virtues are exceptions among mankind,’ said Napoleon. We are reluctant conscripts of virtue and cheap amateurs of vice. These are like any one object, and we have ten thousand such objects on which we’ve set our hearts. ‘Most evil,’ Arendt says, ‘is done by those who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’ But this is no less true of most of the good that is done. Specialists in getting on, how could we be more than dilettantes of integrity or iniquity? These are instruments that we use. They are not the end to which we pledge our lives. ‘I for my part,’ Confucius said, ‘have not yet seen one who had a real love of goodness, nor one who execrated wickedness.’
5 Reluctant virtue
I do good reluctantly, but I do evil with relish.
‘Man,’ as Leopardi wrote, ‘is almost always as wicked as he needs to be,’ though most of us act honourably where we have no choice. Most people are as good as they have to be, and as bad as they can get away with. They have the means to do more good than they wish to. And they wish to do more mischief than they dare to. They are willing to be as vile as they need to be. But most of the time they need to be less vile than they are willing to be. So expedience reduces them to a reluctant rectitude.
God gets our bodies, but the devil gets our souls. In the doing of any evil deed, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. People are too timid to dare all the wrong that they would like to do. And they don’t want to do all the pedestrian good that their own profit might prod them to do.
The malice of our schemes is held in check by our incompetence more than by our propriety.
Our better qualities are ready to lay down their lives for the sake of our baser ones.
BANALITY OF GOODNESS
6 Moral mediocrities
We do such scant evil and such scant good, and we intend still less. Yet we are judged by what we never aimed at. Very few of our acts are done with a moral end in view. And yet most people are happy to submit to this test, since they don’t doubt that they do act from moral motives.
Most of our virtue consists in prudently refraining from doing the wrong that we might do. Goodness is cautious, parsimonious and negative. We are self-serving, but not criminal or saintly. Right and wrong are late-born and sickly.
Ambition and self-interest persevere. Virtue and vice faint and falter. There are far more moral mediocrities than moral monsters. ‘A dwarf in evil, a dwarf in good,’ as Ibsen styled it. We couch our conduct in a thin and crude ethical idiom.
How nobly I would have behaved, if I had been caught up in a real storm, such as a war. But in this low pass I have no spur to act better than the insect that I am.
One thing to be said for wisdom and the rest of the virtues is that they never go to excess.
When I act for my own ends, I project the profit. But when I act for the sake of others, I count the cost. So I’m as brisk and busy in my own interest as I am sluggish in theirs.
7 The banality of evil
It is not evil that is banal, but people, the saved no less than the sinful. Evil becomes as ordinary as the state makes it. The third reich made devilry utterly routine, and so society grew utterly devilish. And a just regime, if it aimed to do as much good as Germany did harm, would need to enlist its Eichmanns of plodding virtue.
The most banal thing about evil might be the platitudes we use to respond to it.
A great abomination such as a world war seems to purge the age of its banality like a blood offering. But the crimes against humanity, which we deplore, tempt us to deplore the whole of humanity and deduce that it may deserve the crimes that have been done to it.
We make holocausts, not when a few of us choose to behave with inhuman brutality, but because most of us are humanly unmoved by all but our own hopes of gain.
An evil genius, such as Hitler or Stalin, though quite nondescript himself, may be the cause of stupendous outcomes.
Those who childishly crave approval cravenly idolize transgressors. Timid and ailing people, like Nietzsche, make fools of themselves when they cheer on the crimes of the strong and hearty.
8 The banality of goodness
Good is no less banal than evil. And if either of them does rise above ordinariness, it is by fighting with an overpowering foe. It is the struggle and not the cause that lends the lustre.
The motives that prompt miscreants to do evil are often as trivial as its effects are prodigious. But both the motives and effects of the good that the just do are equally trivial.
is banal because it is so natural. And good is banal because it is so conventional.
Good is as ordinary as evil in its causes, but it is far less spectacular in its consequences.
The masterpiece of banality will prove to be the wrecking of the globe by so many well-meaning people striving so hard to hand on a better life to their children.
The saints as much as the sinners are sustained by their slogans and catchphrases, not by the truth. These show them where their duty lies, or at least ease their mind when they fail to follow it.
There are numberless vain and irritable pedants of virtue, but no geniuses, though there are plenty of adepts of instinctive self-sacrificing affection.
If a great number of people practise a virtue, we scorn it for its cheapness. And if few do, we scorn humanity for possessing such a paucity of it.
9 Circumstance is king
My moral nature runs so shallow, that the least churn flowing from a fresh fancy or a change of luck is enough to muddy it.
We are not simply generous or kind or honest. We are generous or kind or honest to this person and not to that, in this way and not in that, at this time but not at that. Our virtues are patchy, partial, specialized, arbitrary, conditional, malleable and circumstantial.
Virtue itself must consent to be corrupted before it can do any good in this world. The saints don’t know how much they owe the devil for the completion of their work.
All our traits, both straight and skewed, bend to wheeling chance. ‘Circumstance,’ as Twain notes, ‘is man’s master.’
Things seem so complex because they shift at the whim of the least change in their circumstances.
10 Necessity
Necessity may make an honest man a knave, as Defoe said. And yet the need to live in peace with others keeps many a knave honest.
We feel so hard pressed by our own wants, that we presume we have a right to press hard on all around us in our raving to sate them.
We don’t doubt that we are free yet necessary beings, in control of our own compulsions and aware of ourselves. But in truth we are contingent yet unfree, the dupes of our own drives and ignorant of our own motives. We are assortments of contingencies. Yet we are sure that our path is destined and that our will is free. And it is those who see that they are puppets that gain the freedom to play.
11 Moral conformity
We conform even in our crimes. ‘Men are as the time is,’ as Shakespeare showed. We covet what our neighbours covet, and lie as they lie. We murder in murderous times. In time of war cowards are the first to take up arms. The hard thing would be to stand out from the bellicose herd. ‘The virtue in most request,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘is conformity.’ My self-interest and my stupidity lead me to comply in my moral acts as they do in all the rest. We are chameleons, who take our moral tinge from our surrounds. Few of us turn out to be much better or much worse than the world in which we move. ‘If people had no vices but their own,’ Chesterfield wrote, ‘few people would have so many as they have.’
‘The whole morality of the world,’ Multatuli wrote, ‘could perhaps be summed up in the words, Do as others do.’ The herd buffers itself from the individual by its codes of right and wrong. And the individual defies the omnivorous claims of the collective by insurrection or by indifference.
The most refined prescriptions of right and wrong reproduce the first precepts implanted in the nursery. Thus, as Dryden wrote, ‘the child imposes on the man.’ We crib our most exalted ideals from crude and puerile sources.
12 The rewards of virtue are fixed by the state
People are neither good nor evil. They simply seek their own ends. But the state decrees which kinds of acts they will profit by. And so it is not nature but social arrangements that make reward follow on right action and happiness depend on virtue. A government can’t make its citizens just. All it can do is bar them from being rewarded when they act unjustly.
The inhabitants of a just state do right from the same motives of habit and self-interest that induce those of an unjust one to do wrong. In order to be virtuous, all they need do is calculate and conform. But you can be sure that you have dropped into a fiendish world, if in resolving to act rightly you have to do more than compute what will best serve your own ends. In a wicked society the just have no choice but to act like heroes.
When the state turns society to hell, people will act like devils to fit in or get on.
13 The sterility of virtue
Since life is at bottom unjust, to seek to set up justice as the sovereign good would be to strike at the very roots of life. It would shrivel its fruits, and set in train a course of events which will end in the death of the earth.
A moral code is a needful hygiene, a drilling in what is clean and unclean. But this would in its turn grow to be a baleful distemper if we gave it too much leeway. ‘Be not righteous overmuch.’ Mundane virtues are disseminated almost as contagiously as mundane greeds. The air swarms with a haze of righteous viruses of fine feelings and angelic intentions, which your coldness alone can save you from catching.
Our callousness keeps us in sound moral health, as our immune system keeps us in sound physical health.
We are God’s songbirds. And he cares nothing for our flat virtues and clanging sorrows, but only for how sweetly we sing.
This magnificent civilization which has been built up by bloodshed and grim exploitation will soon be pulled down by happiness, good works and freedom.
Why make yourself a eunuch just to be stupidly good? Purify the will, and you sterilize the imagination. But if you can craft a rarity by becoming corrupt, won’t it be worth the cost? In the kingdom of the imagination salvation is through sin, and the pure in heart have no place.
14 Virtue makes us small
To set much store on right and wrong would be to stunt the myriad wondrous gifts that we might excel in. Justice, like money, cuts everything down to barren quantity and measurement. It would dry up all our lusher endowments, and drown our minds in empathic trifles. Seek to be scrupulously just in small things, and you grow unjust to large ones. Purity violates all our more exalted aims. It is the chauvinism of morality.
By straining to act like a do-gooding archangel, you don’t turn into a devil, as Montaigne claimed. You merely grow small in all other arenas.
Life would be unliveable if you did not abide by some minimal code of right and wrong. And yet it would not be worth living if you tried to live by the true one.
Nothing great is good, and nothing good is great. And the price of our straitened integrity is creative sterility. The moral law is the concern of the mediocre.
The mischief that we do may not be worth much, but we would be worth nothing at all were it not for the mischief that we do. You should do as Blake urged, and put off holiness to put on intellect.
There’s enough righteousness in the world to narrow our vision, but not to make us do much real good.
Ours is not an age of steep moral decline. It is an age of a dizzying decline into moralism.
15 Virtue against truth
We have mandated greed to propel us to act, and moral preening to fence in how we think. Thought erodes virtue, and virtue arrests thought. ‘Every virtue inclines toward stupidity,’ as Nietzsche wrote, ‘and every stupidity toward virtue.’ The law sows the imagination with salt. Thought liquefies moral codes, and they ossify intelligence. The sole reason to think about them is to learn why they are not worth the thought that we spend on them. ‘Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct,’ Wilde wrote, ‘shows an arrested intellectual development.’
As soon as we start to think morally, we become stupid, commonplace and self-justifying. As Rimbaud wrote, ‘morality is weakness of the brain.’ A sound mind is allergic to moralizing. And yet moral and political gossip are the closest that most minds come to thought. Virtue makes living safe but thinking small. Truth stays clear of the righteous, and they stay clear of it.
Righteousness springs from mental poverty, and festers into moral depravity.
First the gods stupefied us by their limp miracles in a world that was so much more miraculous without them. Now they do so by their stern and restrictive codes of good and evil in a world where they have let loose so much mischief.
Truth lies hidden in the depths of hell. The saints stay in heaven with all their illusions.
16 Redeemed by evil
It’s hard to know which has been Adam’s more fruitful legacy to us, sin or death.
Shame and pride, sin and death, lust and rebellion. All these good things we owe to our fall.
A society needs the virtues to keep it in order, but it needs its vices if it hopes to thrive.
Artists use their pulsing desires as decoys to fix their attentiveness. By making art they don’t sublimate their sexual energy but keep it on the boil, so that they can make more art. What else have they to spur them into song? ‘The lust of the goat,’ as Blake states, ‘is the bounty of God.’
Civilization does not consist, as Baudelaire claimed, in the curtailment of the vestiges of original sin, but in their enlargement and upraising into towering arrays of meaning and glory.
Why expel your dark angels? Learn from them. They have more to teach you than your wan rectitude does. ‘The world,’ says William James, ‘is all the richer for having a devil in it.’ Life would be a dull dough if it lacked the leaven of malice and knavery.
You discipline your heart by resisting temptation. But you widen your mind by giving way to it.
The stance of the thinker should be a decent outward obedience and a licentious inner freedom.
LOVE OF TRUTH
17 We don’t love truth
Most people know enough of the truth to see that the truth is not what they want. And they want so many other things so much, which they know truth will not give them.
We have a great gift for seeking out the truth, and then for turning our back once we’ve found it. We may catch a glimpse of it, but when we try to make it part of our life, we turn it into a lie.
People so love truth, as Augustine said, that whatsoever else they love they have to dub it truth.
Speak your truth defiantly, since no one will have ears for it anyway. Their lack of interest sets you free. Don’t worry that you have laid bare to them your inmost self. So caught up are they in their own cravings, that they won’t have noticed or cared much.
In the far-flung provinces no one matters. And that frees you to spend your nothingness to make some work that might be more than nothing.
Truth is a stranger to all but the few who are strangers in this world.
Truth is a social commodity. But most of the time it has no social value.
18 Unthinking reed
If our glory lies in reasoning, as Pascal said, then what is our life but a long disgrace?
For most of us the unexamined life is the sole one worth living, and undoubtedly the sole one worth dying for. Yet philosophers tell us that life void of the search for truth does not befit a human being. So who is mad? We unheeding sleepers, deaf to the dignity of truth? Or they who prescribe a duty that most of us shirk, and who do so as a means to sponsor the latest daft system of their own, which lands them farther than ever from the truth?
Thinking is one of the rarer symptoms of the human disease. And it afflicts most virulently those who are not quite human.
We have made it too easy to talk and too hard to think.
Think for yourself, urge philosophers, since they don’t doubt that if you do so you are sure to think like them.
We spend so little time thinking, but our minds are never at rest.
Most people tell you, ‘I’ve thought a lot about this.’ Thinkers know how little they think.
19 We seek our own interest, not the truth
Most people think only as much as they need to get what they want.
We have no wish to hear the truth, so by what miracle does it so often win out in spite of our reluctance? Our illusions gain us so much, that it takes some greatness of soul to pay truth any mind at all.
We may be most willing to face the truth about things of real importance, since they are not of much importance to us.
We can tell the truth about the things that we have no stake in. But we don’t doubt that we do have a real stake in most things. And so it’s rare that we are free to tell the truth at all. We circle round the truth, but swoop straight for our gain.
Some of us are not shrewd enough to gauge which lies will best serve our need, but none of us is so naive as to think that it will be served by the truth.
The knowledge that adds to our power is now the sole kind of knowledge that we care for.
20 Fun, not truth, is what we’re out for
The brave fight and die so that cowards might live in peace. And the wise search for the truth so that dabblers and time-killers might snack on it as a titbit now and then.
People don’t care for truth. But they can’t get their fill of trivia, news, gossip and useable facts.
The most piercing truths just snick the skin of our shallow souls, whilst the dullest blots and errors sink deep in and dye them.
We tipple such polite sips of truth, but swig down deep draughts of intoxicating lies.
We clutter our hearts with so much other sludge, how could they have room to love the truth?
21 The world hates the truth
A daring mind can’t hold out against the world’s vast imbecility. And taste and beauty can’t hold back the tide of its vulgarity. Art can’t compete with kitsch, and we shove truth aside for thrills and distractions. The more delicate goes down to the more coarse and loutish. The essential stands no chance in its clash with the urgent and frivolous. And the earth stands no chance in its duel with the world. ‘Against witlessness,’ Schiller wrote, ‘the veriest gods feud in vain.’
The real world is too brutal to be pierced by the truth. But truth can easily be crushed by brute reality.
One sure way to bore or depress or offend people is to tell them the stark truth. You don’t know the world very well, if you think that you can speak it and get off scot free. Those who know how to use their eyes must learn to shut their mouths.
The world gives a home to your duplicitous creed, but will leave you houseless if you dare to stay loyal to your treacherous truths.
22 Bored by the truth
Tell people the truth, and they are bored. Tell them that the truth offends them, and they are offended. But tell them the lie that they love the truth, and they will love you.
We can’t bear the truth about ourselves, and we are bored by the truth about anything else.
Most people need to have truth diluted so much, that they can’t taste it. And then they find fault with it for being so bland.
Most people would be bored by the truth, and yet their illusions are not very interesting, though they are flattering.
The flesh fascinates us even when it is repulsive. But the truth bores us even when it is beautiful.
23 Truth and conceit
Is it truth that we cherish, or the conviction that we alone have got it in our clasp, and the sweet spectacle of the rest lost in their darkness? ‘No pleasure,’ Bacon says, ‘is comparable to the standing on the vantage ground of truth, and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below.’ But we want more than that. We want them to acknowledge that we know more than they. As Hazlitt said, ‘We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.’
Like all goods, the goods of the mind gain their value from their scarcity.
People gird their opinions not with shaky corroboration but with unconquerable conceit. And they take pride in their illogic, as if it shows they have bent reason to their own strong will. They hold uncompromising ideas on a point, not because they have found their own reasons for it, but so that they won’t have to.
People take themselves so seriously, how could they afford to take ideas seriously, since these would show them how light and trivial they are?
We think an idea true, if it gives meaning to our own lives. But it does so because it is our egoism that gives meaning to ideas.
24 We love our dogmas, not the truth
People hug their dogmas, not because they long for surety, but because they hate to think. They don’t crave the taxing certitude of proof but the factitious assurance of their own congealed opinions. So they love certainty more than truth, and self-confidence more than certainty. And certainty and self-confidence are easier got by ignorance than by knowledge.
What I venerate is my own dogmas. And what I abominate are those dogmas that I don’t hold. I don’t treasure truth but my truths. And I don’t love God but my own god. The true God is my god. The gods of others must be false gods. We don’t love an idea because we know it to be true, we take it to be true because we have made it our own. I care for truth no more than generals care for the regions that they have crushed.
25 The vanity of originality
Like a jealous suitor, each thinker wants to be both the first and last possessor of this darling thought. And a truth that yields to anyone else’s wooing must be a whore.
I prefer my own errors to others’ truths. And my own truths I prefer because they are mine and not because they are truths. And my own lie I prefer only because I think I might be able to impose it on others. If I succeed in doing so, then it must be the truth. ‘Each theorist,’ Rousseau said, ‘knows that his own scheme of thought rests on no firmer underpinnings than the rest, but he upholds it because it is his. Not one of them would not choose his own lie before the truth that someone else had found.’ And in fact no one but the theorist who has devised it and the professors who are paid to teach it give much credence to any system of philosophy.
They are Pygmalions who, revolted by the fakes modelled by their rivals, fashion and fall in love with their own.
26 Truth is made by conflict
Most of us take up our creed out of conformity, and keep it warm by our hostility. It’s only the shared heat of our herd conformity or the factitious heat of a contest that gives ideas any warmth at all for us. Like our sympathies, we suckle them with our animus. ‘When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘it ceases to be a subject of interest.’ Extremists would lose half their fervour and stridency, if their foes ceased to assail and deride them. How torpidly we love truth, yet how fanatically we loathe what we class as error. I have my adversary to thank for reassuring me that I have right on my side.
Fighting is the supreme test of faith, and winning is the unarguable proof of truth.
We take most of our notions from our allies, and we draw most of the passion with which we defend them from our opponents.
To think with the majority is not to think at all.
How would I know what verities to love, if my antagonists did not teach me what lies I hate? I know that truth delights me, because I feel that lies disgust me. ‘To be a real philosopher,’ William James tells us, ‘all that is necessary is to hate someone else’s type of thinking.’
27 Truth is a weapon
Facts are an instrumental good. Illusions are a social good. Truth is an anti-social good.
A lie is a truth that you don’t want to hear. But the lies that your side tells are a requisite tactic to steal a march on the more insidious deceits of your opponents. ‘Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason,’ Halifax wrote, ‘when it is not of our side.’ And when it is not on our side, it can’t be reason. A falsehood that helps to confound our enemies counts as a fact for us. As Nietzsche remarked, ‘how good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.’ And when facts rebut our faith, we redouble it to show that we are not to be cowed by mere evidence.
Truth excites us only when it becomes the subject of a quarrel. But once it does that, it is lost.
28 Changing minds
Most of us are ready to change our mind, except when someone gives us a good reason to do so. We don’t come to believe because we have been convinced by proofs. We think that we are convinced by proofs once we have already come to believe.
All opposition makes us more obstinate in our beliefs by irritating our self-regard to defend them. ‘How seldom is any man convinced by another man’s argument,’ exclaimed Johnson. ‘Passion and pride rise against it.’ You know how fervently you love a cause from how fiercely you hate its foes.
Even the most hypnotic orators are unable to induce us to take up an idea that we don’t already hold. The most they can do is make us see that our own prejudices are congruent with their crooked lies. Passion persuades only those minds that already share it.
The leaders from whom the crowd takes its views have the sort of mind that attends to the views that interest only a crowd.
Passion and self-interest cue us to say what we don’t mean, so that we can make others accept what they don’t believe.
We may praise and record the noble words spoken in a grand cause, but the words that change minds at the time are the low ones meant to serve petty schemes.
Arguments change no one’s mind. They just needle people to make up counterarguments, and confirm them in the same position.
CRUEL TRUTH
29 Truth is cruel
Truth is fragile but implacable. Illusion is elastic and forgiving. Truth fractures you. Your lies make you whole. Truth won’t relent, and death is the sole thing that you can rely on to release you from its grip. ‘Truth has very few friends,’ as Porchia says, ‘and those few friends it has are suicides.’ Like straining eunuchs at the close of a lifetime of arid devotion, they fall as unregarded offerings to an indifferent god. Truth cares for us even less than we care for it.
However much you may love truth, truth, like the god of Aristotle, does not love you in return.
One person may be cheated by a barefaced lie, but we all feel diminished by a bald statement of the truth.
We prefer evasions which flatter but diminish us to an honesty which would harrow but enlarge us. ‘The lie that exalts us,’ Pushkin wrote, ‘is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.’ Truth makes the wounds for which our lies must find the cure.
Truth has two seasons, its bleak midwinter and its scorching dog days.
Faith is a pillow, truth is a stone.
In the game of life lies are trumps and truth is the joker.
30 The sickening dish of truth
Truth is the most sickening dish that can be served up to a human being.
Truth is salt in the wounds. It may not cure, but it does clean.
Truth is not the stuff out of which we weave the fabric of our lives. The one garment it could make would be a hair shirt.
You must be in dire straits, if you are reduced to relying on the truth. Or if you aren’t now, by being so rash, you soon will be.
You must choose between loving life and knowing it. To know it is the more intelligent course, which no one but a fool would take.
If you think that truth will save you, you will never find it. And if you did find it, you would be lost.
Truth consumes those who seek it as a flame consumes a candle, leaving nothing but snuff, and then guttering.
Those who are happy have no reason to think. And those who think have reason to regret it.
Truth is found on the far side of despair, and few of us have the courage to set out on that journey.
31 Truth kills the ones who love it
It’s the deep souls, like strong swimmers, who drown, since they sally out too far. Truth kills the finer specimens, the few who love it. The rest are resistant to it. Its virus has two strains. The prevalent one, our everyday plain-speaking, is harmless, and may inoculate you against more hurtful truths, so that you can live and thrive. The second, rare as leprosy, will cut you off from the living and devour you. In this enlightened age truths still infest us like lice, but we have learnt to tame the pernicious germs that they spread. They grow less pestilent as they infect more and more people.
People don’t doubt that they know what truth is like long before they have found it. They trust that it will make them free or happy or good, and that if it fails to do so, then it can’t be true. But since they hold this, how could they reach the truth and why would they need to? What impulse would they have to find it, when they are so sure that they have already got it?
32 Lies are shameless
The world garlands truth, and then cuts out her tongue. Lies strut up and down in the open, but truth must be smuggled in like contraband. Lies swank and swagger, truth sneaks and scuttles. ‘Superstition, sacrilege and hypocrisy have ample pay,’ Luther wrote, ‘but truth goes a-begging.’ What need have we of truth, when our lavish deceits give us all that we want? In this world lies are gold and truth is lead.
Our lies make us loquacious. Truth strikes us dumb.
Tell the lies that you need to speak and that your listeners want to hear, and you’ll feel at peace in playing your part, and you will win the love and trust of those for whom you play it. ‘Dishonesty,’ wrote Dickens, ‘will stare honesty out of countenance any day of the week.’
33 Truth makes us ashamed
Shame goads us to seek out the truth, and then makes us blush to utter it. Truth makes us feel unclean and dooms us to isolation.
Good moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld or Pascal, chill all that they touch. They set off epiphanies of embarrassment and disaffection, to ‘make mad the guilty, and appal the free.’ They hope to freeze the world’s heart with shame as it has frozen theirs with revulsion. But the world is too shameless to smart at their acidulous truths. They work with a pitiless lucidity, and would be glad if they could wipe the world clean with a single rigorous book. So they free us to think, and shame us for failing to, though few of us use this freedom or feel much ashamed. Such an inquirer of desponding honesty would be a jansenist with no faith in God, a doubter with no faith in reason or in doubt, a humanist with no faith in humanity.
Those who fight with truth on their side fight with one hand tied behind their back. They know that there is so much that they must not say, or the whole fabric will come tumbling down.
Thinkers are the bad conscience of our race. So we pay them no heed. They would make us more abashed and more worthy of our best selves.
34 The exterminating angel of truth
Truth is an exterminating angel. Truth, as Wilde says, ‘is often pitiless to her worshippers.’ It would have quenched the last spark of life long ago, were it not that it comes down to earth so infrequently. ‘Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet,’ Emerson warned.
Truth is too light and fine to touch us. But it is heavy enough to sink us.
If you don’t find the truth, you still have to fight for your illusions. And if you do find it, you will have to fight for your life. We would do well to take to heart Shelley’s warning not to lift ‘the painted veil which those who live call life.’ The facts of our sad lot are easy to trace but hard to bear. The sole life worth living would be one spent in the hunt for truth. And yet truth, when found, will inform you that life is not worth living.
You search for truth as a haven from life’s discouragements, and then, if you catch it, you need to search for a haven from its desolations.
Only when you’ve lost the world can you find the truth.
The flash of truth is apt to irradiate what it illuminates. ‘Life,’ as Valéry said, ‘blackens at the contact of truth.’
Truth would hollow life out. Lies fill it up.
35 The revenge of truth
Those who are cursed to think seek their devious redress by uncovering the desolating truth. Cassandras of uncaring, their truths don’t help, because they don’t take the trouble to search out the truths that might.
If truth has ravaged you, what cruel relief do you have but to infect others with it in turn? A thinker can’t forbear passing on the execrable blight of truth, as parents can’t forbear passing on the heinous contagion of life. ‘I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.’
Thinkers know that the world never thinks of them. So they take their revenge by thinking deeply about it.
People are so indifferent to the truth, that if they weren’t so aware that the world wants to be fooled, they would feel no spur to find or tell the truth at all.
36 The addiction of truth
The one comfort that thinkers have for the hard and dry life that thinking thrusts on them is to think. All that they do and suffer makes life seem more intolerable, except the one activity that shows them how intolerable it is.
Thinking is the least intoxicating addiction. But it makes all the more enjoyable ones seem not worth enjoying.
Truth is an addiction, and its seekers are junkies. At first they find it hard to bear, till at last they can’t bear anything else.
A thinker can endure life only by seeking out truths which make it unendurable.
For the purpose of tormenting those you hate, a truth will do as well as a lie.
37 No escape from the truth
What could be more awful than to speak and think the ruinous truth for so long, that you start to believe it for real? When it has caught up with you, what asylum could you hope to find? ‘In much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’
Life is a brute beast that is devouring you. You can’t stop it, but you can stick in its craw by seeing it for what it is.
Truth blinds you, first with its brightness, then with its gloom.
It’s not we who chart a path to great truths. They hunt us down and find us out.
Truth doesn’t care for you or wish you well. It scalds and skins you, and strips you of all that you have, and leaves you battered and humiliated.
Some people have to take up residence in hell, as the one place where they hope the truth won’t find them.
What afflictions you have to wade through to find the truth. And the last and worst is then to land on truth’s desert island.
38 The damage of ideas
Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. But watch out when they try to change it. It’s then the trouble comes.
The world, though so brute and unreasoning, can be turned on its head by an idea, but only by one like christianity or communism which is as banal and false as itself. An ideology in the real world spills as much blood as splintered glass in a kindergarten. Ideas are merciless. Even those who give them no thought may still be snared as their prey. And whole countries, such as Russia, though unmoved by ideas, have been brutalized by the most chimerical creeds. ‘Ideas are dangerous,’ Chesterton wrote, ‘but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.’ But most of them don’t do much harm, because they don’t do much at all.
‘Amusement is the happiness of those that cannot think,’ as Pope said. But might it then be just as true that thinking is the amusement of those that cannot be happy? It may be that we seek diversion so that we won’t have to think. But thinking itself may be one of the more tortuous diversions that we indulge in so as to avoid facing our true condition.
39 Truth does not care for life
An idea will use up many lives to get itself thought. And those who bring it into the world must live many lives in order to think it. And the last one to do so must ravel up all the lives and thoughts of all those who went before.
40 The truth will not make you free
Honesty follows a devious calling. It is indifferent, but wants to make you different. It holds out to you the promise of freedom, but it binds you to a stern obedience. Though it tempts you to doubt yourself, it prods you to think for yourself. It lives in answers, but appears in questions. It might make you happy, yet it shames and perplexes you.
The truth won’t make you free. It will only mock your bondage, which your falsehoods alone give you the steadiness to bear. Ideologues, pent in the den of their dogmas, don’t doubt that the truth will unshackle you, since they know that it has done so for them. And they deem it their duty to build real gaols for the impious who lack their light.
It is lies that make us free. Truth yokes us to a harsh servitude.
Zealots are so sure that they hold the inerrant truth in their hands, that they presume they have a mandate to juggle with it. Having brought it down from heaven, they must use all the wiles of the serpent to set it up here on earth. Their faith is the only thing that justifies them, and so they think only so much as might serve to justify their faith.
REDEMPTIONS OF ART
41 The blessings of form
Art is not the beauty of the presented object. It is the redemption of chance by form and of familiarity by imagination.
‘Poetry,’ wrote Novalis, ‘heals the wounds inflicted by reason.’ Knowledge desolates the world. And only the most bountiful forms can replenish it.
‘We have art,’ Nietzsche says, ‘lest we perish from the truth.’ Truth is a gorgon, which will do you no harm, so long as you eye it sideways through the lens of art.
Those artists who seem to belittle life by portraying it so meanly still enlarge you by enlarging your vision. Howsoever sadly they describe the world, their music and mastery still exalts us. The poet may curse the world, but the poem is still a blessing.
The intellect dances, even when the heart is sad. It works in joy, so long as it can work. It may tell of horrors, but it takes delight in chronicling them.
‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ What matter if you curse or bless, praise or blame, so long as you do it all with gusto and relish? ‘Energy is eternal delight.’
42 Beauty makes us sad
How sad to think of what this unlovely world will make of beauty. Its ‘dearest veriest vein is tears,’ as Hopkins wrote.
How strangely we or the world are made, that even beauty makes us sad. ‘The beautiful,’ Valéry said, ‘is that which fills us with despair.’ Does it pierce us more by its vulnerability or by its self-possession, by how close it comes to our hearts or because it is already so far out of reach?
Could there be anything so desolating as perfection, or so poignant as imperfection? Unable to discharge the overflowing joy that they move you to feel, you feel instead all things dissolving.
Beauty rakes you with a sad rapture and a wounded elation, reminding you of all that you have lost or will soon lose. It tells you that you are a stranger in this world. Rilke described it as ‘onset of terror we still have just the strength to bear.’ The silkiest grace hurts us, while the truth delights us even as its spikes puncture our flesh. How could you relish all the world’s fragility and loveliness, if you have not felt all its damage?
Beauty is less a promise of happiness than a shock of distress.
43 Truth is not beauty, beauty is not truth
Truth may be abstractly elegant, but it is lies that seduce, excite and delight us.
That truth is beauty is one of the beautiful lies we love to mouth because we know so little of either.
Ugliness may not be truth, but it certainly makes up a large part of brute fact.
Truth may be beautiful, but it is lies that are useful. And in this ugly world of utility we care far more for use than for beauty.
Truth and beauty coexist like man and woman, now in peace and now at strife. They may become one flesh, but they still don’t give up their own selfhood.
When the mind meets with beauty, it knows it can make no fair return for the enchanting gift, and so it tries to answer it with truth, which may turn out to be the ugliest thing in the world.
Beauty demolishes us deliciously on the spot by the shock of the senses. Truth dissolves us agonizingly and gradually by the acid of the intellect.
Beauty is fire, truth is ashes.
44 Art will fail us
The cult of beauty, like the cult of truth, is as false as all the rest, not because beauty is an idol, but because it is an idol of which we are not worthy. But a god of whom we were worthy would be one not worth serving. Life disappoints us because it is not good enough for us. And art disappoints us because we are not good enough for it. And yet art belongs to the world, and so it too will fail our worldly hearts.
Art won’t save you, but it may be the one divinity that is worth the loss of your soul. It is powerless to help us, which is why it is so precious, and why it takes such a large heart to love it.
Art does not redeem us. It doesn’t care enough for us to do that. It makes use of a few of us to get itself made.
The sorrows of art do not wound us. But they prepare us to be wounded by life in deeper and more subtle ways.
A poem is a personal torment that has found its impersonal technique.
Literature is a wound which has found the words to utter all our wounds. It is Dickinson’s bird, ‘singing unto the stone of which it died.’ It dramatizes the downfall of all the dear things that we shut our hearts to in life. Kierkegaard wrote that the poet’s ‘lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like sweet music.’
Literature does not heal us. It prods and probes our wounds, and keeps them open and bleeding.
REPRESENTATION
45 Art is not imitation
Art is not imitation but imagination.
Life imitates life, art just pretends to.
Art does not try to copy life, but life does aspire to match the glamour of kitsch.
Literature is not a bleeding slab of life. It is a carefully composed ragout of leftover literature.
Life might look like a drama or fiction, were it not that it lacks plot, character, thought and style. These are the flawless circles of art which form no part of our formless existence.
Repetition is the threat of futility. Life emptily repeats at the behest of its stagnant habits. Art repeats designedly to build up grand signifying patterns. It reclaims repetition by permeating it with shape and meaning.
46 The truth of art
Art is more true than life, because it is less real than life. And when it strains to be as real, it becomes as false. Art empties the world of its reality, to fill it up with meaning. All the codes that we use to make sense of life make it seem less real. Fiction is stranger than reality, because it lays bare more of the truth.
Choice works can articulate the great truths of life because they do not try to be true to life. The dumb world has no way to make clear to us what it means. And so artists can do this only by refusing to share the inarticulacy of life. They use the trappings of the day-to-day life that we lead, to disclose the true life which we don’t lead. Art borrows from life its body, and life steals from art its soul. Life has too coarse a taste to copy art, and art has too fine a taste to copy life.
47 Literature articulates life’s meaning
A drama is not a representation of an action, as Aristotle claimed. It is a representation of characters thinking and discoursing on an action as no one would in life. The one salient act that takes place on stage is speaking. But it is a style of speaking like none of those we use in life. ‘The people in Shakespeare,’ Hardy notes, ‘act as if they were not quite closely thinking of what they were doing, but were great philosophers giving the main of their minds to the general human situation.’ And he contrives the events of the tale just to give full play to their thoughts and eloquence. Shakespeare is always generalizing and metaphoric. Greek dramas are particularizing and literal. They transact the business of the play, but have no significance outside it. Shakespeare’s verbal excess is far from the purpose of playmaking.
We say nothing of weight in day-to-day talk. And great authors don’t write a line that could be said in day-to-day talk. They have to use the forms of casual speech to convey the thoughts that you can’t broach in casual speech.
Great texts are deep not because they are full of submerged meanings, but because they bring all their meanings to the surface, and find adequate words to sound them.
48 Life is a cliché
Life itself is a second-hand fiction. And when art follows it, the best it can make is third-hand melodrama. ‘Art does not imitate life,’ Brodsky wrote, ‘if only for fear of clichés.’ And it does not copy real people for fear of stereotype or caricature, though most of us are too vapid and forgettable to be as vivid as that. And though life may not shadow art, it does arrive later. Picasso was outlining Guernica before a bomb had been dropped.
Comedy is full of stock types because it is so close to real life.
49 Art is not truth to real life
Artists raid life like buccaneers to plunder it and enrich their visions. Art resembles life as embezzling from a bank resembles taking out a loan. And they treat the great works of art of the past in the same way.
Life is made of accident, engagement, affect and ambition. Art is made of choice, detachment, poise and vision. Life is arithmetic, particular and actual. Art is algebra, abstract and illimited. Life is thrust on by desire and regulated by routine. Art is animated by imagination and shaped by order.
The world is both more crowded and more empty than art, more varicoloured yet more monotonous, more pressing and more pointless.
Life sprawls like an aggregation of suburbs, cosy though flat and featureless. Art is a methodical yet bewildering city like St Petersburg. From afar life may look picturesque. But the closer you get, all you see is its dour banality. As Van Gogh found to his dismay, it ‘has the tinge of dishwater.’ Why else would he have had to colour it in such opalescent blues and yellows?
50 Art holds the mirror up to custom
Most people assume that a piece of art must be like life if it is reminiscent of the rest of the works of art they have seen. They mistake what is natural for the conventional forms which they are wont to see. They say that a portrait has plumbed the soul if they can read into it their own trite notions of a type of character. So they are keen to find that a pope or cardinal looks worldly and world-weary, that a baron must be smug and supercilious, fonder of his hounds or horse than of his wife and litter, that a thinker is voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
Most of our so-called instincts about art are little more than learned errors.
Why do we assume that if a canvas or a story seems vivid then it must be a realistic picture of life, and that if it looks more graphic than the real world then it must be more real than the real world?
Crude books gratify us by holding the mirror up to the flattering lies by which we live.
Literature is our common confession, heartfelt and unsparing. But, like all confessions, it is at the same time artful and self-exculpating. ‘An artist chooses when he confesses,’ as Valéry wrote, ‘perhaps above all when he confesses.’
NEED OF ART
51 Art is not a natural need
Real things, such as art or truth, are so uncongenial to us, that they need an elaborate scaffolding of snobbery, prestige and institutions to hold them up.
Snobbery is the means by which good taste lures conceit to do its work.
If art couldn’t bank on the good will and patronage of people who don’t much care for it and don’t understand it, how could it last from one year to the next?
If there were no serious readers, there would be no serious writers. And so great authors can write up to the top of their talent only by expecting too much from those who might read them.
A book has no hope of lasting through the centuries, till we have been lessoned to read it as if it will. Had we not learnt to revere Shakespeare as the most sublime of poets, we would snicker at him as a pompous windbag. And if Picasso and Matisse had not been certified as masters by museums, we would have judged them clumsy daubers.
52 The social machinery of art
‘It needs a complex social machinery,’ Henry James said, ‘to set a writer into motion.’ And it takes an apparatus of class, syllabuses and institutes to set readers on to read great books. But they need no prompt to read bad ones. ‘For even the most trifling revelations of art need preparation and study,’ as Nietzsche points out. ‘There is no immediate effect of art.’
Nature will hatch the egg of genius, but culture must fertilize it. Penury may not keep a Milton mute and inglorious, but it and any number of pitfalls may stall him from becoming a Milton.
We need forms, to force us to curb our worst appetites and to fire our best aspirations. If snobbishness didn’t nag us to prove that we are better than those round us, we would all remain contented pigs.
Now that people all make more money than they need, they feel contempt for anyone or anything whose sole aim is not to make money.
ART GIVES MEANING
53 Art alone gives meaning
Art is one of the few things that is worth living for. And yet art shows us that life is not worth much, and that it gains its value only by being recast as a work of art.
An artist should strive to enrich life without affirming it, to esteem it without falsifying it, not to claim that it is worth living, but to make it a touch more worth living. Honest art should transfigure the instant, but should not presume to transfigure the world.
Artists make art, not by culling the fat and waste from life, but by packing it with more marrow. They supply the world with the sense which God forgot to put in. Art distils what life leaves out. It brings out its significance by paring it to its pith.
If life had real worth, we would have no need to strive to build up the works which live beyond life, and which give life its purpose. If it were not so vacuous, what need would there be for thinkers to fill it with meaning? They can’t see much point in their own life, and so they strive to find the most meaning they can in all life. And if life were poetic, there would be no poetry. People who find life beautiful have no need to make art. And it is those who see the formless ugliness of life that feel the need to shape the lovely forms of art. And they need to make music because life is so cacophonous. Life may be many things, but it is not beautiful.
54 Meaning is a fiction
A play of three hours may get nearer to the heart of life than life itself does in seventy long years. Don’t you live more significantly in Troy or Elsinore than you do in your real locality on earth?
Life hurtles with a flaring urgency. Art stands still in cool significance. No wonder we find the least details of our paltry lives so enthralling, and art so boring.
An artist keeps at bay the world’s importunate futility by fashioning works of superfluous lustre.
Art is like neither life, in which everything is real but not one thing is significant, nor religion, in which nothing is real yet it seems significant because it is believed to be real. Artists make our lives mean by making meaningful lives which are not ours. It is only by creating fictions that we make life mean anything at all. Our life gains its significance in the telling.
The world trades on the accepted coin of illusion. We recognize truth solely in the game of fiction or in the inhuman realm of science. It is only in art, where nothing is at stake, that you can afford to wager and win what is priceless.
Why do those who are glad to be cheated by life berate art for being mere fiction?
Life is beautiful only in pictures. And what a mess we make of life when we try to make it as pretty as its pictures. And when we pretend that life is beautiful, we don’t make art but kitsch.
55 Art redeems suffering
What is art but a contrivance for converting misery to meaning? The sorrows of art solace you, since they are not real and yet they still signify. But the sorrows of life are so desolating, because for all the deep scars they leave they mean nothing. Art glows with lambent anguish. Life is fraught with a dim jauntiness. A poet senses the immense sadness behind each joy, and joyfully foresees the fearsome loveliness of each heartbreak transfigured by form.
Some see the terror, some see the glory. A few see both the terror and the glory. Fewer still see both the terror and the glory as one. The highest artists take in the full glare of life’s ghastliness, but have a binocular vision which is able to fix and focus it as a beam of supernal beauty. ‘We stroll on the roof of hell,’ as Issa wrote, ‘gazing at flowers.’
56 We put art to the meanest use
‘The aesthetic,’ as Borges points out, ‘is inaccessible to most people,’ and this now goes for most artists as well. The public takes an interest in all aspects of a work of art except the ones that make it art. And what entices us least in art is what is most integral to it, that is, its form and playfulness. What captivates us is what is most adventitious, its entertainment and impact, its vividness and verisimilitude, its plot puzzles or its platitudinous moralizing. A choice work of art is a lightning show put on for the blind. They may feel the house rumble, but they can’t see the glory.
Just as we dote on a large mind such as Einstein for the quaint traits that denote a trashy celebrity, their peculiarities and peccadillos, dress and gestures, so we love the best books for doing what unexceptional books do much better, for contriving suspenseful plots, pronounced effects, figures with whom we identify, a vivid portrayal of a time or place, and slick sermons which confirm our own fine prejudices or subvert the herd’s.
57 We want art to flatter us
Life, like Narcissus, gazes into the pool of art in order to admire its own face. Literature is a great glass which shows us larger than we are.
What people want from art is flattery and make-believe that they can take for truth. They expect it to tell them that they are ample and anguished, that they are afflicted because they are grand and grand by the grace with which they endure their afflictions.
Kitsch plays the anthems of our self-admiration.
LIFE FOR ART’S SAKE
58 Art does not affirm
The sole thing that a work of art affirms is the plenitude of its own imagination.
Art is not a stimulus to life, as Nietzsche claimed. It is a stimulus to more art. It is kitsch that is a stimulus to life. And art is the refuge of those who have tasted the dregs of life and are sick of it.
59 Salvation through style
Style is salvation. But it is the salvation of the work, not of the artist or the audience.
Style is half the significance of a work of art, and its form is half its meaning. These are the bright ideals that shine through in the most sombre piece. They are the irreducible value left when cold thought has done its work of devaluing.
Good style is a bare cool justice. And fine prose, like Austen’s, works by its own code of right. It is serene, since it wants nothing, cheerful, as it feels no need to impose, and kind, as it doesn’t disdain to please. But only someone who has been seared by the mad vehemence of poetry would trust in the frail justice of prose.
60 There is nothing serious but style
For true artists there’s nothing serious in mortality but style. ‘To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form,’ Wilde points out, ‘nothing else seems of so much importance.’ They take such pains to carve out a style, that they grow stonehearted to all else. A misplaced comma would offend them more than an act of cruelty. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk politics,’ Joyce pleaded. ‘The only thing that interests me is style.’ For a writer, life has no point, save for the residue of words that it leaves behind it.
We look to artists to give form to the inner meaning of things. But for an artist a thing means no more than the form that they give it. The only values that matter to a painter are pictorial values.
What exhilarating torment writers must feel at the dizzying contingency of each choice of shape or texture, word or phrase, chord or cadence, and at how it will ramify out and out through their work and readjust and reconstitute the whole of it. The drama of moral choice is a mere shadow of the serious business of conducting a form into being.
61 Artists love only art
True artists must be false to every cause except their art.
Painters would cordially set the world on fire, if they think it would light the least of their daubings more impressively.
Musicians hold that if there is a high way to God it must be through their own music. The deity that they worship must love music more than anything else, and it must love their own kind of music more than all the rest. And the reverence that they feel for him is a dull after-echo of the awe that they feel at their own craft. Art may have many gods, yet the artist has but one, which is art. And if you don’t serve your art as the one true God for which you would be content to lose your soul, then you are no true artist.
Artists do not believe that their works need to justify the world. It is for the world to justify their works.
Great church music, such as Bach’s, is not music put to use for the praise of God. It is the god of music using human piety to glorify itself.
Artists are proud souls who would lick the lowest dust in the service of their art.
For true artists, living is a mere sleep which intermits their ardent dreams of creation.
62 Art for the artist’s sake
All that artists love they love for the sake of their art. And they love their art for their own sake. They cherish fame more than art, as industrialists love their merchandise for the financial gain that it yields.
An artist or a god is superabundant but not self-sufficient. Their needs are as extravagant as their capacities.
A writer lives to write, and feels sure that the rest live to read, and that the world is here to be written. ‘Everything in the world,’ Mallarmé said, ‘exists to end up in a book.’ And in our age of hyperreality it all exists to be filmed and photographed. Perhaps the Lord put on the whole show just so that he could dictate his scriptures.
63 The work is more than the life
The high things which prove life’s worth were the work of the few who were sure that it has none. The makers make life worthwhile, but they place no value on it themselves. To them it is so much tripe and scrapings.
Some authors use writing as a means to put off dying, and some use it as a means to put off living. ‘Literature,’ Pessoa wrote, ‘is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.’
Art is a way of grasping and embracing life, while still holding it at bay.
Art may claim to show the triumph of life over death, but what it in fact acts out is the triumph of art over life.
It was a sign that art was coming to an end, when the few began to believe that it could save them. Art doesn’t care enough for living beings to try to do that.
64 Artists love what serves their art
Those who make art are least fit to weigh life’s value, but best fit to represent it, since they prize it only as means or material to make their art. So it’s a good thing for us that they feel they must make it out to be worth far more than they prize it. And it’s a good thing for them that their artists’ instincts make them prize it as dear as they feel they must make it out to be. They have to make something worthy out of life, because they know that life on its own is so worthless. ‘They seem to be fighting for the sake of the dignity and significance of mankind,’ Nietzsche says, ‘but in truth they refuse to give up the assumptions that are of most use for their art.’
65 Artists love the world for the sake of their art
Artists care for the world as it gives them the scope to show off their art. And if they wish to save the world it’s only to have beholders for their own works, which are the one force that could save it. When they seem to be exalting life, it is their own poetic might and mastery that they are exalting, which brims over and blesses the unhearing world with its bounty. Artists love the world as God does, ‘the glad creator.’ They hope to redeem its unmeaning squalor by their own abounding grace.
Artists don’t paint the world because they love it. They love the world because they paint it. A crowd-pleaser like Renoir may open your eyes to the beauty of the world, but a true painter such as Cézanne opens your eyes to the beauty of form.
Artists are sure that the world was made for art and not art for the world. They look on the world as mere metaphor or material for their work. If the first, they rejoice to see it seated as an imperishable artefact of shapely calm. And if the second, they love to watch it rock with riotous mischief. ‘All under heaven is in unmitigated disarray,’ Mao said. ‘The situation is excellent.’ The artist must play the world false in order to stay true to the art which lends the world its one frail justification.
66 Art is the meaning of life
What have we to set against life’s infinite littleness but the little infinity of art? It hurls a rapturous vitality in the face of demeaning absurdity or pounding affliction, and so makes them seem worth bearing.
Art does not unfold to us the meaning of life. Art is the meaning of life.
Artists, when asked for a loaf, would not give a real stone. They cheat you, and make good their frauds by conferring untold wealth.
The artist drifts like a ghost amongst the ghosts of the living, to bring them news of a world more true.
We think that the artist’s job should be to give meaning to experience, but the artist thinks that the meaning of experience is to give material for art.
A sickly aesthete, such as Pater, makes a toy of art by treating it as a mere trimming to bedeck life. But a strong artist knows that life is a foul dung good only to be ploughed to fructify art. To read for the purpose of living, as all bookish advisers tell us to do, seems a waste of good literature.
Life is a poor substitute for literature.
67 Live to read
Writer to reader, ‘Why do you bother to live? You are here to read my books. We both live for writing, but you can’t write. What could be more pointless than to be forever reading, never to be read?’ Reader to writer, ‘Why do you bother to live? You are here to make books for me to munch on, as the silkworm is kept in the dark to spin silk. We both live for reading, but you deem reading vain.’ They form one joint ring of uselessness. Writers live to be read, though they set no value on reading. And they toil to enjoy an afterlife of misquotation, to win the brief continuance of a name. They hope to be delivered from the contempt and neglect of the present to the veneration and neglect of posterity.
We don’t need to read in order to learn how to live, since we already live as we read, with the same greedy and distracted glibness and impatience.
If anyone were to read so as to learn how to live, they would do well to stick to airport novels, comic books, fantasies, teen fiction, cheap biographies and self-help pamphlets. And that’s just what they do.
The chief duty that writers owe their readers is not to think of them. ‘He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader,’ as Nietzsche wrote.
See also: Virtues, Art, The Purpose of Life