PERFECTION
1 Vanity triumphs over time
Beauty jilts the loveliest and leaves them bereft. But vanity stays loyal to the homeliest. Beauty is as frail and fleeting as vanity is robust and enduring. Time despoils beauty. But vanity triumphs over time.
Beauty lasts for a season. Vanity lasts for all life. Beauty soon grows old and grey. Vanity stays evergreen.
Our vanity inventories each slight alteration in our aspect, but fails to see its long geological collapse. But we fail to see that we are now the sum of all the small deviations from what we think we look like. Our very flaws help to take our eyes off the wrecks that time has made of us. And death is the signature on the hideous canvas that time has daubed.
Vain people know their weak points quite well. But they look on them as great strengths. A narrow scholar takes his narrowness as proof of scrupulous precision.
Beauty is a rapidly depreciating asset, which vanity preserves in its balance sheet at its initial value.
Some women who were once graced with a sumptuous beauty comport themselves like ruined duchesses. They still presume on their title, though they lack the means to keep it up.
As you get close to some bodies, the pull of their vanity draws you to them with more force than the refulgence of their beauty or the light of their mind.
2 The torment of perfection
What extraordinary toils the most ordinary of us cumber our lives with, in our campaign to prove that we are not ordinary. All that work and worry, just to become a nobody. Our fate, as Cioran wrote, is ‘to have accomplished nothing, and to die overworked.’ I give way to my desires without tasting fulfilment. And I harrow my heart without obtaining glory.
I have to fight anew each day to defend my image of my self. So it’s lucky for me that my self-regard has forearmed me for the fray in impenetrable steel. It’s a struggle that I can’t win and can’t resile from.
We can’t be content, unless we are embarked on some mad scheme of self-betterment which is doomed to leave us more wretched than we were before. Why not on the contrary do as the man in Balzac does, who ‘was wise enough to estimate life at its true worth by contenting himself in all things with the second best’? You ought to thank life each day for giving one more proof that you were right to rate it so cheap. What pangs I cause myself and others by striving to perfect my perfectly mediocre life.
Those who are irreparably flawed still go to great lengths to prove how special they are.
3 Our botched perfection
Perfection is mediocrity polished to a high sheen.
Our restless pursuit of excellence condemns us to a facile mediocrity.
People who fall in love with the idea of perfection are prone to make a foul mess of their lives.
We judge that we are struggling to make the best use of our gifts. But aren’t we just scrabbling to get the most into our grip?
People are so set on perfecting themselves, but that’s so hard, and takes so long, and costs so much, and gains them nothing. And so they try to surround themselves with the most perfect trappings that they can.
People don’t want to change, but they do want to grow perfect, and they trust that they will do so by growing more perfectly who they are.
Some people are sure that they have no faults because they have darned and patched them so many times. And some are sure that they have no faults because they have never felt the need to. I don’t doubt that I must be wise today, since I now see what a fool I was till yesterday.
4 The vanity of the imperfect
How hard I toil to improve, but how pleased I am with the botched job that I make of it.
Our vanity projects for us an enhanced self, but tells us that we have already formed it. I tense all my nerve to perfect myself, yet I’m smugly satisfied with the faulty self that I patch up. I go through life, assuming that I am special, and evincing that I am not.
How could we make ourselves the best that we might be, when we are so intent on showing our peers that we are better than they are? We spend all our strength striving to prove to ourselves that we are better than we are and to others that we are better than they are.
Vain people are well aware of their flaws. But they take it that they will have reached perfection once they have rectified these. My past botches promise me that I must be progressing, rather than alerting me to how far I have gone awry. And my own faults are chips which I’ll repair with a few revisions. But others’ faults are undeniable proofs that their design was wrong from the start.
BELIEF
5 Our deepest belief is our belief in ourselves
The belief that sustains us is our belief in our own importance. And the faith that justifies us is our faith in our own integrity. This is the one catholic and ecumenical creed. Our self-trust beats the blazing certitude of the most fanatical ranter. So long as we trust in our own unique gifts, we don’t need to trust in much else.
Vanity, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen by others. And yet the vain still need others to have faith in them.
Though I am willing to trade most of my errors, I cling to my overvaluation of my worth. ‘We can bear to be deprived of everything,’ Hazlitt says, ‘but our self-conceit.’
We use up our potential for belief by believing in ourselves. The only things that we have a strong belief in are the good things that we believe about ourselves. I trust so fervently in my own destiny, that I have a cold credit to spare for anything else. But I can cajole myself to give my faith to all sorts of things, since my faith in all of them is transferred from my faith in myself. Our creeds are dim halos formed by the fiery core of our self-belief.
We think an idea nourishing if it swells our vanity.
6 The metaphysic of our vanity
Providence is the metaphysic of our ego. Our littleness stretches a vast way.
We have long known that the earth is not the pivot of the universe, and so I’m thankful that I am still the axis round which all bright things revolve.
The least person in the world is still the centre of their own world. And that is the one world there is for them.
How could this not be the best of all possible worlds, when it is the one of which I form the hub?
When you’re young, you may fancy now and then that you can hear the loom of the fates weaving your destiny. But when you get old all you feel is the threads unwinding.
Some of us would rather believe that we are dogged by a malevolent demon, than that we have been set adrift in a cold universe. ‘Our egoism,’ Renard says, ‘is so excessive, that in a deluge we believe the thunder to be directed at us alone.’
Has anyone had a revelation that told them that they don’t matter enough to damn or to beatify?
7 God’s plan
We may not believe in God, but don’t we all trust in a power immeasurably bigger than ourselves whose job is to smooth our pathway through the briars of this world? Our inflated sense of our own entitlement translates the most inconsiderable coincidence into momentous destiny. No event that turns out in my favour is too paltry to form part of God’s plan. How ready the unassuming are to see fate operant in their own small lives.
Some mortals believe in divine intervention, not from faith in the most high, but from faith in their own dim star. They trust in the Lord because they trust in their own lofty destiny. And they hire him as an assistant to help them bring it to fulfilment. God plays a part in our story, not we in his. And in this age of mass celebrity, he is just one more of our fans and backers, and by no means the one on whose approval we most depend.
We swell our self-worth either by our insistence that we are self-made or by our praise of those who have made us what we are.
Some people who don’t believe in God still act as if they were placed in the world to serve as his chosen instruments, and that they are under his special protection so that no harm can come to them.
8 My merit, others’ luck
We know that the hand of God is at work when we prevail, and that blind chance must be in charge when our rivals do. ‘No victor believes in chance,’ as Nietzsche points out. Only the unlucky need to believe in luck, both the bad luck that has brought them low, and the good luck that will soon be here to lift them up.
Providence has patently awarded us most of the merit, but has unaccountably awarded others most of the luck. ‘The power of fortune,’ as Swift wrote, ‘is confessed only by the miserable.’
I have as much as I have by dint of my own merit, but I have no more than that due to my poor luck.
I have my moral sunshine, in which my good fortune assures me that God is in charge of events, and my rainy days, when I know that none but the righteous must suffer as I do.
Many people whine that luck has allotted them such scant pay, but few that it has allotted them such scant talents. The poor in spirit presume that they would be blissfully happy, if for once they got what was due to them.
CONSOLATIONS
9 Conceit consoles us
Self-regard finds the right words to soothe us for all our humiliations. We brazen out most of our batterings by relying on our essential conceit and our casual distractions. And we live down any truth by applying the sovereign antidote of our grandiosity. In the wilderness of our neglect angels come and minister to our self-belief.
Why strive to get gaunt wisdom with toil, when you can have plump conceit with ease? A sage would need to work for a lifetime to win the self-possession that smug people have by birth. We set up our vanity in the seat where our sagacity ought to be, and how much more competently it does the job.
10 The kindness of conceit
Our conceit is our staunchest guard, our kindliest nurse, and our most persuasive pleader.
Who is so poor that they can’t keep up an exorbitant estimate of their own value?
Conceit turns some people’s life into one long victory lap. The clapping deafens them, even if they’ve pressed just a few bored stragglers to sit and watch them in the grandstand.
We stride from one conquest to the next, to find at the last that each day we have been surrendering a portion more to death. What triumphant nobodies we are.
Some people are ballasted by the freight of their self-importance, and are buoyed up by their expansive self-delight. Kept afloat by their swollen self-opinion, they don’t drown, but don’t see that they need to be saved. They are so light and hollow that nothing can sink them.
Vanity gives its possessor an ease and assurance which mere good looks or talent could never provide.
11 Vanity the tormenting comforter
Touchy conceit is the self’s skin, so easy to wound, yet insulating us from scores of wounds. Our self-belief is the part of us that’s most prone to blister but speediest to heal. ‘I’ve never any pity for conceited people,’ wrote George Eliot, ‘because I think they carry their comfort about with them.’ My faith in my own worth solaces me for my inveterate mortifying failure to cajole others to share it.
Vanity brings on us the hurts that our vanity salves us for. It advises us erroneously, but tends us compassionately. It’s an erring counsellor, but an infallible consoler. It is both our punishment and our exceeding great reward.
If we felt less need to think so well of ourselves, we might be more content. And yet if we thought less well of ourselves, we would have no grounds to be content at all.
Self-love fells some like a blow, but sustains most like an unfaltering faith. Though ravishing some, it desolates others. Like the fabled divine charity, it strips these bare, and leaves them with nothing to clothe them but their own self-love. It contents some like an untroubled marriage, but buffets others like a squally romance. In our self-adoration most of us love not wisely but too well.
12 Bittersweet self-love
Our conceit sweetens or curdles all that we feel. It flatters us that we deserve the best, but assures us that we have got it. And yet it still needles us that nothing can ever be good enough for us. It may assuage our pains, but it poisons our joys. It both intoxicates and embitters us, rendering some of us serene and others savage. Though maddening some, it mollifies others. ‘The golden fleece of self-love,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.’ It makes some respected, and some ridiculous. Pride binds up the wounds that our pride inflicts on us, and finds a balm for most of the disorders to which it predisposes us.
We are our own scourge and our own salve. Self is both our curse and cure. The worst punishments are the ones that we bring on our own heads, perhaps because no one else knows us so badly.
Some people are always pleased with their milieu, since it is a proof of how good they are. And some are always displeased with it, since it can never be good enough for them.
Some people love with their hopes, and some with their fears. And in the same way some love themselves with their hopes, and they strive and swagger, while those who do so with their forebodings flinch and hang back.
DEPENDENCE
13 Dependent conceit
Why do we sweat for the pay of the world’s regard, when we could live at our ease on the independent income of our own self-regard?
We are kings of conceit. Yet we all slave for the low world’s good report. Vanity gives us at no ostensible charge a rich estimate of our own worth, but then binds us to slog like drudges to keep it up.
Our vanity is as desperate as a beggar, and as complacent as a billionaire.
We are self-centred but not self-sufficient. ‘We seek for knowledge,’ Pascal wrote, ‘to show it off. So we would never go on a trip if we had no hope to talk of it afterwards.’ For all our selfishness, don’t we need one more soul at least to share our self-satisfaction and to participate in our greed? ‘I relish no enjoyment,’ as Montaigne says, ‘if I can’t share it.’
Your conceit may content you, so long as you don’t need a lot of people to share it, or else assume that they do. I am blest with such high merit, but I am cursed by my need to prove it to the rest of the world.
14 Our shared self-love
We have not slaked our self-love, till we have found another to partake in it, another’s eyes into which we can gaze and glimpse our own bright reflection. Don’t we all need some cause to have faith in and some soul to have faith in us, to tell us that people like us deserve the world’s love and admiration? Pious people find both in the Lord.
Most people need no larger idol than their own small success, especially when they make it out to be so much larger than it is. But they still need a few fellow-worshippers at their shrine.
15 Vanity shows too little self-respect
The conceited may have too little pride, but the proud still have no end of conceit. ‘To be vain,’ as Swift points out, ‘is rather a mark of humility than pride.’
Many of us are less modest or less proud than we seem, but none are less conceited. No one has too little self-esteem. But it may be that all of us have too little self-respect.
Narcissists suffer from a deficit of self. It is not their self but their mirrors that they are in love with. And they need to circle themselves with as many of these as they can, to prove to them that their self is real and rounded.
Some people set such a high value on themselves, not so much because they overrate what they are, but because they underrate what they might be. They think too highly of what they are to be modest, but they don’t think highly enough of what they might be to be proud. They shoot at such a low mark, how could they fail to hit it? Stay true to what you are, and you will become less than you might have been.
16 We can’t see our own vanity
None but the most high-minded people have the modesty to grasp how immodest they are. Some people rate their worth so high because they can envisage a better self that they might one day become, and some because they can’t. We are too vain of what we are, but we lack the vision to see what we might be. ‘No one,’ as Multatuli says, ‘has a high enough estimation of what he could be, or a low enough one of what he is.’
It is the parent of our plans, habits, outlook and feelings, which they are too abashed or too insolent to own. Conceit saves us from seeing that conceit has inspired most of our deeds. Something in the style of our own egoism assures us that we are not egoists.
We agree with Pope, that pride is ‘the never-failing vice of fools.’ And since we know that we are no fools, we conclude that neither are we proud.
I can’t break the grip of my egoism which stings me to act with such ruthlessness. But I can no more conceive the rare feats that might prove my right to my ambitions.