SERVITUDE
1 Servitude and independence
People resent restraint, but they don’t want to be free. And though they chafe at duress, they all need to find some person or some cause to depend on. They cast off the encumbrance of choice, though they still hit back at those who would dare to take it from them. They are born rebels, because they are born serfs. And they long for liberty only with a view to selecting their preferred kind of subjection. They know neither what it is to be truly free nor what it would be to serve loyally. They are content to sell their independence, but they scratch and claw at those who would come between them and their borrowed wants.
Those who drudge as lackeys of their own despotic drives scream if others lay the least curb on them.
We submit with alacrity to a servitude which is real, present and enduring, in order to win a release which is distant, ephemeral and fake. ‘All ran headlong to their chains,’ as Rousseau wrote, ‘in the hope of securing their liberty.’
Why do abject people make a footstool of themselves, and then squeal when their masters plant their feet on them? Some who bite the hand that feeds them are glad to lick the fist that beats them.
2 The willing slaves of avarice
Slavery has oftentimes been more galling, but when has it ever been more willing? Proud of our servitude, we pity those who lack a place in the system of subordination. We seek relief from all our ills in a more highly paid serfdom. What most of us yearn for is not liberty but a more lucrative yoke.
Our wages plate our chains with gold. ‘Most things free-born,’ as Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘will submit to anything for a salary.’ We love our gilded collar, and every morning we put it on with pride. ‘Inside the coop where he’ll stay till he’s killed,’ Pessoa wrote, ‘the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts.’ Our desires imprison us, and we hope to win our freedom by appeasing them. ‘We must,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.’ But who these days would choose a rugged freedom that could profit just as well from an affluent vassalage?
3 Time, money and independence
We spend too much time working to make money in order to buy things that are not worth the time that we spend on them. ‘Money,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘often costs too much.’ Few wares are worth the days and hours that we have to waste to earn the cash to buy them. But we can’t resist the lure of wealth since there’s no more enviable way to use up the time that we take to get and spend it.
People waste no end of time doing what they would not do if they had to pay for it. And they pay large sums of money to lay hold of what they would not care for if it came free. It would bore them to spend much time contemplating a piece of scenery which they would be glad to waste half their life labouring to buy.
A noble soul hates slavery more than death. But our slavery is so sumptuous, that we love it more than life.
4 Importance or independence
We are urged on by a servile self-regard and a busy futility. We are cringing but not humble. Though we cling to our self-importance, we cede our self-reliance.
Why are the haughtiest people so proud to serve a world that is not worth mastering? They need to have the courage to grapple with the world, because they lack the self-control to withdraw from it. The brave must come to craven accommodations with the world, since they are too weak to rout their desire to dominate it.
5 We want indispensability not independence
Those who have no work of their own are keen to serve as the tools of others. They strive to render themselves indispensable because they are slaves to their own ambition, and they do so by enslaving themselves to the ambitions of others.
We have made life rushed and bustling enough to match our sense of our own centrality. The hardest burdens to lay down are the ones that break our backs. We are all now as busy and indispensable as cabinet-ministers, overseeing our broad portfolio of vital interests.
6 Independence and the bondage of work
Labour, the inveterate demeaning curse of the many, has become just as much the vaunt of the few. And we now honour it, since we have no choice but to do it.
Paid work prostitutes your real vocation. True work ennobles, but employment degrades. But we can now see no difference between a calling and a career. ‘All paid posts,’ Aristotle said, ‘absorb and demean the mind.’ They make stupid people more clever and cunning, but intelligent people more stupid and abject.
Where all careers are open to talent, the old vocations that were pursued as ends will be reduced to careers. And those that can’t be reduced to careers will die off.
To hire out one’s body is the dishonourable deed of a prostitute. To hire out one’s mind is the respectable job of a bourgeois.
Work for the joy of the work, not for its wages. If you have to be paid to do it, then it can’t be worth the doing, but only worth the pay. Yet people who work for pay spurn those who work for love as idlers or fools.
Labouring for others does not alienate you. It integrates you. And it’s your alienation that might have forced you to rely on your own resources, and fired you to find your path to the truth.
The devil finds hands for idle work.
Hard work is the refuge of the intellectually unemployed.
7 Independence and your true work
Do what the world wants, and you will become indispensable and make what is dull. Do what your spirit demands of you, and you will grow superfluous and may create what is priceless. Mozart was valued more as a music teacher, and would have starved had he been a mere composer. Working for pay will fritter away your life, your true work will ravage it.
You know you may be doing something worth your while if no one else can see the point of your doing it. And you may be on the right track, if all are aghast at where it has led you. In labouring uselessly you find your true calling.
The world is keen to get from you the dull services that anyone else could have done for it. But it has no use for the precious things that no one else could give it. All it wants from you is some cheap means to advantage it or some cheap toy to amuse it. It won’t know what to make of what no one but you could make.
You need a great deal of leisure if you are to get your proper work done. But most of us now live life so fast, that we can’t shape what might outlast it. As Kraus notes, democracy ‘makes no provision for those who have no time to work.’
8 Independence or pay
We are too undisciplined to keep to what we need, and too impatient for quick returns to reach for the steep and arduous essential. We want to pluck the fruit before it’s ripe. The meaning of our work is the prizes that it wins.
These days it’s only the most destitute who can afford not to work. And they alone are condemned to bear the ennui and reproach of leisure.
We are now so rich, that everyone must work, and everything must pay.
Even professors who seem to have their heads in the clouds know to an inch the height of the chairs on which their backsides are perched relative to their peers.
How ridiculous true devotion now seems. To let all those rich rewards go begging, and waste all that time on what yields no pay.
Few regret the path that they have chosen. What we resent is that we have been paid so poorly for following it.
The world will pay you abundantly so long as you consent to waste your life. And when it pays the plodding such high fees, as it does now, what sense is there in aspiring to do a great work?
9 Act without thought for the fruits of action
The rest of us work for our living, artists must work for their lives.
The luminous moment wins its worth only by being transfigured into the hard lustre of a lasting work. And even the richest interior life gains its value only by virtue of the forms in which it externalizes itself.
Your own work is always easy. And if it’s not easy, then it’s not yours. If you find it hard, you have not yet hit on your true calling. ‘All that is good is effortless,’ Nietzsche said. ‘What is divine runs with light feet.’ With no strain Ulysses strings the bow, Aeneas plucks the bough of gold, and Arthur draws the sword from the stone.
10 The rewards of vocation
High aims shackle you to anxiety, but show you all mercy in the end. If you don’t reach them, then you don’t matter. And if you do, then nothing else matters. Fame will ransom you from obscurity, or obscurity will ransom you from scorn. In the grave, as Housman wrote, ‘silence sounds no worse than cheers.’
Time is both the justest and most lenient judge. It pays the deserving their due, and lets the rest off with no penalty. It discounts your divided aims, and crowns the best that you have done. Death will ask the carver one question, Did your works warrant the expenditure of so much fine marble?
The self-spending that makes some of us futile makes others fertile.
What worthier end can we aspire to than a grand futility? How glorious of the easter islanders to squander it all and leave some marvel for the time to come, rather than live on soberly bereft of a name. How fine, to take your life in your hands, and fling it at the stars. What matter that the violin will soon be smashed, so long as it has played the one blest hour of immortal music it was made for. Better to blaze for an instant than to sputter for an age.
You can make a full and happy life out of a studied futility. Dickinson toiled for twenty queenly years to shape her songs, which she felt sure no one would hear.
11 The reward of despair
Heroes have found a devotion as deep as their despair. ‘Real nobility,’ as Camus wrote, ‘is based on scorn, courage and profound indifference.’ If you hope to bring off some great feat, you must love it with a reckless ardour. But it will turn all your love to derision, and look on it with sightless shining eyes, and hear it with deaf ears, and grant you no return. The sole comfort that I have for the failure of all my work is to go on hopelessly working. I prayed that nothing of me should matter but my work. I got half my wish.
Is it worse to die with your work unfinished, or to live on to see how it has failed?
I work, at first in the hope of defeating my futility, but then just to deflect my thoughts from it.
12 Between the aspiration and the achievement
It is a fearful thing to fall into the abyss of your own shallowness, and to be crushed by the weight of your inanity, to have the will but not the talent to do great things, to stand in awe of the best and to know that you will never be good enough, to hold that the work is all in all and to see that your own work is nothing at all. ‘No fate is more dismal,’ Vauvenargues wrote, ‘than to have grand aspirations but not the calibre to carry them out.’ I’m sure that I have suffered enough to make some rare work. But not the least of my sufferings has been that I lacked the talent to make it.
Between what we dreamt we might have been and what we know we are lies the urgent nightmare in which we live and strive to prove our worth. ‘There is not a fiercer hell,’ Keats wrote, ‘than failure in a great object.’
The most bitter martyrdom is to give your best and find that no one wants it. And the truly cursed are those who feel not only the pain of their afflictions but their futility. But our misery is almost as good as our joy at concealing from us its pointlessness.
13 The heroic ego
‘Egoism,’ as Nietzsche said, ‘is the lifeblood of a grand soul,’ though this is no less true of a small soul. Noble minds have the most unflinching dedication and the coldest contempt of rewards. They are thrust on by a fiery pride, and kept in order by a chill aloofness. They don’t care how dear a deed might cost or how much it will pay, but what its true worth is.
Life may plunge you in such degradations, that you have to strive for dignity as a drowner struggles for breath.
Heroes need both the courage to defy all illusions and the confidence to cling to the supreme illusion of their own heroic devotion.
A hero, such as Joan of Arc, does with a fierce awareness the mad deeds that a crank does with none. Yet a blockhead may be trivially right where a hero goes tragically wrong.
SELF-RELIANCE
14 Time and independence
The rich still own lots of room, but now brag that they have less time than the poor. They used to be proud of possessing more leisure than the rest of us. Now they are proud to be so short of it.
The poor must sell their time, since they have nothing else to sell. And now the rich are just as eager to sell theirs, since they have nothing better to do with it.
We value money far dearer than time, since there’s no way that we can make a great deal more time than our peers or show it off to them. Our time is our own, and so it’s scarcely real. Wealth gains its worth and reality by being paraded before others. Time is an intrinsic good, and is therefore of far less value than wealth, which is a status-marker.
The right use of money is to buy more time. But we have so little use for our time that the best we can do with it is to try to make more money.
15 Leisure is independence
True leisure is a full-time job. It is not a hiatus in which you rest so that you can do more work. It is the purpose of life, not a means. But the needs of capital have smashed the social structures, stable classes, standards of taste, sense of vocation, ideals of duty and service, and concept of time and speed which were necessary to keep it up.
In a culture that puts a high value on leisure, few have the means to share in it. And where all have the means to share in it, no one will value it much.
Those who believe that the only work worth doing is the work that is paid can think of nothing better to do with their leisure than to pay to be amused. In a world in which all must have its use, the only superfluous thing we have time for is fun. In consumer capitalism leisure makes as much profit as work.
We may be adult and efficient in our job, but we regress to childhood in our pleasures.
Drones and rentiers have been responsible for nine tenths of the great work of culture.
16 Wealth eats our independence
Freedom belongs to the dimension of time, greed belongs to the dimension of space. So we are glad to waste our time in order to acquire or tour through more space.
Why do we let our greed poach from us the hours which are the sole good that we can call our own? As Montaigne points out, ‘We are never so profligate than with the very things over which avarice would be useful and laudable.’ We are now paid so well for our labour, how could any of us take the time to indulge in leisure?
In order to make each of us rich enough to enjoy cultivated leisure and be free of squalid material needs, every aspect of life had to be turned into a machine for making money, in which no one sets any value on cultivated leisure and each of us must keep labouring to fill our superfluous material wants. A society that has all the money it needs in order to do what it likes will find nothing better to do than to make more money. ‘Increased means and increased leisure,’ according to Disraeli, ‘are the two civilizers of man.’ But we have sold our leisure to add to our means.
17 Independence of means and ends
Few of us have independent means, still fewer have independent ends. Some people are as self-reliant in small things as they are subservient in big ones. They stick obstinately to their own how, while wantonly misappropriating another’s why. ‘Many are stubborn in following the path they have picked out,’ as Nietzsche tells us, ‘few in following the goal.’ They are parasites of purpose. The noble have high aims, which they choose freely, and work at on their own. Allow anyone else to mark out your goals for you, and you have sold your soul as a willing slave.
Which is crazier, to live for the sake of winning the approval of others, or to dream that you can live without it? When I try to rely on myself, I rely on the regard of others than those whose regard I rely on most of the time. And when I try to think for myself, I let myself be fooled by those who are not the usual ones to fool me.
TRUE PRIDE
18 Heroism
Aim high, shoot straight, claim little. The great-souled ask for nothing and yield nothing, confide nothing and conceal nothing. They demand no more than is their due. And they seek only those goods that they have a real regard for. Yet they retain all the ardent disproportion of youth.
The noble have the resolve to keep up the first bounteous impetus for their chosen course all the way to its tedious end. ‘Blessed is he that waiteth.’ They wait but are not corrupted by their own impatience. They yield to passion without letting go of restraint.
The corpse of archaic heroism stiffened into the rigor mortis of roman stoicism.
19 A hero needs a cause
A hero may fight in a bad cause but not in a small one. In order to be brave they have to overrate some cause more than the rest of us overrate life.
A hero needs a cause, but any cause will do, and the more bloody it is the better. Caesar’s, in the words of Montaigne, ‘had as its vile objective the ruin of his country and the debasement of the whole world.’ Each fateful creed has its heroes, the hateful no less than the honourable, and the most illegitimate no less than the justified. The SS pullulated with them. The grossest hokum armed them in a sterling resoluteness.
All the virtues can be used in a bad cause as well as in a good one. The force of courage can beat down the claims of justice.
Some people have all the flaws of a hero but none of a hero’s high merits. They are headstrong, overreaching, defiant and unyielding, willing to waive their own good to keep up their lofty self-conception. But where is the grand cause that would breed from these failings golden feats?
Some of us fritter away our courage on a fight for a mean cause, since we lack the daring or clarity to find a deserving one. But there is no escape. A great cause will rack a great soul. A mean cause racks a small soul just as direly.
20 The demonic providence of pride
Kill pride and self-will, and you kill the most precious things that we make and do. ‘Pride and egoism,’ Keats said, ‘will enable me to write finer things than anything else could.’ They are the forces that frame all style and find out all our truths. Where pride is lacking, there will be no truth, no worth, no achievement. And where greed gives out, look for no hope, no pleasantness, no progression, no life. So the world, by indulging these two worst sins, mindlessly accomplishes what the most mindful divine planning could not, and out of evil brings forth good. ‘Take egotism out,’ Emerson says, ‘and you would castrate the benefactors.’
It is in the furnace of perversity or pride that great things take shape. Only the sickest can see the truth, and only the most insane would dare to speak it.
Truth alone could shame us out of our pride. Yet none but proud souls can pluck up heart to seek out the truth.
21 Pride must prove its worth
Only the proudest people feel called on each day to make good their claim to fill up a place on earth. They must disagreeably prove that they are like no one else. The rest of us just assume it. We take our self-estimation for granted as an axiom, but they have to put their pride to the test of incessant experiment.
The proud feel called on to defend the steep price that they set on their own merits. But they scorn the common ventures that could prove it to their peers, and so they spend their force on the rare exploits which fail to.
You win your happiness when you light on some impersonal mission which gives full scope to your most personal desires. Large achievements are totally egoistic but rise above all self. Life gains its victories by a ceaseless selfish self-sacrifice. Our devotion draws its force from the selfish energy with which we fuel it.
22 Redeeming selfishness
We are too weak to shrink our selfishness. So you should strive to make the most capacious self that you can. Most of us do this arithmetically, by supplementing it with more selves, by our love of kin, tribe or natal land.
Heroism is the healthiest exertion of a soul mortally disordered by pride.
The brave are spurred on by a grand and self-forgetful egoism. They may forget themselves, but not their heroism. And though they hold their own lives cheap, they hold others’ lives still cheaper. ‘They weighed so lightly what they gave,’ as Yeats wrote. They are ready to lay down their lives for a cause, which they would cast off as readily for the sake of their own renown. The finest things are achieved by selfish people who set aside their self-interest in the achieving of them.
Better to burn the self to a crisp in some arduous and fiery quest, than starve it by a juiceless and lingering asceticism. It’s not worth effacing, but it is worth expending. Why strain nature to abnegate a thing so paltry? The self is worth annulling, but not for one’s fellow selves.
ADMIRATION AND IMAGINATION
23 Independence and admiration
Admiration is the intellect in love. ‘To love,’ Gautier says, ‘is to admire with the heart, to admire is to love with the mind.’
True admiration is a stern justice and proportion. But when distilled as form it shapes the most delightful style. Fake admiration is a crafty self-aggrandizement posing as generosity. ‘The worship of God,’ Blake says, ‘is honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius.’
Be sure to commend and contend with the right people. How could you grow an inch larger than these? Rivalry makes you as puny as your puniest opponent or as ample as your own best self.
Creators need both the veneration which prompts them to emulate and the daring which spurs them to deviate. Their task, as Hopkins said, is to ‘admire and do otherwise.’
24 Independence and imagination
The best you can hope to attain is neither true humbleness nor true heroism but a mere semblance of them. But by aspiring to nobility you may bring off rare feats, whereas when you try to put on lowliness you stunt your high faculties.
Heroes are self-sufficient people who must keep their gaze glued to the mirror of fame to assure themselves of their own value.
Noble souls remain just what they are, since there is nothing in this world that they respect enough to change for it. Their pride won’t stoop to pretend to be what it is not. Yet they reach their best by becoming greater than they are.
The truly proud take pride not in what they are but in what they might make of themselves. But the vain preen themselves on what the world takes them for.
Imagination makes the coward as imagination makes a hero. The fainthearted see the threat in all its horror. But the fearless see the fine figure that they might become by defying it.
Resolute people have both the vision to glimpse how much they might gain by losing all and the fortitude to lose it.
Artists sculpt new forms that they imagine. Heroes remodel themselves as an ideal that they imagine. They must be the sculptors of their own lives. Saints dream that they can turn themselves into paragons that they take to be real.