1 Our many selved self

After a few hundred years we may be close to the uttermost frontiers of scientific learning, though its propositions are hard to grasp and lie far from common use. But in thousands of years of discussion, observation and experience, we have explored so little of the heart and its emotions. And yet it is not a complicated organ. We know how to astonish it, thrill it, please it and stab it, but we are still at a loss to understand it. Like the weather, its delicately poised agitation is formed by simple but erratic variables. It’s a jumble of ill-assorted details. So it seems complex, but it’s just miscellaneous and overloaded. It’s not more intricate than the world of matter, but more elusive and enigmatic. We don’t live below the surface, but we do live on a medley of them.

Mind and body may well be one substance, but it is through their felt duality that we take hold of the world.

METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY

2 Pitfalls of understanding the emotions

When we try to guess what has led people to act as they have, we first restrict the field of determinants to motives, and then search for one that appertains to us and that casts us in a bright light. We bring to bear first our general human self-obsession and then our own private self-obsession. We take it that they do things because they desire us or envy us, when they are not thinking of us at all.

Freud was not a bad scientist. He was a bad literary critic. Thus he conceded that ‘wherever I go I find that a poet has been there before me.’ He thought that he could stitch together a rigorous science of the mind by reducing a few foundational tales to crude formulas. As a theory psychoanalysis arrays in a mythological frame not psychological facts but our trite notions of them. As a therapy it is psychic blood-letting, and the analyst clings like a tenacious leech. Freud was a scientific quack, but at rare moments a genuine old-fashioned sage.

Psychotherapy is a means that some people use to misunderstand themselves in a more colourful way.

3 Emotions

Emotions narrow us, and so we take it that they make us whole.

Our emotions are the body heat of our egoism.

We get most of our emotions third-hand from the way others evaluate the appearance of things.

Some people use distressing emotions, such as anger or self-reproach, to syphon off their thoughts from the real source of their distress. They work up a sham mood to switch their own or others’ gaze from the real one that they do feel. They weep for a deep loss, to steer their thoughts clear of the shallower ones which touch them so much more deeply.

The deepest feelings can be turned on to a quite new track by some slight impediment laid on the rails.

4 The fragmentary self

Our souls writhe with perversities and incongruities. So how could an incisive analysis of motives, such as Dostoyevsky’s, be anything but a thicket of paradoxes? ‘All contradictions can be found in me,’ wrote Montaigne, ‘depending on some twist or attribute.’

Our being is sewn up from offcuts and oddments, ‘fragments from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine apparel, pieced together as is the human soul,’ as Strindberg put it. Yet we still dream of a wholeness which we will never reach.

Our disposition is all things but uniform and indivisible. ‘We are entirely patched up from bits and pieces,’ the amorphous Montaigne says, ‘so diversely and so shapelessly, that each one of them pulls its own way at each moment.’ Live in consonance with human nature, the stoics urge us. That is, be unalterable and variable, unbalanced and moderate, prying and listless, soppy and hard-hearted, cocksure and diffident, spendthrift and mean, circumspect and foolhardy, spirited and cold, pliant and unappeasable, all colours by turns but not one of them for long.

Each of us is made up of a whole army of selves. But our general self-interest keeps us under tight control so that we can act like a single unit.

5 To psychologize is to despise

The human sciences are bound to set too high a value on their object of study, since it is the same as their audience. As Twain says, ‘etiquette requires us to admire the human race.’

The most profound explorer can’t fathom the turbid shallowness of the heart.

Only the unhappy few who sound their souls to their marrow have heard how hollow they are.

‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout mépriser.’ Scan the will and motive, and you won’t think much of life or of your fellow beings. ‘In the depths of my heart,’ Freud wrote, ‘I can’t help believing that my fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ To psychologize is to despise. To become expert in it, you must wield the knives of empathy, apathy and revenge.

Some dispositions are penned in an invisible ink, and you have to hold them up to the flame of your ill-will to read them. And some are so well secured by their self-regard, that suspicion is the one tool pointed enough to pick their lock.

No one is a hero to their psychologist. Psychology is the science that proves to us that we are far more facile, predictable, venal, dishonest and unself-knowing than we assumed.

MATTER OF PSYCHOLOGY

6 The unsurprising self

Some people strike you as more vivid than you thought they would be before you met them. But you soon find that they are more vapid than they seem when you have just met them. They harbour odd and astounding longings, but for flat and dull reasons. Their fingerprints are more distinct and inimitable than their minds. They are like journals, worth skimming through, but not worth rereading, diverting and informative, but mass-produced and disposable. Most of us are more thin and spectral than our solid presence makes us seem at first glance.

I fail to foresee so much of what happens to me, because it’s so banal that it falls below my theatrical expectations. And yet I’m so used to events upending my most confident predictions, that it shocks me when they fall out just as I envisaged. ‘We are,’ as Hoffer wrote, ‘more surprised when something we expected comes to pass than when we stumble on the unexpected.’ I’m caught off guard by the very crises that I saw coming.

The most surprising thing about us is how predictably we behave.

7 The complexity of the self

People feel from one minute to the next more wayward moods, memories, intimations, wounds and wants than they could find words for or than you could conjecture. Their transitory emotions, recollections, intuitions, pinings and impressions pierce deeper than their conscious thoughts. Their inner lives may be as rich as a novel, but their views are as thin and meagre as a dusty exegete’s exposition of it. ‘People,’ as Valéry says, ‘are unutterably more complex than their ideas,’ though that’s not saying much. Thinkers are those rare people whose ideas are more complex and interesting than they are themselves. Most people live in a narrow circle, and think in an even narrower one. Thinkers live in a narrower one, but think in one less narrow.

8 The banality of the self

We are such shallow beings, that the shallowest explanations of our acts are the ones most likely to hit the mark.

The deepest part of us is our ego. And there’s nothing more shallow than that.

Our compulsions are convoluted but not complex. And our schemes are ingenious but not wise.

To say that a person is larger than life is no doubt an exaggeration. But it’s still not saying much.

The personal soul is a social figment forged by our symbolic codes.

It is only our bodies and all their stupid running round that give a tinct of variety to the monotony of our souls.

We meet both the most momentous and the most routine events with the same dull lack of thought.

9 Empty on the inside

If they didn’t wear clothes, would we be so sure that people have souls? It is in part their exterior coverings and complications that make them feel that they must have such rich interior lives.

It might not matter that we are so empty on the inside, if we at least had some substance on the outside.

When we try to turn our gaze inwards, all we see is the grand figure that we think we make in the eyes of the world. And we use up most of our so-called empathy in imagining what others think and feel about us. Yet we still fail to see that they don’t think or feel much about us at all.

It might be good to fix my thoughts on my inner wealth. But all I would see is how poor I really am.

Like all prisons, most of our self is empty space.

10 The shallow unconscious

Our unconscious is the shallowest part of us. And we live most of our life unconsciously.

We are shoved on by a ruck of conscious aims of which we are nevertheless unaware, and by a crew that lurk beneath the surface but which are still quite superficial. The unconscious is submerged and murky but not deep. Our compulsions seem profound because they surge up from an unsearchable though shallow font. And our latent drives master us because their shoals measure the same as our squalid heart’s compass.

We are so shallow, that we feel sure that the unconscious must be deep, and that we think searchingly when we don’t think deliberately. Most of us, who are moved by facile promptings of which we are not aware, scorn thoughts and words for being merely conscious.

Most of what we call thinking takes place in the unconscious. And there’s nothing more glib, crafty or self-seeking than that.

People who have such shallow ideas are proud of the deep fountainhead from which they spring.

11 The human machine

An animal’s nature is far more simple than its organs, just as the soul is far simpler than the body. And the brain is far more complex than any thoughts it may think. So it ought to be far easier to know the soul than the body, as Descartes said. And yet we know the body far better than we will ever know the soul. The soul, which we think is closest to us, is closed off to us.

Whether or not we look on the animals as automata, it’s probable that this is how they look on us.

We are most fully human only on the surface. Deep down we are animals. Deeper still we are machines. We may have a nature, but it is not a human nature. Most of what is natural in us is not human, and most of what is human is not natural.

Technology does not rob us of our deep humanness. It lays bare how shallow it is.

From now on most of our deepest, most lasting and most constant relations will be with machines. And nothing that takes place in the real world will engross us as do the images that flash on our screens.

12 Diagnosis is not cure

‘Once we know our infirmities,’ Lichtenberg maintained, ‘they cease to do us harm.’ But you no more bring to heel your preconscious drives by becoming conscious of them than you heal a disorder by diagnosing it. ‘Recognizing idols for what they are,’ as Auden points out, ‘does not break their enchantment.’ To be aware of your bondage does not free you from it. It may well make you more its slave, since it shows you that you are too weak to break loose. Your mad cravings may grip you all the more forcibly when you wake to what they are, since then you feel constrained to reinforce them with reasons. Our very consciousness of them may harden us in our worst habits. And by the time that we spot our errors, they are so much part of our self, that we are loath to give them up.

You may slip into a fault just because you eye it so warily and take such pains to shun it.

13 In your dreams

My sleeping dreams are as egocentric as my waking ones. I play the lead in all of them. Even in the sea of sleep I don’t cast off from the blighted island of self.

Dreams are proof that the unconscious is yet more banal, trivial and shallow than the conscious mind.

Dreaming is as needful to the mind as defecating is to the body, and its products are of the same value. As Halifax said, ‘The inquiry into a dream is another dream.’

Your dreams won’t teach you a thing. But you may learn a great deal from sleeplessness. You can get a day’s work done in one insomniac hour. ‘A wakeful night will yield as much thought as a long journey,’ wrote Thoreau.

14 Character eaten by anecdote

Who would not rather reel off all the details of what they’re up to than search out the truth of what they are?

May your years have the tang of racy tales.

We live by anecdotes, which pulse with incident and variety, but lack form and meaning. Some of us add up to no more than the sum of the stories that we tell of our doings. And some are what is left when all our tales have been told. ‘Who could conceive a biography of the sun?’ Baudelaire asked. ‘It is a tale replete with monotony, light and grandeur.’ But most of us turn out to be like cheap potboilers, with more plot than character, thought or style.

We judge people by their fluctuating fortunes, and from these we attribute to them permanent traits.

Don’t we decide what those near us are like partly for dramatic effect? We want to people our life’s stage with a large troupe of striking types.

Life must be lived forwards, but it must be misunderstood backwards.

15 All mad

Some of us seem sane because we have learnt how to rein in one breed of lunacy that threatens to buck us by riding some other which looks less wild and out of control. So we try to bring to heel our indecent addictions by indulging one that seems more respectable.

We are all mad, and so we have to humour one another as if we were sane. We have to learn to speak to each other as if we were grown up and could bear to hear the truth.

You don’t spot how cracked some people are because they are so conventional. And you don’t spot how conventional others are because they are so crazy.

Insanity is a set of maladaptive illusions, sanity is a set of adaptive ones. ‘Sanity,’ Santayana wrote, ‘is a madness put to good uses.’ Madness is an inflation of self in ways that harm the self and others. And sanity is an inflation of self in ways that help them. Sickness of any kind, as Lamb wrote, ‘enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself.’ And yet it does not so much enlarge our self to our self, it shrinks our self to it and to all its petty symptoms and routines and hopes for a cure.

16 The haywire clockwork

An animal is an ingenious piece of clockwork. But in us consciousness has sent the mechanism haywire.

Mad people unnerve us, because they are so patently the puppets of their compulsions. And that is what we all fear we might be. It is where the mechanism breaks down in the most bizarre ways that we see that it is no more than a badly wound-up piece of clockwork. And suicides scare us, because they show us how easy it would be to cut our strings and stop dallying.

It is the rational animal, human kind, that brings a germ of chaotic irrationality into the world.

GRIEF

17 Grief

The deaths of those I don’t care for seem to accord with nature. The deaths of those I love outrage it.

When those who are dear to you die, they glow all the more luminously for you. It’s you who live on that fade to a wraith, to loiter behind in this limbo of low goings-on, which looks grey and bleached of meaning now that they have ceased to light it up. Who knows whether the saved are those who lived on or those who went under? It is the living who, as Shelley wrote, ‘lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.’ And yet we don’t doubt that merely to be alive is a proof of success.

Are those who mourn harrowed more by what they can’t remember or by what they can’t forget?

I feel that I have a right to look for comfort when I lose the priceless things that I took for granted and the worthless ones that I craved too much. We can think of nothing worse than to be deprived of the cheap garbage that we have toiled so sedulously to shovel up.

18 The shallowness of grief

In grief, diversion is better than cure. We are so shallow, that we alleviate a grief more efficaciously by deflecting our mind from it than by getting to the bottom of it. The way to stanch its bleeding is to give it no thought. Sorrows are best cured not by learning to think of them in the right way, but by not thinking of them at all. It’s best to dodge blows, not parry them, as Montaigne says. We are too weak to fight fortune. Just run.

We entomb our sorrows deep in our hearts, since that’s the district we least frequent. ‘The only thing grief has taught me,’ Emerson wrote, ‘is to know how shallow it is.’ Our grief flows deeper than we say, but shallower than we think.

It takes most people no time to recover from deep shocks to their soul. If you want to harrow them, you have to strike at their material interest or their social standing. The dark night of the soul is bright sunshine compared to the eclipse of our social regard.

I grieve because others change. And I cease to grieve because I change.

The soul-stirring gestures of our grief help to put the dead out of mind.

Any grief that can be assuaged by the rites of mourning can’t have pierced too deep. We have worked them up to pretend to allay the griefs that we pretend to feel. Mourning is meant more to display our grief than to dispel it.

Grief may be strongest when its object is a false image, since then we can shape it to our own needs.

19 The selfishness of grief

How deftly self finds its way into the most self-forgetful grief. When I mourn for my dead, I sigh for what I have lost, not for what they have lost. Pity me, I miss my friend. I feel sorry for myself for the brief pang that their eternal loss costs me. True grief gives them a peaceful home till we die, where they can live out their loss, unmolested by our showy tears.

Our mourning is selfish because our love is selfish. When I grieve, I am crushed by the desolate selfishness of loss, from which I am delivered by the fierce selfishness of returning desire. Our greed for life eats up our grief for the dead. The passing of the one you loved may eclipse the sun of your selfishness for a brief hour, but it won’t blot it out for long.

How few of the mourners at a funeral are thinking of the dead.

Grief, like love, can be jealous, possessive and self-deluding.

People are consoled for what they lose by the outlet it gives them to flaunt their bruised sensibility.

We build sepulchres to blazon how affectingly and glamorously we mourn. ‘Funerary pomp,’ as La Rochefoucauld says, ‘has more to do with the vanity of the living than with the commemoration of the dead.’ A funeral is a celebration of human self-importance.

20 The grief of love

Grief is love’s dark similar. It has its fervid romance and its long fractious marriage. All love ends in mourning, which flings you back to the first ardour of your love.

Grief, like sex, floods your flesh with an irresistible inundation. They both work by a kind of imagination, mingling dream and memory, guilt and desire.

Loss, like love or poetry, imbues the most exiguous details with meaning, and inspires a rhapsody of superabundant suggestion.

We have three sovereign balms, truth, love and death. And when knowledge hurts and love goes, death is all we have to do the work.

One comfort for the thought of your dying is that at least you won’t be reunited with the people you knew on earth. ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all,’ as Butler joked.

21 Cheap comforts of the emotions

The highest things might lift our heavy hearts, but most times it’s the lowest ones that do. Commonplaces are our most effective consolations, since they best tally with the smallness of our minds. ‘A trifle consoles us,’ says Pascal, ‘because a trifle upsets us,’ though a trifle will rub us raw where a blow will barely bruise us. When we claim that art has saved us, we mean that it has amused us and kept our minds from brooding on the real torments from which we need saving and which are so much more trivial.

When we lose what is most dear to us, we seek a haven in false condolences, ceremonials, emollient nostrums, sugary tunes and bad verse. These tactfully disguise from us the baser schemes that are even now thronging in to take its place. I use my anodynes to prove how sorely life has gored me, while I press on to the next shallow enterprise which will soon fill my whole heart. But I spurn the facile succour held out by my comforters, which I soon won’t need since I’ll be so swept up in my facile schemes and pleasures. The scars have long since healed of the lacerations that I was sure would send me to the grave.

22 The consolations of untruth

We are solaced by the lie that we are solaced by the truth.

At times I grope for some gaudy consolation to hide how soon I was consoled by a mere toy. And at times I need it to make sense of a great sorrow that I don’t quite feel.

You have to find a way to lose yourself, as a ruse to keep your thoughts off your crushing losses.

How smartly I find ease for troubles of which I’m not even aware. I’m cheered less by the consolation than I am by my erroneous view of what I required to be consoled for.

We can bear the lack of love, riches, success or liberty, so long as we lack self-reflectiveness as well.

Our delicate self-deceit shows how hard our plight is.

Necessity will eventually force on you the remedies which your good sense was too hesitant or too steadfast to provide.

23 The consolations of conceit

You may allay a light loss by lessening it, but you allay a large one by magnifying it. ‘What sorrow is like unto my sorrow?’ is the cry that marks the egoist.

Even in my most gruelling hardships I want to be flattered as much as I want to be relieved. In our ordeals and degradations we still hope to be the cynosure of all eyes. Your conceit plays the fraudulent comforter, and so it is the sole thing that you can count on to console you. Any lie will dim your pain in time of trouble, and the lie of your significance will do so best of all. I lull to sleep my griefs by thinking less of them and more of my own importance.

24 Failed consolations

I treasure my consolations, but they crumble like porcelain as soon as I start to handle them. I keep them for show and not for use. They invariably fail me, but it may be I need them so that I can say that they fail me. When I’ve turned my back on all the more creditable things, I like to feel that there is one thing at least that has turned its back on me.

Art and philosophy help you to bear only those woes that you need no help in bearing.

25 The dangers of comfort

The consolations that you take up to ease your pain will end by crippling you unless you could get on just as well without them. Like subtle parasites, they keep alive the gloominess that they batten on. They act on us like sweet poisons and toxic medicines, palliating the symptoms of our bereavement, while prolonging the disease. Look for solace, and you will meet it at every turn. But if you need it, you will find how insidiously it will sap your strength.

You blunt your pain not just by the sort of illusions that you hold but by the way in which you hold them. Treat a consolation as more than a holiday, and you’ve lumbered on your back one more office and obligation, which will bow you as low as the sorrow that you want to crawl out from under.

HABIT

26 Our shallow habits usurp our deep self

We mistake our shallow habits for our deep self. And then we allow our adopted habits to usurp who we are. What I do is more definite and stable and colourful than what I am. And when I detail myself by my routines, I cadge some of this stability and definition and colouring for my self.

Personality is an indolent friction. It’s a clutter of habits which retards your march but is not so hard as having to choose the right way at each stride.

Custom is an impotent autocrat whose sway would topple on the spot if I once refused to bow to its directives.

It is not so much the desire that breeds the habit, but the habit that breeds the desire. People don’t so much do things because they like doing them. Rather they like to do them because they are in the habit of doing them. And in any case, they always have to be doing something.

27 The vanity of habit

We take up our habits to push our self-interest, and we hold on to them to keep up our self-regard. Some rigid people are less determined to succeed than they are to cling to the customs that hamper them from doing so. They would rather give up a chance for gain than a fixed idea. They force their ampler designs to bend to their crabbed routines. And then they stick to these for years after they’ve ceased to subserve the objective for which they took them up. ‘Our habits cling to us, even when they do us no good,’ as Proust points out.

Each of us clings to our own way of doing things, and one of the few things we have in common is our contempt for the ways of others.

‘Even the most adept egotist,’ Nietzsche says, ‘regards his set ways as more salient than his advantage.’ My ambition costumes itself in the everyday wear of my habits. I could change them in a trice, if I were not so vain of them.

Some people have to be stubborn, because they are too weak-willed to change their course.

Time wears down good habits. But stupid habits grow worse as time goes on.

HOPE AND DESPAIR

28 The oxygen of hope

How could you work in the absence of hope? Hope makes you work, or work will make you hope. Hence action is, as Conrad words it, ‘the friend of flattering illusions.’ As soon as we think, we see what peripheral beings we are. But so long as we act, we can’t but feel that we are the centre of the world. Action and fiction fill up our lives. Contemplation and truth would scoop out their pith and leave them dry and desolate.

Hope is the lungs of our delight. And if it gives out, we drown in a hideous deep black water.

Hope divided by anxiety totals happiness. A tally short of one, and your life goes dark.

Hope toys with you like a kitten with a mouse, mercilessly deferring your reprieve.

Hope is winged, but it can’t fly. It is like Icarus, not like a bird. It draws us out of the present, but it can’t lift us above life’s banality.

29 The happy dupes of hope

You need a few hollow and buoyant hopes to ferry you across the boiling sea of life.

We are the happy dupes of hope. Hope is our worst flatterer and our best friend.

Our hopes make such fools of us, that we have to fool ourselves with yet more hopes. It is the source of half our ills and the sole comfort we can count on to cure them. Hope, which hourly misguides us, is yet the one real joy that we can call our own, ‘the chief happiness which this world affords,’ as Johnson puts it.

Hope is such a jovial companion, that I don’t mind if it leads me down the wrong path. And despair is such a hangdog, that I don’t want to go along with it, though it may lead me to the right one.

If we had any real grounds for hope, what need would we have of its dreams?

The more hope cheats you, the more you are lured to trust in its promises. And the more woes your superstitious fears bring on you, the more you yield to their intimidation.

It’s no great victory for hope to get the better of despair. Illusion always has the start on truth.

30 Hope defers our life

Our hearts are haunted by shadows of lost sunshine and forebodings of looming darkness. And our hope is our current and real self-satisfaction promising us fabulous satisfactions to come.

After a while all you hear in hope’s blandishments is the ominous overture to some new discouragement. And you dread joyfulness as if it were an intruder come to break in on your settled gloom.

To hope is to put off life and put on illusion. And since our optimism will make the world so much better than it is now, why would anyone want to live in the present?

31 The house of desolation

When the tide of hope goes out, you’re left plastered with a slime of despair, which no future fulfilment can rinse off. ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’

Not even a dread despair will harden you to the million pinpricks of frustration that come your way. Desperation won’t save you from disappointment, and disappointment won’t save you from being duped by hope, as polar regions, forsaken by the sun, are lit up by gaudy northern lights.

Despair is the last stage of a cancer which has grown by many metastasized disappointments.

Once you fall into despair, you never stop falling.

The Lord of hosts fed the chosen seed with the thin sustenance of despair, while he led them hopelessly astray in the wilderness.

32 The hunger of despair

Our affirmations flag our hopelessness. Try to proclaim your faith, and you will let show how deeply you despond.

Overactive expectations breed tumours of despair.

Despair is not a placid resignation. It is a wild beast which has been balked of its prey, but which is still gnawed by its hunger, and so eats its own heart. And it is the drop of hope that gives despair its venom.

On the far side of despair a still more sinister despair lies in wait to devour you.

33 Too noisy to despair

Life schools us to despair, but all we learn is to hope. We have no dearth of reasons to despair. So it’s just as well that we don’t live by reason. I learn so tardily to despond, and I forget so soon. The spinning years unravel all my dreams. But following all my failures, I fail at last to despair.

Most of us don’t lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau claimed. And he might have lost all heart if he knew how few of us do. On the contrary we lead lives of noisy and hectic self-satisfaction. Who these days has the leisure to despond? We are all in too great a hurry to get and spend. Hope stinks eternal on the human breath.

No one feels that life has passed them by. We are all hurtling so fast that life can barely keep up with the pace we set. And certainly other people’s lives cannot.

Let go of all your ampler hopes, and a hundred sucking tentacles of desire will still keep you stuck to life. Having staked all on a single venture, how gaily you go on struggling when that has miscarried. You find that what you live for you can easily live without. You will, as Austen said, ‘live to exert, and frequently to enjoy’ yourself.

34 We fail to despair

My hopes betray me, and I betray my despair. I am rarely worthy of my desperation, and in the end I prove unfaithful to it. And the despair that I feel is unworthy of the despair that I think I feel. And yet there are times when I have to put on a fake despondence to navigate my thoughts away from my real one.

We don’t have enough faith to be capable of much despair. And in this life, which thwarts us at every turn, don’t we need to seek refuge in hope’s sweet perfidy? Only a fallen angel would have the fortitude to bear real hopelessness. To hope is human, to despair divine.

When all your prospects have gone black, your fears live on to tell you how strongly you are still bound to the world.

35 Those who have no hope cannot afford to despair

‘Hope,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘is a subtle glutton.’ Faith is bloated by the hunger of despondency, which is, as George Eliot said, ‘often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.’ Are any so eaten up by hope as those who have been starved of real success? The ghouls of hope haunt them, and plunge them in a gloom yet more menacing. Its toadstools sprout in the damp shade of desolation.

When you have nothing to hope for, you also have nothing but hope. ‘The miserable,’ as Shakespeare wrote, ‘have no other medicine.’ However threadbare our coats may be, we keep their pockets stuffed with hopes.

Life makes liars of those who boast that they have abandoned hope. And then hope makes fools of them by abandoning them for real.

Who hopes so incorrigibly as an invalid who trusts that this latest cure will work, for no better reason than that all the foregoing ones have failed? And now we are all in this sick state.

Hope is a blossom which smells no worse to us for being dunged with a thousand disappointments.

36 In the lucid pit of despair

To despair is to be both burningly awake to life and worse than dead. It is to know that in order to go on, you must have hope, and yet that there is no hope.

Despair is an experiment to test if we have the strength to live without the staff of falsehood. In the lucid pit of despair you at last come to believe what you have long known to be true. World-weariness is the nausea which comes over you when you have evacuated all the lies that help you to digest the truth. Lose the hang of deceiving yourself, and you are no longer fit to live in this world. To lay bare the false trappings of life would be to shred life without making a rent in its false trappings. ‘Don’t part with your illusions,’ Twain cautioned. ‘When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.’ When they give way beneath you, death is the one thing left to cushion your fall.

37 Falling into truth

To despair is to find the one deep gulf of truth in this world of shallows, and fall into it, and never climb out.

You know you’re getting near the heart of life, the closer you come to the black hole of despair. But to get near the heart of life is to arrive at the farthest remove from the lives of most people.

Those who have been dying their life long don’t go out in peace but in terror and despair, their minds nettled by their paralysis, like poisoned rats in a hole.

LOVE AND HATE

38 Hate

Few of us are important enough to have enemies, though most of us make it a point of pride that we do. It’s lucky for us that so few people care enough about us to wish to do us harm. And it may even be lucky that so few care to try to do us good.

Those who appear to hate themselves in fact want to mark themselves off from the people whom they look down on but fear they might be lumped with. What better way to prove that you are not bourgeois than by running down the rest of the bourgeoisie? ‘The middle class,’ as Renard notes, ‘is other people.’

Misanthropes think they don’t need anything so much that they have to accommodate the world’s benign hypocrisy to get it.

People’s loathing is stronger than their love. And it is their hate that makes them strong in the world.

Hatred, far more than love, does not count the cost, and is willing to work for no pay.

The devil need only lob a stone into their swamp, and the saints will devour each other like crocodiles to snatch the prize.

We start to hate people because we dislike a few things that they do. And soon the least thing that they do makes us hate them more, because it is they who do it.

39 Love

You have to go on treating those who are dear to you as if you adored them, for fear of how you might feel about them if you stopped.

Love is of all things the one most subject to chance, and so we have to speak as if it were the work of destiny. It settles in the nearest place that our vagabond attention comes to rest. The need to love is essential. The object of love is accidental. And in the same way, our need to hate and fight is as imperative as the pretexts we find for doing so are petty.

To be adored is a common enough fate. How intoxicating to win a person’s love, but how sobering to keep it. And how it chills the heart to see what you are cherished for.

You can hate a person steadily and without ever seeing them. But love is not so fine a passion. It needs to have a body in front of it.

Who would pledge eternal love, if they believed they were going to live for all time?

We are proud to show off our love and hate, but we try to conceal their real causes, which is not so hard, since we don’t know them ourselves.

40 The daily miracle of love

Malice sees the parts, love sees the whole. Love harmonizes, hate clarifies. Love paints in the softest pastels, hate etches in the sharpest lines.

Romance, like jealousy, is a wild curiosity. But love sports in a tranquil knowledge. It works its daily miracle when it consummates your curiosity without diminishing your astonishment or destroying your illusions.

Perfection compels you to admire, but blemishes kindle dry admiration to a blaze of love. The flaws of the one you’re fond of form gullies which you level by flooding them with more fondness. So they come to be some of the traits that most endear them to you.

Love knows no drudgery. A labour of love is no labour at all. ‘And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.’

I demean myself in front of those who love me, in order to feel secure that I need not prove that I’ve earned the right to their love.

Love is a mundane passion which makes the whole world seem miraculous.

41 Egoism for two

Those who love for their own ends love no more than themselves. But those who love without an end of their own in view most likely don’t love at all.

Our egoism is such a burden to us, that we try to force others to bear it with us by making them the object of our love or hate. We must each take up the cross of our self-love, and try to rope in as many others as we can to help us carry it.

Our complacent self-love makes our love too blind to spot the flaws of the one whom it has marked out for its own. And the flaws that it is most blind to are those that hurt others. It soon opens its eyes to the ones that wound its own love. And most unconditional love extends only as far as forgiving the wrongs done to others.

Most people are sure that they have a right to unconditional love. But if they need it, then they have no right to it. And if they have earned the right to it, then they have no need of it. ‘Most people,’ Ebner-Eschenbach says, ‘need more love than they merit.’

Some of the happiest marriages are those in which both parties are in love with the same one of them.

Two selfish people may form a most loving partnership, provided they can join to work for some shared selfish goal. And the shared goal may be the welfare and success of just one of them.

42 The selfishness of love

Love and amity prune your selfishness into more acceptable shapes, but they don’t weed it out. ‘Our true passions,’ as Stendhal said, ‘are selfish.’ I cherish what I own or what I hope to make my own. Egoism is the pull of gravity that keeps us in orbit round one another.

The world is such a cold place, that we each have to find some frail heart to warm us, while we add our own chill to make it colder.

A capitalist society that values nothing but money has to make a show of valuing nothing more highly than love.

Love is the most picturesque form that our selfishness can take, and the most generous form that our self-delusion can take.

Love will forgive the one it loves all wrongs, till it finds out that it is not loved. And then it will forgive none at all.

We have it fixed in our skulls that love moves the stars, since we are sure that all things must love us.

If love were selfless, it would be a far feebler passion than it is.

43 Need not love

Love is the feeling that grows in us over time for objects that we believe are useful and good for us. But the greatest need that we have of some people may be the feeling that they need us.

Love is the victory of need over good taste.

Some people fancy that they love anyone who might be of use to them, and some are willing to love anyone to whom they think they might be of use.

In love the slave longs for the exclusive possession of the master more than the master wants the slave’s.

Defoe said that ‘all men would be tyrants if they could.’ But if they can’t be tyrants, they’re happy to be slaves. And need and love are tyrants which make the most tyrannous people their slaves, who therefore feel that they have a right to enslave others to their cause.

A heart that needs to love something won’t scruple to give its love to the worst thing. And by loving what is unworthy of its love, it makes itself unworthy of being loved.

Those who need to love are just as ruthless in gaining and keeping their object as those who are in thrall to any other need.

We are willing to see the good in the worst people, if we hope that they might do good to us.

44 Jealousy

Love is mere selfishness, if it’s heated by jealousy. And yet if it were not hot enough to flame into jealousy, it would be a very pale fire. The measure of our love is the hatred we would feel if the one we love were to spurn our love.

It is not love that is the prime social tie, but jealousy and the lust for possession.

We would be glad to lay down our lives for the ones we love, whom we would be glad to see dead if they ceased to love us. Selfless love asks for no more than undying and exclusive ownership of its beloved. Our sacrifices are self-forgetful and yet calculating.

There can be no such thing as universal love. Love is by its nature a preference for one object over others.

45 The cruelty of love

Those who are sure that they are adored grow casually cruel, but so do those who adore them. Idols and their worshippers are both made of stone.

Love or fellowship can turn to hate in the twinkling of an eye. It’s only in books that hate can turn to tenderness. And yet our quarrels and animosities are so thin, that they may well switch back to camaraderie.

The fire of love must die down to a thin flame, or else it will blaze back up as a red hot resentment.

People are so affectionate, that they need to find something to love. But they won’t hesitate to throw this over, if they come across something more to their taste.

People who need to love will put up with all wounds from those who they think love them, so long as they don’t wound their self-love by disvaluing their love.

No one dies of a broken heart, but some may be willing to kill in the hope of soothing the pain it has caused them.

46 The damage of love

What greater wrong could you do some people than to fall in love with them?

How much harm people do by striving to win the love of those who are not worth loving.

Love doesn’t care what damage it does when it succeeds. And when it fails and turns to hate, it cares still less. And then each resents the wrong that they have suffered by loving too much, yet neither repents the harm that they have caused.

Love what is false, and it will betray you, and show you that your love was treachery to the true things that you should have loved.

Some people waste their lives turning themselves into ugly replicas of the ones they think they love, till they find out too late how much they hate them. Yet they never cease to love themselves more than all the world.

If God is love, that may explain why the world is in such a mess.

It is love that will destroy the world by cramming it with its own progeny.

All that will survive of us will be the mess that our love has made of the world. If you want to make havoc, all you need is love.

Love makes more innocent victims than hate.

The one truth in Dante’s lying poem is that hell was built by love supreme.

47 Expressing emotions

Some of us talk least and maybe think least of those whom we love most. ‘If I loved you less,’ says Austen’s Mr Knightley, ‘I might be able to talk about it more.’ Passion loosens some tongues and stops others. And yet it’s only those couples who cheerfully tell each other all they think and do who can cheerfully stay still and silent together.

People warp their feelings when they vent them. But don’t they do the same when they try to hold them in, since they never cease to talk to their own hearts, which demand to be told sugared lies?

48 Marriage

Some of the sturdiest marriages are founded on mutual fallibility. ‘And that support is wonderfully sure,’ as Pascal says, ‘since there is nothing more certain than that people shall be weak.’ Many dote on their mate for years for faults that they wouldn’t put up with in anyone else for five minutes. How few couples could stand each other if they weren’t bound to live under the one roof.

Our life is so ugly, yet we think that if we have a witness to it, that will prove how beautiful it is.

Marriage is a machine for converting a passing mutual flattery to a durable shared self-interest. It is an offensive and defensive treaty made by two egos for the better promoting of their joint selfishness. They start by gazing dreamily into each other’s eyes, but are soon ogling all the things that have caught their own eye.

A spouse is not an object of desire, but a partner in desiring other things.

Most people are bitten by love when they’re young, and can be cured only by marrying.

Marriage is an honourable estate. But it makes disgraceful fools of most of its tenants.

The one clever thing that some fools do is to find a mate dumb enough to put up with all their dumb antics. And the least loving thing that some loving people do is to find a mate who can’t return affection and lavish on them all their love.

49 Fidelity

A loyal husband or wife won’t forgive an outsider who dares to speak of their mate as they think of them.

Every couple must be made up of a more loving and a more loved one. And the one who is more loved will be the more selfish and less deserving of love. And the more loving one may grow less loveable, by being at the mercy of such a cold monster.

The more loving don’t doubt that they are loved, and the less loving don’t doubt that they are martyrs to love. Yet the first take pride in loving more than they are loved, as if it proved the one they love to be a god and so much more worthy of their love. And the second are proud of being so loved, since it shows how much they are worth.

The trials that a couple must brave together may tear them asunder. The death of a child may sound the knell of a marriage.

We condemn those who are inconstant in love, but why should love be constant, when its object never stops changing?

An impulsive adultery may harm a marriage less than a chilled fidelity.

If you’ve married a tyrant, your faithfulness is no virtue. It is collaboration.

50 The family curse

Your family, like the army, is a brutal school. It throws you in with people that you wouldn’t wish to know in civilian life.

A family is half freezer and half hothouse. There’s no climate like it for fermenting lush strains of mental and emotional derangement. It mingles the fetid stench of intimacy with the cold sterility of alienation.

A happy family is maintained by its smiling lies, an unhappy one by its venomous lies.

If hell is the absence of love, is that not what many parents make when they start a family?

Each of us is foredoomed to take on the same propensities that we found most repellent in our parents. ‘After a certain age,’ Proust wrote, ‘the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.’

The worst mistake you can make is to become like your enemy, and your parents are the enemy whom you can’t help becoming like.

Your character may be the way that the family curse works itself out in your own life.

A healthy family spawns far more lies and diseases than it does love or offspring. And even in the most loveless family there is still less truth than love.

The family curse keeps going by making its most pitiable victims its most vicious agents.

Many a child’s attitude to its parents starts out as reverence and ends in resentment.

51 No escape

Once the sugar of childhood has been boiled off, all that’s left to hold a family together is a hard, sticky clump of spite and recriminations.

The ties that bind a family are the mutual loathing, jealousy and contempt of its members.

Being brought up in a family fouls you up so badly, that you can’t wait to get out of it and make one of your own to foul up.

Children judge that they have turned out well, in spite of the harm that their parents did to them. And parents find their children wanting, in spite of all the good that they lavished on them.

A family is a rat-king. The harder you try to pull free of it, the more entangled you get in the foul knot of its spittle and faeces and bile.

Your parents hand down to you all their diseases through their genes, and then prevent you from finding a cure by the warped way they bring you up.

Some parents are little better than viruses. They are neither alive nor dead. All they know is to reproduce themselves. And a family is a disease that you carry through life. You may go into remission, but you are never cured.

No noose is so deadly as a close-knit family.

Each of the children in a large family is still an only child.

In some families feelings run so deep that they are not even superficial. And what does go deep is malice, jealousy and resentment.

Some people are so damaged by their parents because they find out at last how worthless they were, and some because they never do.

52 Dishonour thy father

Dishonour thy father and thy mother, that your days may be short in the land. In this way you will pay them back for what they have done to you, atone for their sin, warn others not to repeat it, lighten the earth of its load, and free yourself from the curse they laid on you.

What more suitable way to show how much you have learnt from your parents than to loathe them as much as they loathed each other?

You may be an utter nonentity, but you can still sow a lush crop of wretchedness and insanity just by having children.

Parents are responsible for all the evil in the world, yet the defining feature of a parent is lack of all feeling of responsibility.

The best that can be said for most parents is that they know not what they do. But that doesn’t make them any the less bent on doing it.

Your parents load you with neuroses, launch you on the sea of life, and then watch with unconcern as you start to sink.

People need no training to be parents. They have an inbuilt knack for messing up those who are close to them and depend on them.

Most parents are just bright enough to brainwash small children.

Your parents give you life, and then poison all its springs.

You spend your life paying for the free gift of life which your parents gave you.

53 Sins of the fathers

It takes an institution as stupid and brutal as the family for anyone to feel awe at a thing as stupid, smug and brutal as a father.

Fathers have no excuse but their own fathers.

Parents must feel that there’s not enough misery in the world, but they have a duty to spawn their own grisly little strain of it. We all yell about the right to life. No one pays the least heed to the prior right of the unborn to stay that way and not be dragged in to this world of pain.

God loves the family, because it is the scourge by which he visits the sins of the fathers on the children.

Our parents were such plaster saints, God no doubt wants them at his right hand. But so long as they are together, it doesn’t much matter where they are, since they’re still in hell, where they belong.

No matter how emotionally constipated two people may be, they can still manage to excrete a family.

Many people have children because it’s easier to give birth to lumps of flesh than to become human beings themselves.

54 We love by misunderstanding

Cruel people want to understand others as they are. When you love, you seek to misunderstand them as they misunderstand themselves. And when you do, they feel that you must understand them as no one else does. And misunderstanding them helps you to keep on misunderstanding yourself. That is how we love ourselves so much.

Lovers are each in love with a false image of the other, who they think must love their true self.

When we say that we understand others, we mean that we see through them. But when we ask that they understand us, we mean that they should see all things from our point of view.

The truth does not want our love. No more does our love want the truth.

Only those who see themselves as they are have earned the right to be loved. But they will not be very lovable.

55 Love, truth and flattery

How could you speak with bluff straightforwardness to one whom you lust for or one whom you love? You can tell the truth only to those that you don’t care for or to those that you don’t need. ‘Nobody speaks the truth,’ wrote Bowen, ‘when there is something they must have.’ So how could we be frank with ourselves or with God, from both of which we hope to gain such a deal of bliss?

Our affection makes our fawning sincere. It luxuriates in an uninterrupted mutual truckling which it rarely needs to put in words. ‘Lovers never tire of each other’s proximity,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘because they are talking of themselves all the time.’ And would we not be bad friends to ourselves, if we weren’t continually commending to ourselves what we do?

56 The sexes

Each sex both dotes on and in some degree disdains the other like a darling child. And each half of a loving couple acts as both parent and child to the other, in their different ways.

We rarely admire those whom we love. Still less do we love those whom we admire. We need someone to love and someone to look down on. And it may well be the same person.

Women hope that their husbands will grow up, but they never do. And men hope that their wives won’t change, but they always do.

Men see things in isolation, women see how they are related to people.

Males and females differ in the sorts of things that they are willing to be slaves to, females to what is human, males to things that are not human. Men maintain their fidelity to their loved ones by lavishing their real passion on some other object.

There may be more Miss Havishams entombed in their dusty bitterness because their bridegrooms did not leave them on their wedding day.

To hold that sex is a mystical or transcendent rite is not the instinct of a healthy animal. It is the figment of a brainsick fantasist. Sex is not a jet of savage rapture. It is a tame pastime for farmyard fowl.

57 Unrequited love

No love is unrequited. It will be paid in full, though it may be in a coin that you have no use for. ‘The pay is always certain,’ as Whitman says.

An unconsummated passion may impregnate the soul, and so beget a breathing work. Poets waste nothing, not even the men and women that they hold most dear. Dante got from Beatrice all that he had need of, but what did she get from him but unwanted adoration?

Some lovers share a mutual unreturned passion, which gives each of them all that they want from the other.

58 Defeated by desire

Passion may lose each round in its bout with reason, and yet still win the tournament. We fight a doomed contest with desire. Frustration enrages us, and satiety cloys. But both beguile us to play the game once more. Dumb lust swindles us, and always disappoints us. It promises fireworks, but performs squibs. Yet it still continues to charm and cheat us. We are slaves to passion, just because it pays us such a low wage.

You can’t kill lust by inanition. It grows fat if fed, and bloated and malformed if starved.

59 No satisfaction

We let slip our bliss in our hungry rush to seize hold of it. We chase it with such breathless celerity that we plough on past it. Brief as our pleasures are, we have left them before they end. By the time they reach us, we are gone after some new sport.

I inflate my desires with my fantasies, till they burst in frustration.

Since we can’t curb our urges, we have to pretend that they meet our needs. We are suspended between desires which we can’t quench, and death which we can’t escape from. Should we succeed in satisfying our passions, they would still fail to satisfy us. And when we at last get hold of the wares that we have craved for so long, they burn us up or leave us cold.

Since we all crave our bliss in this world, we are manifestly not made for a better. But since none of us finds it, how could we be made for this one?

We are puppets, and our cravings are the wires that yank us from one zany contortion to the next.

60 Love and lust

Lust is greed, love is gratitude.

Lust soon palls, but love makes its contented bed in custom. ‘Familiar acts,’ says Shelley, ‘are beautiful through love.’ Sweating lust prowls for ceaselessly changing objects on which to renew its unchanging desires. It craves variety, but finds stale monotony. Love grows strong by its routines, which cast their spell by their sweet predictability.

Lust lures us with the warmth of our past passions, but makes us forget the parched desert they led us to.

We are liable to mistake our lusts for our affections. And we may end up mistaking others’ lusts for our own affections. We are imitators even in our passions.

Our affections are so light and unfixed, that they would blow away if they weren’t anchored in habit and familiarity. And our desires are so boisterous, that they would drive us off course if we weren’t ballasted by our hulking self-interest.

Our lusts make us at once crafty and incautious. They are keen-scented enough to smell out all the trails that might lead to bliss. But then they rush pell-mell down them, careless of the threats that might lie in wait. And our desires are both opportunists and fanatics. They latch on to the first object that comes their way, but then they pursue it with a mad urgency.

A dash of repressive puritanism adds spice to our licentious pleasures.

61 False dreams of pleasure

Our twitching desires stimulate but stun our imagination, and electrify but don’t illuminate it.

If swallowing and swilling are as pleasurable as people claim, why is it that they always do something else at the same time, as if they couldn’t have sex without leafing through a newspaper while they were at it? They pay so little attention to their food that they don’t perceive how little enjoyment it gives them.

Those who seek transcendence through transgression and ecstasy in degradation find that such satanic pleasures are just as vapid and unreal as all the rest. Burst headfirst and sweating into the blazing attic of rapture, and you find it just as empty as if you had trudged step by step to the freezing summit of wisdom.

A human being can no more find transcendence in extremity and excess than it can save itself by moderation.

Your false dreams doom you to chase fictitious pleasures, but won’t take your mind off your real pains.

It may be that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, as Johnson claimed, but we are all self-deceivers. We have to fool ourselves that we enjoy them as much as they promise.

Half the pleasure that we get from a pastime comes from the herd comfort we take in how many people share it or from the snobbish pride at how few do.

62 The fantasy of pleasure

The coarsest sensualists are more in thrall to their brainish fantasies than to their carnal cravings. And since they take most of their notions from others, it’s not even their own fantasies that they are in thrall to. We are actors even in our pleasures. We try to play up to roles that we have seen others playing. And even when serving the most worldly desires, we are serving the whims of an unreal world which exists only in our minds.

Our imagination is so thin, that we have to flesh it out with real pleasures. And our pleasures taste so bland, that we have to flavour them with hot fantasies. Our pleasures are more than half in our mind, which shows how unsatisfying they are and how low our mind must be. ‘To strip our pleasures of imagination,’ as Proust wrote, ‘is to dock them to their own size, that is to say to nothing.’ Real joys are too insipid to overpower us, but we are dazed by our gaudy dreams of them. They keep us spellbound just because they are phantoms.

Wild fancy makes one half of our desires and aversions, and dull habit makes the other half. And the fancy is not even our own.

FRIENDSHIP

63 Friendship

We have a gaggle of discrepant categories of friends. Some are duties, our patrons and clients. Some are a reuters service, which you maintain like cables to relay the bulletins. Others glow like candles, bright erotic sparkles that soon sputter. And some are recreations, which refresh you by diverging from you in cast of mind, occupation, bent and bias. A few may act as your accomplices, but most who might be worthy choose to work on their own. You’re in luck if you meet with one good collaborator in life.

Most people who might be able to help you no doubt have something better to do with their time.

We are small, frail and imperfect creatures. And we are joined to those we love by small, frail and imperfect bonds. But when these crack, it feels like the breaking of worlds.

The strongest ties are laced from the most tenuous fibres.

Your friends are the people whom you have to forgive, even when you have done them wrong.

You must either love someone dearly or not care for them in the least, if you can forgive them for the wrongs that you do them or for forgiving you.

You mend a rift with more grace by suing for a favour than by doing one.

64 Friendship is a habit not a feeling

Isn’t most friendship less a form of love than a means of joint amusement? ‘Almost all people,’ as Emerson says, ‘descend to meet.’ It’s not so much our friends that we are fond of as the fun things that we do with them. We cluster in groups to share our mutual delusions and featherbrained recreations. We want to snatch the most fun for the least sweat. And if we fall out of the habit of having fun with them, we will soon cease to be friends. And what we miss when we lose our friends is not so much who they were but what we used to do with them.

Friendships are like routines. They last so long because friends don’t think them worth changing.

Poverty makes solitude dreadful and society dreary.

Why is it that we have to be slightly inebriated to bear the slight inebriation of company?

Friends don’t try to stop you doing all the harm you would do to yourself if you were left on your own. They just give you better things to do.

A loving family teaches you that you’re a lot safer with people who don’t care about you. And that’s why friends are such a tonic.

65 We descend to meet

‘Man,’ as Delacroix wrote, ‘is a social animal who dislikes his fellow men.’ They need to feel that they have their own slot in a pack, though they don’t care for most of its members. ‘Although the ox has little affection for his fellows,’ says William James, ‘he cannot endure even a momentary separation from his herd.’

Friends don’t grow close because they like each other, they learn to like each other once they have grown close. Many people wouldn’t much like their friends if they were not friends with them. And some fall out over a trifle, since it shows them what faint fondness they have for each other. Some people owe the sway they hold over us to the brittleness of the bonds that splice us to them. These are so frail, that we dare not tug at them, since they would snap at once.

I find the doings of the people I know so fascinating because they are the people I know.

We need all the accomplices we can get in our lifelong felony of killing time.

66 Friendship and flattery

A friend differs from a flatterer, not in telling more of the truth, but by telling lies that are more unfeigned and that we feel bound to reciprocate. We rely on our friends to abet us in our lifelong career of self-deception. In this at least they are like our second selves.

A friend is willing to misunderstand you as you misunderstand yourself. Sycophants just pretend to do so for their own ends. And enemies misunderstand each other almost as much as friends.

A flatterer knows you too well to be a true friend. And a friend knows you just well enough to guess how you want to be flattered. But a friend who dared to tell us the unflattering truth would not stay our friend for long.

Many friends fall out not because they fail to understand one another, but because they no longer feel it worth their while to misunderstand one another.

Don’t spare me the truth, I say to those who I know I can trust to tell only those truths that suit me.

Our friends are too complaisant to try to save us from ruining ourselves.

67 Friendship and enmity

Some people endure the presence of their friends so that they can abuse them in their absence. And they love to hear others slander those whom they dare not treat as outright foes. If you have a knack for friendship, you guess how far a friend wants to run down the rest of their friends. ‘The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetener and cement of friendship,’ as Hazlitt wrote.

Friends might not much like each other, if they did not spend so much time together.

What a history of unspoken enmity lies between some of the best of friends.

Who is not appalled by the sentiments of their enemies and by the antics of their allies?

Few of us can tolerate a fool whose foolishness differs a shade from our own. And we curse as a fool anyone who serves our own interests with less than optimum efficiency.

There are some people whom you can’t help disliking when you’re in their company, and others when they are out of sight. Their tics rasp you when you’re with them, and their faults offend you when you’re not. You have to stay close to certain people, so you won’t find out how little you like them. ‘We think well of them while we are with them,’ Hazlitt says, ‘and in their absence recollect the ill we durst not hint at or acknowledge to ourselves in their presence.’

68 Chatter

In polite talk people defer to some person who is old or august or staid, and they vie to sound as respectable and prim. But in smart repartee they strive to outdo one another in ridicule and wit, and strain to show that they have mastered the catchphrases of the hour.

We are too dull and imperceptive to find new things to say. But we are so desperate to say something witty, that we can’t keep to the plain truth.

Nine laughs in ten are cued by the occasion and not by the joke.

We are so ready to laugh because we want to please others, or because we are so pleased with ourselves.

Why do we pine for intimacies and confidences, and then cravenly deflect them when they come?

Stern moralists may claim that gossip is an evil. But it is such evils that bind us to our tribe. How bland most talk would taste, if it were not peppered with gossip.

69 The rules of the game

The sole kind of conversation that most of us find decent consists in swapping anecdotes about how well we’re getting on and how much fun we’re having. And few things strike us as more indecent than general ideas.

The rules of conversation force you to say a lot of things that you don’t mean, and prevent you from saying a lot of things that you do mean. We think that we don’t want people to lie to us, so we need to train them not to tell the truths that we don’t want to hear.

We have agreed on the codes of conversing so that we can speak amiably to one another without saying a thing. Most small-talk, like dentistry, just fills inconvenient gaps.

I feel sure that I talk much less than I do, but say much more than others do, and that they store up my few clipped and polished words like pearls.

70 Fools talk

When the wise talk to a fool, they feel like fools. And when a fool talks to the wise, he has no doubt that they must be fools.

Fools are told nothing but foolishness. And if they are told something wiser, that is still all that they hear.

Who would not rather talk to a dunce than listen to a sage?

On any matter of common concern the views of the wise are apt to be as silly as those of a fool.

A sage knows nothing that a fool wants to hear.

Why are some people, who scintillate in their urbane talk, so niggling in their vocation? How can they be so sparkling at the periphery, and so dull at the core?

What a mercy, that no one cares to call to mind all the crass and stupid things that I’ve said.

Most people have to talk to others all the time, since they don’t have much of interest to say to themselves.

People are like birds. The worst songsters make the most noise.

71 The feast of solitude

You must be one of a kind, if you can win and keep your joy in retirement or your truth in the crowd. Your solitude should be as replete and well-tempered as society, apt to tease you into good humour.

Some people are too dense to shine in society, and some are too thin to fill up their solitude.

Most people can’t bear to be alone, because when they are, there’s no one there. They find that time spent in their own company is wasted.

You have to flee into company once in a while so as to stop thinking about other people.

Loneliness is boredom imprisoned by shame and protracted into despair. But true solitude is a buoyant pride consecrated to some worthy endeavour. Loneliness is a draining fast, solitude is a rich feast. Insularity is a waterless desert, but seclusion freshens you like an oasis in life’s populous wilderness. You feel lonesome when you fall in with the wrong company, though the wrong company may be your own soul. And you are most friendless when you have no more to say to yourself.

The grand house of solitude soon sinks to a slum of lonesomeness, if not maintained in good trim. Like friendship, it must be kept in constant repair. It must be repeopled from time to time with new selves.

MEMORY

72 The hollowness of memory

We recall events with our eyes, nose and pores. But we don’t remember with our ears, which may be all to the good, since they don’t give us much that is worth remembering. Memory allures us so long as it stays mute. If it could speak, would we not find what poor stuff it had to tell us?

How few hours in such a long life are worth recalling.

Aren’t our memories all as self-centred as our dreams? What I recall is not the scenes which I saw, felt, underwent, but myself seeing, feeling, undergoing them.

Change exists because of time, yet time exists because of change.

Why do ten years in the long roll of history seem so much lengthier than ten years in our own life, which is so brief?

You are not what you remember, as Augustine argued, nor are you what you forget or what you have repressed. Are you not much more than each of these, but all of the things that you think, dream, hope, love, desire, own or aspire to? If we are what we remember, we are no more than a few scraps, trivia, details and banality. And in that case what we are would better be forgotten.

Year by year our recollections are clarified by our illusions. The eyewitnesses of the resurrection incised it on their hearts in sharp but incredible and conflicting details.

Memory, as Kierkegaard said, is a faithful wife, which is why it always flatters us.

73 The haunting

We each die a second death, first the death of the flesh, and then of the world’s remembrance of us.

The death of those you loved may seem like yesterday, but their life an age ago. Their going stays with you, their life is what you’ve lost. Do we injure them more by our forgetting or by commemorating them so pretentiously?

The dead come to form the north of all our memories, which they attract as they failed to do when they were with us. Too shadowy now to rule our waking hours, they colonize our sleep and become the usurpers of our dreams.

The children write the stories that their parents lived. A book is dunged by the flesh and bone of a file of generations, and watered with the blood of a host of lives. The towering dead come back as the native characters of fiction. They haunt what we read and what we write.

74 Bitter memories

Memory is not the master-key that unlocks the prison of self. It is one of its inmost cells.

Our memories may pester us like fleas, but we do enjoy a good scratch.

For some people, their past is a jungle, which they have to napalm, in their campaign to clear it of the sinister recollections which they fear lurk in ambush in the shade.

Life loads you with a freight of leaden memories, from which you have to hope death will disencumber you.

An obedient memory is one of the most reliable helps to happiness.

Forgetting is a blessing. Memory is a curse.

When you are happy, all your memories, both sweet and bitter, sweeten your happiness. But when you are sad, they all make your sadness more bitter. Their darkness deepens your dark, their brightness lights up what you’ve lost.

And the happiest memories are the most lacerating. They remind you how far you have fallen.

Relays of reverie keep arriving as envoys from the past, to tell you that you are outcast from it for the rest of time. Don’t we all have enough blissful memories to bruise our hearts? Paradise would still be hell, if you had to leave your memories on earth, or if you had to cart them with you. Memory is our heaven or our hell.

75 Fragmentary memory

Even the events that I recall vibrantly I do so in mere fragments and scatterings. ‘We do not remember days,’ says Pavese, ‘we remember moments.’ My memories, so fugitive yet so persistent, are as stranded and patched as I am myself. They lack the flow of a film, the articulacy of a book, or the distinctness of a photograph. And yet they subdue me as none of these can. Memories are not stories, and stories are not like memories. And we distort and degrade both when we speak as if they were.

Your memories seem as clear-cut as crystal, till you peer at them more closely, and they melt and lose their shape.

People assume that they can call back a scene inerrantly because they call it back vividly, and that they call it back vividly because they call back what they felt when it happened. But you can be sure that the events you recollect intensely did not take place as you think. You think that you remember experiences distinctly because you experience the recall of them so distinctly.

76 The magic lantern of nostalgia

Memories fall from the sky like rain, and all kinds of weather precipitate squalls of reverie. I can summon to mind momentous days, but what I can’t forget are a few stray inconsequential ones, still winter hours when filaments of the past hang like dust in sunlight. It’s not what you can recall, but what you cannot help recalling, that rends your heart.

You rediscover in your yesterdays the flat banalities of today, in exotic provinces the greyness of your own, in dreams the cheap confabulations of waking life. Nostalgia breaks the magical spell of the past. It shows you that its charm is not much more than a trick of the light.

Nostalgia is a malaise of time which time will soon mend. It fastens on those who have too few memories. The young are susceptible to it, as they have such short storms of sorrow to call back to mind so lovingly. After that, you have to sate your hunger for nostalgia by feeling regret for the time when you could still feel nostalgia.

Those who are prone to nostalgia waste their lives striving to recapture the thrill of a moment that they scarcely felt the first time.

Our nostalgia is a form of narcissism. The past serves as one of our mirrors.

Life is all the time rewriting the radiant poem of the past as the dull prose of the present.

77 The manufactured meaning of nostalgia

Memory, like art, manufactures meaning rather than representing it. But the meaning that memory makes is purely personal. Reverie wraps dross in gilding. Why else would it rouse our tears so dependably? It’s a crazy miser and a crazy wastrel. It makes treasures of trifles, while fecklessly frittering away millions. As Twain says, ‘It is always throwing away gold and hoarding rubbish.’ It salvages splinters of cheap glass, which its alchemy makes glister like diamonds. Like the rest of what we own, our memories would lose most of their value if they weren’t ours.

No one can wrest from me my memories, and so I toss them away.

78 Nostalgia for nostalgia

Nostalgia is a yearning for a home which you never had.

Nostalgists go abroad so that they can come back and pine for regions where they don’t belong. They yearn not for home but for their homesickness. And when they come home they grow still more homesick. They are stirred to the core by emotions that they have ceased to feel. Like Pessoa, they learn to miss their memories of the past more than the past itself, and to feel a ‘nostalgia for what never was.’ And at last, like Basho, they long for home most touchingly when they have not even left it.

Our nostalgia for the real is, like all nostalgia, a yearning for what we never had.

The one alienation more bitter than being a stranger in a strange land is to feel like a stranger in your own land.

In order to feel nostalgic for a thing, you don’t need to have lost it. And there’s no need to have had a thing to long to get it back.

Our nostalgia is the fantasy that we could live in a future in which we would be able to call back a past which was never real.

79 The sadness of time

The brightest and gladdest day of your life bleached from your mind long ago. Your most joyful recollections are not recollections of joy. Reverie makes an art of chiaroscuro. It needs broad swathes of blackness to paint its shimmering pictures. Wistful people don’t pine for the past because they feel sad now, they pine for it because they felt sad then.

If you repine that your past didn’t go more slowly, you probably wish that your present would go more swiftly.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, each has its own special plangency. Yesterday’s tears of pining and regret, today’s for the dear things that leave us so soon, and tomorrow’s for all our vain longings. These are the three tenses of our sadness.

YOUTH AND AGE

80 Youth and age

You have not lived long enough, if you would choose to be one day younger. Youth is the best time of life. So why is it the time that we would least like to go back to?

Even from a happy life there are so few episodes that we can recall, and far fewer that we would care to, and almost none that we would want to relive.

The self-satisfaction of the young brims over as a bubbling delight in life. And then when they are old, this stiffens into a stodge that they hope to munch on to the last mouthful.

The young strut and prance like vain players, and the elderly sit and judge like smug critics.

The one thing that grows no more infirm with age is egoism. It shrinks its scope, but is as ferocious as ever.

Youth allures us with the mirage of life’s beauty, and we are fooled by it. Old age lands us in the midst of its ugliness, and we refuse to see it.

81 Squandered youth

Why do the young spend the best part of their lives searching for authorities to guide them how to rebel against authority?

Many who waste their bright youth waiting for their life to take wing waste the remainder of their years trying to find their way back to their youth.

Why squander your golden youth drudging to buy a luxurious pillow for your grizzled age, which will be too sleepy to feel how soft it is?

82 Too young or too old to learn

No matter how old or how young we are, we count those younger than us callow, and those much older than us dull. ‘Each generation,’ as Orwell said, ‘imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’

As I age, I don’t see that my gifts are decaying, since my judgment is decaying at the same pace. However old we may be, we don’t doubt that we are just entering our prime and that our latest work must be our best.

No matter how old we are, life seems to be just beginning. And most of us learn so little from it, that it always is, till it comes to an end. ‘We arrive,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘as thoroughgoing tyros at the sundry phases of life.’

Our youth and seedtime oozed and stormed like bad verse, which the drab prose of our maturity had to temper and emend. And yet most people’s maturity is no better than the torpid and self-congratulatory prose that a scribbling versifier would write.

83 Senile heads on young shoulders

Only a soppy and doddering age such as ours could maintain that children are geniuses. Genius is not the recovery of childhood at will, as Baudelaire claimed. It is the abandonment of all the habits of childhood. Children are no more imaginative than their elders are wise.

We all now say that girls and boys are wondrous prodigies. But where are the master works that they have made?

An artist may seem like a child, but a child is not in the least like an artist.

The famed imagination of childhood is one of the figments of the sentimental lack of imagination of adults.

Where children are deemed to be as smart as adults, adults will soon be as silly as children.

The young live as freshly and lustily as they think stiffly, stalely and drily. And it takes a lifetime for their flesh to grow as heavy and wrinkled as their minds. ‘The soul,’ as Wilde says, ‘is born old but grows young.’ The body decays by changing, the mind by remaining the same.

84 Mere prodigies

‘If lads and lasses grew up consonant with early indications,’ Goethe wrote, ‘we should have nothing but geniuses,’ but we have so few, because they cling to their unripe habits rather than make them grow. Yet some people are sure that they must have been precocious children, since they have still not outgrown their first fledgling opinions.

We all start out as prodigies. A fresh mind alone matures into something deeper and more capacious. It’s dullards that hang on to the traits of youth, its mindless legalism, pettiness, flippancy, cribbed hair-splitting, iterations and impatience. Only a pioneer busts their hold, and keeps mutating and evolving. ‘It takes a long time,’ as Picasso said, ‘to grow young.’

85 Juvenile heads on old shoulders

Most people’s mental growth ends with the onset of puberty. If it did not, how could they deal with the childish ways of the big world?

Our flesh shows at sixty what our mind has been since sixteen. As Proust wrote, ‘It is from adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old people.’

Some old people’s brains are so active and unimpaired, that they still have all the same claptrap rattling round in them as they did when they were young.

Gravity and sloth age the mind as they do the body.

We have at last found the elixir of eternal immaturity. In the past the young had to give way to the old. Now the old rave to keep up with the hectic fatuity of the young. They fear that they are vegetating, if they’re not roaring round like teenagers. So long as they can move, they can’t bear to keep still. And when they can no longer move, they still can’t bear to let go.

Old people have nothing to teach the young, except to take care not to grow as old as they have. And that’s the lesson that no one wants to learn, and that they don’t know they’re teaching. The wisdom of age is a fiction. If it were not, old people would not have allowed themselves to get so old.

Our society dotes on youth, but is not up to making anything fresh. And it coddles the old, but it has no use for the past.

It wouldn’t matter that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, if you could break it of its ingrained ones.

86 The golden age

When you are young, the world seems magic. But when you grow up, you find that it was all just a trick.

In childhood every familiar object is a fetish. The mystery is at first material.

How unhappy a happy childhood may have been. How could you believe in an age of gold, when you have lived through one in your youth, and know how tarnished it was?

Children incarnate all the cruel partiality and cold glee of life. They are the evergreen world being reborn the same, merciless, inquisitive, ardent. ‘Every child,’ Thoreau says, ‘begins the world again.’ How sad to look into their eyes and think of all that they will see to dry up their hearts, and how soon they’ll be drawn in to desiring it all. Their unthinking innocence will soon have grown up to be an unthinking viciousness.

How short is the interval from beholding the world with wonder to eying it with lust.

Children these days don’t see through the emperor’s new clothes. They are prodigies of amenable duplicity, who know that they have more to gain from admiring how finely he is attired.

87 Haunted by the past

The young feel the burning, the old taste the ashes, and neither can get their fill of them. When you’re young, each knock wounds you more than it should. And when you grow up, what should gash you won’t so much as graze your skin. Was childhood frightful, because such small slurs rubbed you so raw, or because you were rubbed so raw by what was so flat? Doubtless it’s all changed now that we are grown up.

What ghosts loom out of the dark of childhood to harry us through life.

How small we were when we were children. And how much smaller life has got since then.

88 Children of a larger growth

I want to gain my big adult triumphs just to sate a few infantile yearnings. The world is so topsy-turvy because we are all still schoolgirls or boys squabbling to come off best in a game which is not worth the winning.

Even as children our desires are oversized and ravenous. And even as adults they remain trivial and juvenile.

As we go on in life, we collect a large wardrobe of grownup costumes to overlay our childish desires, till age strips us back once more to stark childishness. ‘Men,’ as Dryden wrote, ‘are but children of a larger growth.’

Girls and boys don’t play aimlessly, but spend all their time copying, competing and working out convoluted rules. There is no such thing as pure play. There must be some goal to aim at, some cruelty, rivalry and vainglory. ‘Games are not games for children,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘but are the most serious thing they do.’ Play initiates us into the solemn ways of the world.

Children charm us, not because they are so natural, but because they are so mannered, ‘as if their whole vocation,’ in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘were endless imitation.’ They are still conning their parts, and they play them more awkwardly than us, since we have been rehearsing ours all our lives.

Children are the most captious conformists, always on the watch to jump on the least deviation from the rules.

 

See also: Self-knowledge,  Religion,  Happiness