Gotham Diary:
Easy Virtue
18 February 2015

I did crawl back into bed yesterday and watch Gone Girl. Midway through, I got up and sat in my chair, the better to eat the Chinese lunch special that I’d ordered, when a tense moment in the movie elicited sharpish hunger pains. I remained in the chair for the rest of the show.

When it was over, it was two-thirty. The day seemed shot, and I decided to watch another movie. But as I was on the point of slipping another DVD into the machine, I was flooded by misgivings. What I diagnosed later as a surge of moral imagination flooded the room with images of discontent and the psychic taste or smell of wretchedness — I want to stress the sensory nature of this unpleasantness. If I did not see to my Tuesday chores right now, it would not only create a scheduling pile-up but coat the apartment with the grimy dust of demoralization. For a moment, I stood still, unwilling to shift gears, but this only gave the surge more time to buffet me about. After a minute or so, I put down the DVD, closed the machine, extinguished the monitor, and prepared to get dressed. By three-fifteen, I had made the bed, sorted the clean laundry, and begun the tidying. I reserved the right to stop if I got tired, but although I got very tired near the end, straightening the sideboard in the dining ell and vacuuming the carpets in the living room, I did not stop, but got it all done, and in little more than two hours. I listened to Don Carlos as I worked, Claudio Abbado’s recording of the grand opera in its original French. When I was done, and sitting down with a mug of tea and Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave, Katia Ricciarelli was singing “Tu che la vanità” (but in French). Well done.

I don’t think that I have ever felt the force of moral imagination so strongly before. Certainly it has priced at me often enough in my life, but it has rarely interfered with my doing what I wanted to do, at least where it was a question of not doing what I was supposed to do. This laziness is my great vice (although there is nothing great about it), and the goal of all my attempted schedules has been to trick myself into thinking that it’s almost as easy to do what I’m supposed to do as it is to do something else or, in the usual case, nothing at all. This is quite true, by the way: doing what I’m supposed to do is rarely more demanding than doing anything else, but I never think so, because there is something terribly off-putting about duty. I got off to a bad start on the duty front, and have spent much of my life trying to get in step. Yesterday’s wave, which I attribute to my latest scheduling scheme, was much more than a trick, however. It vividly insisted that the alternatives to my self-appointed duty would create pain and unhappiness.

I don’t need moral imagination to resist the temptation to steal things or commit other criminal acts. Whether or not I’d get away with them doesn’t come up; with my guilty conscience, right out of Poe, I know that I should never be able to live with the fear of being found out. I think it fair to say that I am simply never tempted to do bad things — bad things that are punishable by law, that is. I expect that most of my readers are similarly disposed — although they’re likely to have been motivated a little more by virtue and a little less by shame. I lead a life, as Marilynne Robinson would be quick to point out, in which it is relatively easy to be a good person. It’s possible that my new weekly schedule will make it even easier. That’s what my moral imagination was roaring on about yesterday.

Back in the Sixties, when I was a young person, taking advantage of the easiness of one’s life in order to become more virtuous still would have been scorned as fraudulent. Easy virtue wasn’t virtue at all. My thinking has developed a few nuances since then. Easy virtue is certainly not a point of pride. You can’t claim that you’re living properly because you’re virtuous. But that’s as regards other people. All that other people need to see is that you are living properly, or at least living well, morally. With regard to yourself, however, easy virtue is not unlike a well-developed muscle. The fact that it is relatively easy for a strong man to lift a great weight does not mean that he is not strong. So it is with good personal habits. The fact that they are easy (habitual) does not mean that they aren’t good.

It has always been easy for me to read. I can’t claim any credit for that; I was given a mind that encountered no difficulties reading printed texts. Studying the so-called great books in college, I learned that reading was a skill that could be put to good use, or to none, and whether from vanity or vision, I resolved to put mine to good use. It took a long time to learn to distinguish challenging writing from merely difficult prose; only very eventually did I discover that, indeed, the most challenging writing is very easy to read. (Du musst dein Leben andern.) I look for challenging writing in the way an athlete looks for incremental difficulties, because that is the best way to keep a strong mind strong. (It is at this point that the athletic comparison breaks down completely, because, the blandishments of Taylorist psychologists to the contrary notwithstanding, there are no metrics for mental strength.) Having a strong mind, I never have to worry about being bored or confused. Can I claim credit for this strong mind? I don’t think so. I can claim credit for that undergraduate resolution, and for sticking to it until it became a habit. Very ancient history by now.

I hope that there is nothing truly advisory about these paragraphs, except in the most general (and least helpful) sense. A few universally understood statements, perhaps. But no secrets of how I got where I am today. And you can, too. The best thing that I can do is to say something that quite accidentally triggers a moment of personal insight in the reader. My tangent becomes the reader’s orbit. More direct interference (do this) is unlikely to work, at least as planned. We are all too different, and the further we get from the grosser prohibitions, and the closer we get to what I’ll call happy virtue, the less we have to share in the way of useful information. All we can do is to remind each other of the primacy of personal difference. While we dance as conventionally as we can, the better to be good companions, we must bear in mind that we are all unalike, that each of us must find his or her own way through the world — preferably, without disturbing the dance of convention.

Nobody has any good advice to give. Only testament.