in present satisfactions. We in fact act like drunken archers all the time—what is left to hit after the bulls-eye? The peak of skill reached, the accomplishment gained, there is no further choice but to languish in the shadow of glory’s anticlimax or to die. In such a state, pleasure comes upon those with a large quiver: merging of arrow and man in vandalism, loss of self-consciousness in sabotage and defacement. Accidentally killing a bystander produces no regret in the most inexperienced archer so long as the wine flows—even an expert can renounce his aim and plead manslaughter.
And when the end is the activity itself, the means frustrate even that. Stepping correctly in the waltz, it becomes not a waltz, but a new dance entirely; one preempts the waltz, flies over the goal through the superior implementation of one’s own craft knowledge—a method that, designed to reach the end, establishes value for itself by conflicting with it.
Equality of Wisdom
People seldom meet a mathematician without baring their uvulas to him. They see his head in a halo of light, floating in a world far above their own limited comprehension. That they too, on a basic level, know some math, seems to escape them. Like all experts who have harnessed their talent, a great mathematician has simply, through long struggle, advanced beyond the basic level to a plane where they cannot follow: this winged creature has shodden hooves.
An ethical thinker, by contrast, receives only blank stares. Everyone believes they have full access to “The Good” simply by virtue of existing. The moralist’s liability is that he cannot fall into technical language without becoming absurd. Value, like knowledge, erects walls; but this labor being done by informed experience and not high learning, the average man has leverage over the professor. If people could read Greek letters they wouldn’t hesitate to dismiss the mathematician as a mailboy trolleying symbols into a row of cubbyholes.
But as long as only the moralist’s occupation is in doubt, he has not yet fallen as far as he can—as he inevitably will. In the realm of ethics one always holds its thinkers to a higher standard than in other fields: one expects them to live their ideas. Studying man from a plurality of angles, taking into account factors fugitive from naïve experience, bending logic to his use to the same extent that a mathematician draws on his intuition, he is expected to be his own case study. With intellect consolidating and rigorizing judgment, and judgment second-guessing intellect where it seems fallible, all the faculties of the moralist’s mind are focused on weighing his charitable donations against his volunteer work—and even then we are still suspicious of his good will. It would be absurd to demand of a logician, an epistemologist, a metaphysician, or an aesthetician that their lives be the litmus test of their theories. Nor does one think to measure the political thinker by this standard—the reader merely assumes the author votes on the side of his theory. One might weigh a religious thinker by prayers and almsgiving, if the mystic were not read chiefly because of his example—one has to have visions before he can gather a literate following of aspiring ecstatics to preach to.
Spinoza was the only ethical thinker to ever be judged good enough for his books. The others so often turn out to be inconsiderate (Schopenhauer), noncommittal (Kant), or, in the hypocritical case of the immoralist, a good man (Nietzsche). Not that readers don’t often lose respect for other specialists when learning of controversial aspects of their biographies—Heidegger’s Nazism, Wittgenstein’s cruelty, Leibniz’s cowardice and ambition. In these cases, however, one does not feel that their ideas are undermined as a result; the astute critic never goes so far as to make an ad hominem judgment. But when the ethical thinker is not a saint his thoughts crumble to pieces. This injustice is understandable: readers of ethics, unable to rely on any fundamental advances in the formulation of proofs since the Socratic dialogues, can only corroborate its principles by putting proponents through a trial by ordeal. In the witch-hunt of the moralists, an altruistic sacrifice is proof of innocence.
A statue stands with its finger raised in the air. Its admirers, fascinated by how the stone seems chiseled out of life, walk that way. Soon they come to another statue pointing in another direction. And so on. The history of morals is such a sculpture labyrinth, where people would feel lost among the paths of experience if earlier generations had not poured cement over their pedants, prophets, and polemicists. They don’t realize that in these cases life was animated out of stone, and the cement was merely added as a finish—capital punishment often serves as a protective coating.
Love’s Novelty
If first love is always young, every love thereafter is like the old woman in the rocking chair: enfeebled by experience and swaying to a memory. Love ends in the recline position, the skin still enjoying the bulk of feeling—this is perhaps true only of noble souls; with all the rest, every love feels original: they leave their pre-teen playmate to marry their high school sweetheart, only to refresh their bed at college enrollment. Every new season of life obliges a new excitement. The modern lover has internalized the essence of comedy: that happy endings always round off at the commencement of the relationship. Love becomes a fading echo. Without a right side to cast our nets over, we drag them through thinned, polluted seas, hungering for the succulence of perpetual novelty and surviving off of chunks from driftbones. When our life partner, passion, finally leaves us, comes the realization: that we should have held on the first time.
The Highest Necessity
“How delicious it smells,” the wino says, referring to the glass of tap water. “But . . . if I were lost in the desert I would spill it in a heartbeat for a good box of cabernet.”—It is when a man is most thirsty that he needs his appreciation. And in the wilderness, without anyone to praise his connoisseurship, he can at least savor the glass that will end his urgency. The moral principles of addiction will not permit infidelity; even in extreme circumstances gratitude to the grape is paramount, hydration the betrayal of a meager satisfaction. His is a disinterested dependence. Dying, he would set fire to a vineyard to spare its contents from being dried into raisins or shipped away fresh—to prevent service to a lesser obligation. “Oh,” whines the wino, “what a loss that would be!”
Feast or Famine
Taking our most cherished dichotomies out to brunch: eating cereal with sandwiches, mixing orange juice with champagne, leaving a generous tip with a poem, On the Virtue of Indigence, scribbled on the bill. White and black, good and evil, ugly and beautiful—all muddied somewhere between the hash brown casserole and the toilet. For as long as one is satiated, dualities will hold hands and twirl. But when hunger returns the senses lose their dullness and no longer see gray.
Plagued by Love
His clothes were moth-eaten, his stomach full of butterflies. Love, infesting one with a sense of homelessness and indigestion as it does, is only exacerbated further by the application of insecticide.
Moth musk—perfume for all those heading towards the bottom of the food chain. He buys a new shirt, pops an antacid, spritzes himself, and is swarmed by every flirter in a seven-mile radius. Cured of the feeling of love, he finds himself thrust into the phenomenon of it. Leper among Lepidoptera, he spreads drab wings in the clubbing hours, transformed into a barfly’s fuzzy ideal of beauty. Impersonation is his only defense, pollination of weeds his only purpose.
And to think that all he ever wanted was . . . a bug zapper.
Seasons of Womanhood
Virgins want to wait, spinsters to give it all away. After the petals of her youth have fallen comes the Autumn Philanderer, deflowering her honor by insinuating himself into her will. People who allow themselves to be cheated after their death are never said to have spent their life well. If only he had caught her in spring instead of winter! Still taking what wasn’t ready to be given, by introducing her into an early summer he would have saved her from the expectation of virtue.
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