The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  We are used to according automatic respect to the central figures of great tragic works, but there is nothing inherently noble about the personalities of Hamlet or Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure or Anna Karenina. That we accord them dignity has to do with the way their stories have been told to us; if we had left the task to the media, they would have been indistinguishable from the usual objects of popular ridicule and loathing.

  The real purpose of tragedy is not to teach us to be kind to fictional creations, it is to encourage us to apply a complex lens to the travails of all those around us and, crucially at points, to ourselves. Without having any of the dramatic talent of a Sophocles or Shakespeare, we need to tell our own stories of loss and error with some of the same generosity that they employed, thereby holding on to what can often feel, especially at our lowest points, like a hugely improbable idea: that though we have failed, however stupid our mistakes, we remain deserving of that gracious and grand epithet, a gift from the Greeks to all humankind: a ‘tragic failure’.

  THE WEAKNESS OF STRENGTH

  We may sometimes wonder how certain irritating people have come into our lives. After spending time around them, what dominates our awareness of them is their flaws: how rigid they can be, how muddled, self-righteous, vague or proud. We grow into experts in their deficiencies of character.

  We should in our most impatient and intemperate moments strive to hold on to the concept of the weakness of strength. This dictates that we should interpret people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we’re seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. If we were to write down a list of strengths and then of weaknesses, we’d find that almost everything on the positive side of the ledger could be connected up with something on the negative. The theory urges us to search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and honesty. We know so much about a person’s messiness, we have forgotten their uncommon degree of creative enthusiasm. The very same character trait that we approve of will be inseparable from tendencies we end up regretting. This isn’t bad luck or the case with one or two people, it’s a law of nature. There can, perplexingly, be no such thing as a person with only strengths.

  In the 1870s, when he was living in Paris, the American novelist Henry James became a friend of the celebrated Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was also living in the city at that time. James was particularly taken with the unhurried, tranquil style of the Russian writer’s storytelling: he spent a long time on every sentence, weighing different options, changing, polishing, until – at last – everything was perfect. It was a hugely ambitious, inspiring approach to literature.

  But in personal and social life, these same virtues could make Turgenev an aggravating companion. He was almost impossible to pin down for an appointment, writing florid, nuanced letters of apology for his delays and changes of plan. James would invite him for lunch for 1 p.m., Turgenev would agree, then suddenly change his mind twenty minutes before, sending a note to say that he’d had to leave town on an urgent trip. Eventually he’d make an appointment that seemed to work, but would show up an hour and a half late.

  James might have been tempted to end the friendship forthwith, but he had the wisdom not to interpret Turgenev’s disastrous timekeeping as an isolated part of his personality but rather to see it as an emanation of the very same side of his character that enabled him to produce some of the greatest literary works of the age. The same trait might generate Fathers and Sons and, around appointments, six cancelled meetings. Musing in a letter about Turgenev’s greatness as a writer and his trickiness as a friend, James remarked that the Russian novelist had thoroughly exhibited the ‘weakness of his strength’.

  The theory of the weakness of strength invites us to be calm and forensic about the most irritating aspects of those we live around. There is no comfort in being told that these aspects are not real or significant. The consolation comes in not viewing them in isolation, in remembering the accompanying trait that redeems them and explains the friendship, in recalling that a lack of time management might have its atonement in creativity or that dogmatism might be the offshoot of precision.

  It is always an option to move away and find people who will have new kinds of strengths, but – as time will reveal – they will also have new, fascinating and associated kinds of weaknesses.

  Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

  MOTIVES

  One of the fundamental paths to sympathy is the power to hold on, in the most challenging situations, to a distinction between a person’s overt unpleasant actions and the more pitiable motives that may underlie them. Pure evil is seldom at work. Almost all our worst moments can be traced back to an unexotic, bathetic, temptingly neglected ingredient: pain.

  A traditional folk tale known as ‘Androcles and the Lion’, originally recounted by the ancient Roman philosopher Aulus Gellius, tells of a Barbary lion – nine feet long with a splendid dark mane – who lived in the forested foothills of the Atlas Mountains (in what is today Algeria). Usually he kept far from human settlements, but one year, in spring, he started approaching the villages at night, roaring and snarling menacingly in the darkness. The villagers were terrified. They put extra guards on the gates and sent out heavily armed hunting parties to try to slaughter the beast.

  It happened around this time that a shepherd boy named Androcles followed his sheep far into the high mountain pastures. One evening, he sought shelter in a cave. He had just lit a candle and was setting out his blanket when he saw the ferocious animal glaring at him from a corner. At first he was terrified. It seemed as if the angry lion might be about to pounce and rip him to pieces. But then Androcles noticed something: there was a thorn deeply embedded in one of the lion’s front paws and a huge tear was running down his noble face. The creature wasn’t murderous, he was in agony. So instead of trying to flee or defend himself with his dagger, the boy’s fear turned to pity. Androcles approached the lion, stroked his mane and gently, reassuringly extracted the thorn from the paw, wrapping it in a strip of cloth torn from his own blanket. The lion licked the boy’s hand and became his friend for life.

  The story is a reminder of what kindness demands. We resent others with unhelpful speed when we lack the will to consider the origins of their behaviour. The lion is in terrible pain, but has no capacity to understand what is hurting him and what he might need from others. The lion is all of us when we lack insight into our own distress. The thorn is a troubling, maddening element of our inner lives – a fear, a biting worry, a regret, a sense of guilt, a feeling of humiliation, a strained hope or an agonized disappointment that rumbles away powerfully but just out of range of our standard view of ourselves. The art of living is to a large measure dependent on an ability to understand our thorns and explain them with a modicum of grace to others – and, when we are on the other side of the equation, to imagine the thorns of others, even those whose precise locations or dimensions we will never know for certain.

  WHAT TO THINK OF OUR ENEMIES

  People are bad, always, because they are in difficulty. They slander, gossip, denigrate and growl because they are not in a good place. Though they may seem strong, though their attacks can place them in an apparently dominant role, their ill intentions are all the proof we require to know as a certainty that they are not well. Contented people have no need to hurt others.

  The theory should help us to reverse some of the humiliation that comes from being attacked. It is only too easy to imagine that those who have hurt us are somehow invulnerable and noble; we readily remember reasons to be ashame
d of ourselves. However, to hold on to the idea that hurt generates meanness casts our opponent in the subservient role. It isn’t us who must be pitiful but our attacker who feels such a need to crush us. One has to feel very small in order to belittle.

  The theory helps to restore a kind of justice that we may not ourselves directly be able to administer. The explanation of the origins of nastiness changes how we assess our opponent. No longer are they necessarily strong and impervious. We have not been able to punish them, but the universe has in a sense, and the clearest evidence for the sentence lies in the unhappiness that is powering their attacks. They have not got away with injuring us; their punishment lies in the pain they must be enduring in order to have such an urgent need to lash out. We, who have no wish to hurt, are in fact the stronger party; we, who have no wish to diminish others, are truly powerful. We can move from helpless victims to imaginative witnesses of justice.

  This may sound overly convenient; but it is also plainly true. We are not beyond improvement, of course, but people simply never need to harm others if they are not first tormented themselves.

  The logic of the argument points to how we might, when our short-term irritation has worn off, deal with those who have injured us. The temptation is to grow strict and inflict punishment back. But with a better understanding of the insecurity and sadness that power ill temper in the first place, there is only one plausible, though extremely challenging, way forward: a response of love.

  POLITENESS

  For most of history, the idea of being ‘polite’ has been central to our sense of what is required to count as a kind and civilized person. But more recently, politeness has come under suspicion. While we may not reject it outright, it’s not a word we now instinctively reach for when we want to explain why we like or admire someone. Politeness can seem to carry almost the opposite of its traditional connotations, suggesting an offensive or insolent degree of insincerity. A polite person can be judged as a bit of a fake and, in their own way, really rather rude.

  The rise in our collective suspicion of politeness has a history. In the late eighteenth century, an ideal of Romantic anti-politeness emerged, largely driven forward by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who powerfully redescribed politeness in terms of inauthenticity, servility and deceit. What was important for Rousseau was never to hide or moderate emotions and thoughts, but to remain – at all times – fundamentally true to oneself.

  Rousseau’s writings generated highly influential attitudes to which we remain heirs. What ultimately separates the polite from the frank person isn’t really a knowledge of etiquette. The difference doesn’t hang upon considerations of which knife to use at a formal dinner, when to say please or thank you, or how to word a wedding invitation. It comes down to a contrasting set of beliefs about human nature. The polite person and the frank person behave differently chiefly because they see the world in highly divergent ways. The following are some of the key ideological issues that separate them.

  Original Goodness vs. Natural Sin

  Frank people believe in the importance of expressing themselves honestly principally because they trust that what they happen to think and feel will always prove fundamentally acceptable to the world. Their true sentiments and opinions may, when voiced, be bracing of course, but no worse. Frank types assume that what is honestly avowed cannot really ever be vindictive, disgusting, tedious or cruel. In this sense, the frank person sees themselves a little in the way we typically see small children: as blessed by an original and innate goodness.

  Tellingly, we don’t usually think that the strictures of politeness apply to the very young. We remain interested to hear about whatever may be passing through their minds and stay unalarmed by their awkward moments, infelicities or negative statements. If they say that the pasta is yuck or that the taxi driver has a head like a weird goldfish, it sounds funny rather than wounding. The frank person taps into just this childlike optimism in their uninhibited approach to themselves. Their trust in their basic purity erodes the rationale for editing or self-censorship.

  The polite person, by contrast, proceeds under a grave suspicion of themselves and their impulses. They sense that a great deal of what they feel and want really isn’t very nice. They are indelibly in touch with their darker desires and can sense their fleeting wishes to hurt or humiliate certain people. They know they are sometimes a bit revolting and cannot forget the extent to which they may come across as offensive and frightening to others. They therefore set out on a deliberate strategy to protect others from what they know is within them. It isn’t lying as such; they merely understand that being ‘themselves’ is a treat that they must take enormous pains to spare everyone else from experiencing – especially anyone they claim to care about.

  Paradoxically, the polite person who is pessimistic about their own nature doesn’t in fact end up behaving horribly with anyone. So aware are they of their own dislikeable sides, they nimbly minimize their impact upon the world. It is their extraordinary suspicion of themselves that helps them to be – in everyday life – uncommonly friendly, trustworthy and kind.

  The Stranger is Like Me vs. the Stranger is Other

  The frank person operates with a charming, unconscious assumption that other people are at heart pretty much like them. This can make them very clubbable and allows them to create some astonishing intimacies across social barriers at high speed. When they like listening to a particular piece of music at high volume, they will take it as obvious that you probably do as well. Because they are very enthusiastic about spicy food, or never want to add salt to a dish, it doesn’t cross their mind to ask if you actually like this restaurant or would favour a salt cellar on the table. They are correspondingly undisturbed by the less obvious clues about some of the dissonant feelings that may be unfolding in the minds of other people: if someone is a bit quiet at a meeting, it doesn’t occur to the frank person to worry that they might have said something wrong or badly misjudged the situation.

  For their part, the polite person starts from the assumption that others are highly likely to be in quite different places internally, whatever the outward signs. Their behaviour is therefore tentative, wary and filled with enquiries. They will explicitly check with others to take a measure of their experiences and outlook: if they feel cold, they are very alive to the possibility that you may be feeling perfectly warm and so will take trouble to ask if you’d mind if they went over and closed the window. They are aware that you might be annoyed by a joke that they find funny or that you might very sincerely hold political opinions quite at odds with their own. They don’t take what is going on for them as a guide to what is probably going on for you. Their manners are grounded in an acute sense of the gulf that can separate humans from one another.

  Robustness vs. Vulnerability

  The frank person works with an underlying sense that other people are internally for the most part extremely robust. Those around them are not felt to be forever on the verge of self-doubt and self-hatred. Their egos are not assumed to be gossamer thin and at perpetual risk of deflating. There is therefore understood to be no need to broadcast constant small signals of reassurance and affirmation. When you go to someone’s house, the fact that the meal was tasty will be obvious to everyone, not least the person who spent the day preparing it. There is no need to keep stressing the point in a variety of discreet ways. When one meets an artist, there’s no need to mention that their last work was noticed and appreciated; they’ll know this well enough. And the office junior must have a pretty clear sense that they are making the grade without any need to stop and spell it out. The frank person assumes that everyone’s ego is already at least as big and strong as it should be. They are even likely to suspect that if you praise someone for the little things, you’ll only inflate their self-regard to undue and dangerous proportions.

  The polite person starts from a contrary assumption that all of us are permanently only millimetres away from inner despair and self-h
atred. However confident we may look, we are very vulnerable – despite even great outward plaudits and recognition – to a sense of being disliked and taken for granted. Every piece of neglect, every silence or slightly harsh or off-the-cuff word has a profound capacity to hurt. All of us are walking around without a skin. The cook, the artist and the office junior will inevitably share in a craving for evidence that what they do and are is OK. Accordingly, the polite person will be drawn to spending a lot of time noticing and commenting positively on the most apparently minor facets of others’ achievements: they will say that the watercress soup was the best they’ve had for years (and that they’d forgotten how much they liked it); they’ll mention that the ending of the writer’s new novel made them cry and that work on the Mexico deal was particularly helpful to, and noticed by, the whole company. They will know that everyone we come across has a huge capacity to be hurt by what we sometimes refer to as ‘small things’.

  There’s likely to be an associated underlying difference in attitudes to money and love in the context of work. For the frank person, money is the crucial ingredient we want from other people in our professional lives. They therefore don’t feel any great need – in service situations, for example – to express gratitude or take particular pains to create a semblance of equality with an employee. The waiter or the person at the car-hire desk has, they feel, no special need of kindness on top of the money they will already be securing through the transaction.

  Yet the polite person knows that we take a lot of ourselves into our jobs and need to find respect and a form of love from them as much as we need cash. So they will be conscious of an additional need to contribute smiles and a pleasant word or two to the person stamping their passport or changing the bedclothes in the hotel. These people are doing their jobs for the money of course, but payment never invalidates an equally strong emotional hunger for a sense of having been useful and appreciated by another person, however brief and functional the encounter may have seemed.