The Little Virtues

by Natalia Ginzburg

  And we leave home and go to live with this person forever; not because we are sure that he is the right person: in fact we are not entirely sure, and we always suspect that the right person for us is hiding away goodness knows where in the city. But we don’t want to know where he is hiding; we feel that we have by now very little to say to him, because we say everything to this person—who is not perhaps the right person—with whom we now live; and we want to receive the good and the evil of our lives from this person and with him. Every now and then violent differences between us and this person erupt into the open; and yet they are unable to destroy the infinite peace we have within us. After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realize that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could not have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that the heart needs.

  Now, in the new house where we have come to live, and that is ours, we don’t want to be poor, in fact we are a little afraid of poverty: we feel a strange affection for the objects around us, for a table or for a rug—we, who were always spilling ink on our parents’ rugs; this new affection of ours for a rug bothers us a little, we are a bit ashamed of it; sometimes we still go for walks at the edge of the city, but when we come home we carefully clean our muddy shoes on the doormat; and we feel a new kind of peace when we sit at home, under the lamp, with the shutters closed against the dark city. We no longer want friends very much, because we tell the person who lives with us all our thoughts, while we are eating soup at our well-lit table; it doesn’t seem worth the effort to tell other people anything.

  Our children are born, and the fear of poverty grows in us; indeed an endless number of fears—of every danger or kind of suffering that could attack our children’s mortal flesh and blood—grows in us. In the past we never thought of our own flesh and blood, our own body, as being frail and mortal: we were ready to hurl ourselves into the most unexpected adventures, we were always about to set off for the most distant places to live among lepers and cannibals; every possibility of wars and epidemics and cosmic catastrophes left us quite unmoved. We did not know that there could be such fear, such frailty, in our body: we never suspected that we could feel so bound to life by a chain of fear, of such heart-rending tenderness. How strong and free our past was, when we walked alone at will through the city! We felt such pity for the families we saw; the fathers and mothers with their prams out for a careful little Sunday stroll along the avenues seemed to us to be something so tedious and sad. Now we are one of those families, we go carefully along the avenues pushing our pram and we are not sad, in fact we could be said to be happy, though it is a happiness that is difficult to recognize in the midst of our panic that we could from one moment to the next lose it forever: the baby in the pram we are pushing is so small, so weak, the love which binds us to him is so painful, so frightening! We are afraid of a breath of wind, of a cloud in the sky; isn’t it going to rain? We—who have been soaked and bareheaded with our feet in the puddles so often! Now we have an umbrella. And we would like to have an umbrella stand in the house, in the hall; the strangest desires come to us, desires we would never have dreamed we could have when we walked through the city alone and free; we would like an umbrella stand and a coat-rack, towels, a camping oven, a refrigerator. We don’t go to the edge of the city anymore; we go through the avenues, between villas and gardens; we are careful that our children have no contact with people who are particularly dirty or poor because we are afraid of lice and diseases; we flee from beggars.

  We love our children in such a painful, frightening way that it seems to us we have never had any other neighbour, that we never could have any other. We are still not very used to our children’s presence on the earth; we are still bemused and bewildered by their sudden appearance in life. We no longer have friends; or rather if our child is ill we think with loathing of those few friends we do have—it almost seems to us to be their fault because whilst we are in their company we are distracted from this unique heart-rending tenderness: we no longer have a vocation: we had a vocation, a profession that was dear to us, and now as soon as we give it half our attention we feel guilty and rush back to this unique, heart-rending tenderness; a sunny day, a green landscape, signify for us only that our baby can get brown in the sun or play on the grass; we have lost every ability to think of ourselves or enjoy ourselves. We gaze at everything in a worried, suspicious way, we look to see that there are no rusty nails or cockroaches or other dangers for our baby. We want to live in clean, fresh countries, with dean animals and kindly people; the brutal universe that used to fascinate us does not fascinate us anymore.

  And how stupid we have become, we occasionally and regretfully think, as we look at our baby’s head which is so familiar, familiar to us in a way that nothing else in the world has ever been, as we watch him while he is sitting making a little hill of earth with his pudgy fingers. How stupid, and small, and sluggish our thoughts have become, so small that they could be packed into a nut­ shell, and yet at the same time so tiring and suffocating! Where has the brutal universe that fascinated us gone, and where have the strength and vitality and freedom of our youth gone, and our eager discovery of things day by day, our resolute glorious gaze, our triumphant past? Where is our neighbour now? Where is God now? We only remember to talk to God when our baby is ill: then we tell him to make all our teeth and hair drop out but to make our baby better. As soon as the baby is better we forget about God; we still have our teeth and hair and we resume our petty, tiring, sluggish thoughts again—rusty nails, cockroaches, fresh pastures, gruel. We have become superstitious too and are always warding off bad luck—we are sitting working, writing away, when suddenly we get up and put the light on and off three times in order to ward off bad luck because out of the blue we felt that only this would save us from a catastrophe. We refuse to suffer; we hear suffering approach us and we hide behind the armchair, behind the curtains, so that it won’t find us.

  But then suffering comes to us. We have expected it, but we don’t recognize it at first: we don’t call it by its real name at first. Stunned and incredulous, trusting that everything can be put right, we descend the steps of our house and close its door forever; we walk through interminable dusty streets. They follow us and we hide; we hide in convents and in woods, in barns and in alleyways, in the holds of ships and in cellars. We learn to ask for help from the first passer-by; we don’t know if he is a friend or an enemy, if he will want to help us or betray us; but we have no choice, and for a moment we trust our life to him. We also learn to give help to the first passer-by. And we always keep alive our faith that in a while, in a few hours or a few days, we shall go back to our house with its rugs and lamps; we shall be comforted and consoled; our children will sit down to play with clean aprons on and red slippers. We sleep with our children in stations, on the steps of churches, in the doss­houses of the poor; we are poor, we think, but without any pride; little by little every trace of our childish pride disappears. We are really hungry and really cold. We no longer feel fear; fear has penetrated into us, it is one with our exhaustion; it is the arid, uncaring gaze with which we stare at things.

  But at intervals, from the depths of our exhaustion, the awareness of things rises up in us again, and it is so sharp that it moves us to tears; perhaps we are looking at the earth for the last time. We have never before felt with such force the love that binds us to the dust in the street, to the high calls of the birds, to the laboured rhythm of our breathing: but we sense that we are stronger than that laboured rhythm, it seems so muffled within us, so distant, as if it were no longer ours. We have never loved our children so much, their weight in our arms, the touch of their hair on our cheeks; and yet we do not even feel fear for our children: we say to God that he will protect them if he wishes. We tell him to do as he wishes.

  And now we are really adult we think one morning, as we look in t
he mirror at our lined, furrowed face; we look at it without pride, without any curiosity; with a little compassion. Once again we have a mirror within four walls: who knows, perhaps in a little while we shall also have a rug again, a lamp perhaps. But we have lost those who are dearest to us, and so what can rugs and red slippers mean to us? We learn to conceal and look after the objects that belonged to the dead; to go alone to the places where we went with them; to ask questions and hear the silence around us. We no longer fear death; every hour, every minute, we look at death and remember its great silence on the face that was dearest to us.

  And now we are really adult we think, and we are astonished that this is what being an adult is—not in truth everything we believed as a child, not in truth self­confidence, not in truth the calm ownership of everything on earth. We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences: we should like to uproot from our past so many cruel words, so many cruel acts that we committed when, though we feared death, we did not know—we had not yet understood—how irreparable, how irremediable, death is: we are adult because of the silent answers, because of all the silent forgiveness of the dead which we carry within us. We are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too, and we who looked at them from the just place that is given to us: human beings, objects and memories—everything appeared to us in its just place beneath the sky. In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.

  We realize with astonishment that now we are adult we have not lost our old shyness when we are with our neighbour: life has not helped us to free ourselves from this shyness at all. We are still shy. Only, it doesn’t matter; it seems that our claim to be shy has been conquered for us; we are shy without shyness, boldly shy. We shyly search within us for the right words. We are very pleased to find them, shyly but as it were without any trouble; we are pleased that we have so many words within us, so many words for our neighbour that we seem intoxicated with our own ease and naturalness. And the story of human relationships never ceases for us; because little by little they become all too easy for us, all too natural and spontaneous—so spontaneous and so undemanding that there is no richness, discovery or choice about them; they are just habit and complacency, a kind of intoxicated naturalness. We believe that we can always return to that secret moment of ours, that we can draw on the right words; but it isn’t true that we can always go back there, often our return there is false; we make our eyes glow with a false light, we pretend to be caring and warm towards our neighbour and we are in fact once more shrunken and hunched up in the icy darkness of our heart. Human relationships have to be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbour is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

  Now we are so adult that our adolescent children have already started to look at us with eyes of stone; we are upset by it, even though we know only too well what that stare means; even though we remember only too well having stared in the same way. We are upset by it and we complain about it and whisper our suspicious questions, even though by now we know how the long chain of human relationships unwinds its long necessary parabola, and though we know all the long road we have to travel down in order to arrive at the point where we have a little compassion.

  The Little Virtues

  As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

  Usually we do just the opposite; we rush to teach them a respect for the little virtues, on which we build our whole system of education. In doing this we are choosing the easiest way, because the little virtues do not involve any actual dangers, indeed they provide shelter from Fortune’s blows. We do not bother to teach the great virtues, though we love them and want our children to have them; but we nourish the hope that they will spontaneously appear in their consciousness some day in the future, we think of them as being part of our instinctive nature, while the others, the little virtues, seem to be the result of reflection and calculation and so we think that they absolutely must be taught.

  In reality the difference is only an apparent one. The little virtues also arise from our deepest instincts, from a defensive instinct; but in them reason speaks, holds forth, displays its arguments as the brilliant advocate of self-preservation. The great virtues well up from an instinct in which reason does not speak, an instinct that seems to be difficult to name. And the best of us is in that silent instinct, and not in our defensive instinct which harangues, holds forth and displays its arguments with reason’s voice.

  Education is only a certain relationship which we establish between ourselves and our children, a certain climate in which feelings, instincts and thoughts can flourish. Now I believe that a climate which is completely pervaded by a respect for the little virtues will, insensibly, lead to cynicism or to a fear of life. In themselves the little virtues have nothing to do with cynicism or a fear of life, but taken together, and without the great virtues, they produce an atmosphere that leads to these consequences. Not that the little virtues are in themselves contemptible; but their value is of a complementary and not of a substantial kind; they cannot stand by themselves without the others, and by themselves and without the others they provide but meagre fare for human nature. By looking around himself a man can find out how to use the little virtues—moderately and when they are necessary—he can drink them in from the air, because the little virtues are of a kind that is common among men. But one cannot breathe in the great virtues from the surrounding air, and they should be the basis of our relationship with our children, the first foundation of their education. Besides, the great can also contain the little, but by the laws of nature there is no way that the little can contain the great.

  In our relationships with our children it is no use our trying to remember and imitate the way our parents acted with us. The time of our youth and childhood was not one of little virtues; it was a time of strong and sonorous words that little by little lost all their substance. The present is a time of cold, submissive words beneath which a desire for reassertion is perhaps coming to the surface. But it is a timid desire that is afraid of ridicule. And so we hide behind caution and shrewdness. Our parents knew neither caution nor shrewdness and they didn’t know the fear of ridicule either: they were illogical and incoherent but they never realized this; they constantly contradicted themselves but they never allowed anyone to contradict them. They were authoritarian towards us in a way that we are quite incapable of being. S
trong in their principles, which they believed to be indestructible, they reigned over us with absolute power. They deafened us with their thunderous words: a dialogue was impossible because as soon as they suspected that they were wrong they ordered us to be quiet: they beat their fists on the table and made the room shake. We remember that gesture but we cannot copy it. We can fly into a rage and howl like wolves, but deep in our wolf s howl there lies a hysterical sob, the hoarse bleating of a lamb.