Essays in Idleness

As Kipling said, one must keep one’s head, “when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you.” He has other advice in the same poem, but I notice, this is where it starts. I think it is good advice, in general, though I would add a few whimsical qualifications, here and there. Too, the piece goes rather psycho, towards the end.

My late grandfather supplied me with the framed text; it was very kind of him. He was an illuminator, in his spare time from being a cartographer. The idea was, that I could read the text while shaving.

A lady friend suggests that I should shave more often. But as I’ve never let her inside the High Doganate, she couldn’t have been “commenting” on more than my appearance.

Nor have I drawn the inference, that men with beards are unwiser than clean-shaven men. Or, women for that matter. But no, I am not a pogonophobe. For not everyone is provided with an illuminated copy of the “If –” poem, to review at the start of his day.

I mention it for the sake of nostalgia, but also as a remedy against current ills. If, instead of didactic verse, one begins by reading meejah headlines on the Internet, it is less likely the day will turn out well. One might, for instance, go as crazy as the meejah. The day might then easily degenerate, from the motive of revenge.

From hard personal experience, I have discovered that I lack influence in the world. The insane things, that are insanely reported, would probably happen if I never got up. I could, quite probably, do more good by going first thing to Mass. Or even by giving a bottle of whisky to a “homeless person”; it might save him money for his other needs. As to the big problems of Society and State, nothing I do is going to solve them.

God might put me in a situation like that in which He put those Austrian boys: the two who tossed the “pachamamas” in the river at Rome. Though as a friend said, there are lots of bad things in the Tiber already. Perhaps toss a few liberal bishops in the Amazon. It might make for a better video; especially if you lucked into a school of piranhas. But now, perhaps, I’m getting carried away.

And anyway, I’m against providing clickbait.

Where Kipling goes wrong, predictably because he is not a Catholic, I think, is by omitting the one thing I could reliably do, to make the world a better place; however indirectly. It is to become Holy. This, truly, is “to advance one’s own cause” — in the highest sense, selfish.

It is the selfishness that is distantly reflected, as it were in mudwater at the bottom of a pit, in The Fable of the Bees. (In that, the ideology of Capitalism was foreseen: “private vices, publick benefits.” The author, Bernard Mandeville, was our English Machiavelli. He preferred selfish vices, to “virtue signalling.”)

Alternatively, as Newman suggests, the path to sanctity begins even before shaving. Step one is to get out of bed in the morning, … promptly.

I’m still working on step two.