`Responsible and Eloquent'

A writer/editor in New York City writes to me in an e-mail:

“Instead of resolutions for the new year, I've chosen a few key words I hope will influence my life in the coming fifty-two weeks. They are: responsibility, eloquence, frugality, discernment. I hope that the writing I produce this year is both responsible and eloquent; I hope to maintain a sustainable lifestyle, to not live beyond my means; and I hope to more wisely choose how I choose to spend my time, and with whom. It seems wiser at this point to give myself broad directives than specific, and therefore potentially unattainable, goals.”

I’m impressed by any man, especially one so young, with the prudence to resist the self-sabotaging allure of pre-doomed resolutions. Grand revolutions of body and mind are as like to succeed as comparably emphatic revolutions in the body politic. We change incrementally, if at all. Dr. Johnson understood our endlessly renewed capacity for self-delusion. This he published on Oct. 21, 1758, in No. 27 of The Idler:

"There is nothing which we estimate so fallaciously as the force of our own resolutions, nor any fallacy which we so unwillingly and tardily detect. He that has resolved a thousand times, and a thousand times deserted his own purpose, yet suffers no abatement of his confidence, but still believes himself his own master; and able, by innate vigour of soul, to press forward to his end, through all the obstructions that inconveniences or delights can put in his way."

The four virtues my young friend has settled on are wisely chosen. I wasn’t capable of such mature thinking at his age, almost 30 years ago. Of eloquence I remain cautious. Writers must be on guard against self-seduction. Nothing is easier than to be eloquent with nothing to say. Perhaps he has chosen, however, the perfect countervailing virtue, discernment, which implies the ability to make critical distinctions. Like the early mechanical clocks, with their verge-and-foliot design, we work most efficiently when we can both move and stay balanced.

When Brian’s e-mail arrived, I had on my desk a photocopy of Zbigniew Herbert’s acceptance speech for the Ingersoll Foundation’s 1995 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing. I keep it in the drawer of my night table and read it periodically, for Herbert was a man given to balance in his thinking and work, if not always in life. The Greeks were his constant, though never uncritically so:

“Every year, I undertake an imaginary journey to Greece, in order to experience pure joy and to drink from the sources of our civilization. The Acropolis and the Greek temples in Sicily, lonesome columns, and the Epidaurus theater: these are perhaps the greatest concentrations of beauty in the world. I repeat to myself that beauty is a vehicle for passion and virtue, and this thought offer peace. Yet an evening spent in one’s library over the volumes detailing Greek history may fill one with horror and demolish the comfortable thought of past perfection. Sophocles, Socrates, and Plato witnessed events that seem carbon copies of present-day tribal wars, so deftly served up in newspapers.”