'The Source of Much Mindless Conformity'

“A writer who is not ashamed of what he has written has not re-read it.” 

I’ve known writers who happily reread their words, sometimes long after they were published, reveling in the little darlings. For others, their work is like food – consumed, digested, excreted, and that’s the end of it. I straddle both camps. Because I reread obsessively as I write, editing until published, I seldom feel the need to look back, though reading old work is always risky. It’s embarrassing: redundancy, vagueness, too-cute metaphors, pretentiousness, sloppy reasoning, failed attempts at humor, flat-footed rhythms. All announce their presence like pimples on a nose. Occasionally, one is pleasantly surprised: “Not bad.”

 

The author of the sentence quoted above is Theodore Dalrymple in his latest book, Midnight Maxims (Mirabeau Press, 2021). It consists of 365 apothegms, the product of his recent bout of “habitual insomnia.” Dalrymple has always been an aphoristic writer, even in longer works. (The prose of two nineteenth-century writers of very long novels, Eliot and Tolstoy, is often highly aphoristic.) He has often acknowledged his longtime fondness for La Rochefoucauld, of whose maxims he has written: “[T]hey came with the force of revelation, and yet at the same time they said things that I had known all along.” That’s the secret to a good maxim. It doesn’t reveal a new truth but rather distills a vague sense of “truth-ness” one already had. The essence of a maxim is luminous concision. Here is a Dalrymple maxim that has only recently started to make sense to me:

 

“What a person finds beautiful is more revelatory of him than what he finds morally bad. That is why so few people today talk of beauty.”

 

Lately I’ve sensed that people are losing whatever aesthetic sense they once possessed. Many say “beautiful” when they mean “fashionable.” Or politics has usurped the place in their lives once occupied by an openness to beauty. At the heart of most maxims, certainly Dalrymple’s, is the human capacity for self-delusion. Homo sapiens is probably the only species that routinely lies to itself. In the natural world, such a quality would frequently prove fatal. Here’s a Dalrymple sampler on the theme of self-blindness:

 

“The intelligent boor takes his boorishness for authenticity and is proud of it.”

 

“For the sentimental, tears are an argument.”

 

“We are seldom more craven than when we think we are daring.”

 

“The desire to be unique is the source of much mindless conformity.”

 

And back to where we started, on writing: “Concision is to the mind what cleanliness is to the body.”