Don’t misunderstand me. I myself am no fan of the “confession,” all that sickly, crippled displaying of oneself and the slobbering and frothing at the mouth that goes with it. But I do like truth. It is truth we most like to hear, of course, because superfluous self-revelation is the province of invalids, egotists, and people of an effeminate nature. Nevertheless, it is better to listen to the truth than to speak lies. Unfortunately, wherever I’ve looked in life, it was chiefly lies I heard.
You ask me what I mean by truth, by healing, by the ability to feel joy? I’ll tell you, old man. I’ll tell you in two words. Humility and self-knowledge. That’s all there is to it.
Maybe humility is too grand a concept. For humility you need grace too, and that is an exceptional state of being. In everyday life we can achieve what I am talking about by exercising a certain modesty and striving to discover our own true desires and inclinations. And by seeking a compromise between our desires and the world as it exists.
I see you are smiling. You are thinking that if everything is so simple, if there really is some universal template, why isn’t my life a success? Well, you see, in the end there happened to be these two women, and I tried to live first with one, then the other; I mean really live, as a matter of life and death. I can’t complain about them as people, as marvelous people in fact. All the same, I failed, failed with both, and here I am, alone. Self-knowledge, humility, all those great oaths and promises; it was all in vain. I failed, and now all I can do is sit here and sermonize … That’s what you are thinking. Am I right?
In that case I had better tell you what my first marriage was like and why it failed. My first wife was perfect. I can’t even say that I didn’t love her. She had but one small fault, and it wasn’t something she could do anything about. It wasn’t any kind of psychological problem — nothing of the sort. Her problem was that she was a middle-class girl, poor thing, a middle-class woman. Don’t misunderstand me: I myself am middle-class. I am conscious of being so, a conscientious member of that class, someone who knows its faults and limitations, content to shoulder the responsibilities of middle-class existence. I don’t like drawing-room revolutionaries. One should keep faith with those to whom one is tied by origin, education, interest, and communal memory. It is the middle class I have to thank for everything: my upbringing, my way of being, my desires, the very finest moments of my life, and that common culture which offers such a dignified entry to such moments … Because there are many who say this class has had its day, that it has grown feeble, that it has fulfilled its mission, that it can no longer take the leading role in human affairs the way it did in the past. I can’t speak about that. I don’t understand it. I have a feeling that the middle class is being buried a bit too enthusiastically, a little too impatiently; I think there may be some power left in it, that it might still have a role in the world. Perhaps the middle class will form the bridge on which the forces of revolution meet the forces of order … When I say my first wife was a middle-class woman, that is not a criticism; I am simply establishing a certain condition. I too am middle-class, quite hopelessly so. I keep faith with my class. I will defend it when it is attacked. But I won’t defend it blindly or from a prejudiced position. I want to see quite clearly what it was I received as my portion of social destiny. I have to know, in other words, what our faults were, and to discover whether we have been attacked by a kind of social virus that has drained us of vigor. Not that I ever talked about this with my wife.
So what was the problem? Wait a minute. Let me get my thoughts in order.
First and foremost, it was that I was a middle-class man, fully acquainted with the rituals of my class. I was rich. My wife’s family was relatively poor. Not that being middle-class is a matter of money. My experience is that it is precisely the poorest members of the class, those with the least financial security, who are most urgently preoccupied with maintaining middle-class standards and values. No one rich ever needs to cling so attentively, so desperately, to social customs, to points of etiquette, to respectable behavior, to all those things the poorest of our kind, the petite bourgeoisie, needs to underwrite its very existence at any given moments of life. There is the assistant manager in the office who watches everything like a hawk, careful that his accommodation, his wardrobe, and all the minute details of his life should keep firmly in step with his salary … The rich are always open to a kind of minor risk-taking. They are prepared to wear a false beard or to shinny down a drainpipe in order to escape, even if only for a little while, the prison of ennui that goes with property. I am secretly convinced that the rich spend every hour of the day being utterly bored of themselves. But the middling man, the middle-class citizen, who holds an office without a great salary or a reservoir of money, will perform acts of heroism fit for a knight errant simply to maintain his position in the existing hierarchy, which means preserving both his rank and his system of values. It is the petit bourgeois who upholds the sacred rituals. From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, he constantly has to be proving something.
My wife was well brought up. She was taught languages, she had the ability to make sharp distinctions, between good music and a sentimental tune, between literature and cheap hackwork. She could tell you precisely why a painting by Botticelli was beautiful and what Michelangelo had in mind with his Pietà. But wait — let me be accurate about this. She learned most of it from me — travel, reading, the art of intimate conversation. The education she received at home and at school, the culture she absorbed there, remained in her only as the memory of strict teaching. I tried to dissolve the tensions implicit in learning such things by rote; I wanted to transform school learning into warm, living experience. It wasn’t easy. She had remarkable powers of hearing in both the physical and the psychological human sense. She sensed that I was teaching her and was offended. People are offended by all sorts of things. It doesn’t take much. Say one man knows something because of his good fortune in being born who he is and has had the opportunity of inquiring into the mysteries that constitute real art, while the other has only learned it in class. That’s an offense. It happens. But it takes us a whole lifetime to learn this.