Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

Out of work

I’ve ceased tutoring for the summer. Now that I’ve defended my dissertation, I’m doing a month or so of job hunting before the door slams shut for getting a full-time academic job in 2019–2020.

If I don’t get a full-time academic job this month, I’ll take whatever job I can get. I need to provide for Karin and the baby.

Karin continues to go to her job. It’s a little more grueling for her each day. She’s just beginning the third trimester of the pregnancy.

Our son is about the size of a prairie dog or a Napa cabbage.

Jasper and Ziva are glad to have us back in South Bend. They were reluctant to accept us at first, but after we spent a full night at home they were very affectionate. As much as Karin & I enjoyed touring the east, we missed our kitties terribly. I hope we never stay apart from Jasper and Ziva this long again.

Reprieve’s end

It was a warm Christmas and New Year’s. But new snow has landed, and outside – where I haven’t gone the last couple of days – it looks like a different world. Tomorrow I’ll trek to IUSB to return some library books. On Monday, I’ll resume my job.

My philosophizing has made great strides in my mind, but not on the page.

Most nights, I dream about it.

A dismal realization

It’s exam week at IUSB. My vacation will begin on Saturday.

Today, I worked for just two hours. All my appointments with college students were canceled. I only tutored my middle school student. (She’s in the eighth grade.)

Reviewing mathematics with her, I realized that she had no understanding of percentages.

First, she couldn’t tell me what percentage is left over if 15% is subtracted from the whole.

Then, she couldn’t tell me that 15/100 = 15%.

It was one of the most dismaying moments of my tutoring career.

A messed-up world

Tonight, Karin and I watched The Big Lebowski. … And right now, as I type this, I’m listening to one of its best songs: “Gnomus,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

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This week, I had an especially good session with my eighth-grade tutee. We discussed the religious differences among Britain’s thirteen North American colonies. This required me to explain the relationship between being a Puritan and being a Protestant, which necessitated a survey of the Reformation.

First, I explained about Lutherans (led by Martin Luther) and Calvinists (led by John Calvin). “And then,” I said, “the English church also split away from the Roman Catholic church. This was so that King Henry VIII could divorce his wife.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

“Who was the leader of that church?”

“King Henry VIII. He also cut off some of his wives’ heads.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, I explained how Puritans and Quakers, among others, emerged from the Church of England.

“The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania. They allowed other Christians to settle in Pennsylvania, too.”

“Were different kinds of people allowed to settle in the other colonies?”

“Not all the colonies permitted more than one kind of Christian group. The Puritans kept Massachusetts pretty much just for the Puritans.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, we went over Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” – line by line, just about, because my tutee didn’t understand a lot of the vocabulary.

As she grasped the meaning of each sentence, she exclaimed: “That’s messed up!”

But I had trouble getting her to finish reading the story.

When she told me she’d gotten to the end, I asked her how the narrator had killed the old man.

“I don’t know.”

So we checked the relevant passage, and I told her what its words meant. “So,” I explained, “the narrator held the bed against the old man’s face until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”

“That’s messed up!”

“All right, now: where did the narrator hide the body?”

“I don’t know.”

For someone so taken with the messed-upness of the world in general, and of the story in particular, my tutee was remarkably incurious about the story’s major plot points.

Which, I thought, was a little messed up.

Woes

Most days, my students drop by unannounced, and I tutor them in the order in which they arrive. On Wednesdays, though, I tutor them by appointment. The disadvantage of the “by appointment” system is that I don’t get paid if a student cancels thirty minutes before the starting-time. (Moreover, when a student misses an appointment without canceling, I receive payment only for the first thirty minutes of the non-tutorial.)

Today, I met with one student at ten o’clock and with another at eleven o’clock. I worked with each student for one hour. Then I had lunch. All of that was OK.

Then, a student missed her one-o’clock appointment (she overslept, she later told me in an email). I obtained credit for thirty minutes of work. Also, because this was her second unexcused absence, I canceled her privilege to continue making tutoring appointments.

At 1:15, another student canceled her 2:00–4:00 appointment due to illness. At 3:30, the next student canceled his 4:05 appointment. (More illness – “the runs.”) And a little after 5:00, the last student called to reschedule her appointment (she’d had a workplace emergency).

So, although I was at the job longer than seven hours, I earned payment for about 2.75 of them.

It was similar two weeks ago. Wednesdays are generally pretty bad.

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Also, tonight, Elders Johnathon and Richard canceled the supper they were supposed to cook for us.

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Yesterday was pretty awful, too. I had to miss work for the draining of a trichilemmal cyst on the back of my neck. (If you want to see some disgusting photos, perform a Google search for the word “cyst”; my own cyst was much handsomer than those depicted.) The procedure hurt like hell. Afterward, I had to wear a very uncomfortable bandage.

When my surgery was over, I wasted much time at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. I went there to update my ID card. After a long wait, my number was called, but I was told I’d failed to meet certain requirements for my objective.

During the wait, I reread a good chunk of J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, the great South African novel of Kafkaesque misery. It got me feeling sorry for myself.

I decided that it might be funny the next time to bring along Kafka’s own stories to the BMV.

Another ambitious read

Karin has “beaten” the Rugrats in Paris video game.

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A tutee of mine, writing about Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, is quite taken with the titular character’s virtue.

I, not so much. But the assignment has piqued my interest in Fielding, and I’ve decided to read Tom Jones. Afterward, I’ll be able to watch the movie in good conscience. It’s supposed to feature Albert Finney prancing up and down the countryside as a young man.

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The Elders saw me tonight at Barnes & Noble. They asked if I’d read much of the Book of Mormon lately, and I had to say I hadn’t.

I promised to discuss more of it with them on Wednesday.

Before then, I must turn in a dissertation chapter, or two, to my adviser.

I am mistaken for a chemistry tutor

Tonight, Karin met a friendly, stray tomcat who piteously mewed. She brought him food and stroked him.

It’s sad, knowing we’ve reached our limit as far as pet adopting goes.

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IU’s tutoring program has expanded into some of the local secondary schools. Today, I met the eighth-grader whom I am expected to tutor all semester, four hours each week.

Our first subject was science. I explained the distinction between physical and chemical changes. The cutting of bread involves a merely physical change; when the bread is digested or burned, the change is chemical.

This was a topic I hadn’t thought about in the last twenty years.

A college student sat at a nearby table, listening intently to us. He must be one of the chemistry tutors, I thought. I hope I’m doing justice to his subject.

Then he got up and walked over to our table. He showed me a sheet of paper on which he’d made complicated drawings. “Will you help me to understand these ionic bonds?” he asked.

I told him how he could find a real chemistry tutor.

My eighth-grade tutee and I then discussed the poetic techniques of metaphor, simile, and alliteration, and she wrote an alliterative poem of two short stanzas.

A prank; a vote; a forthcoming event; a new tutee; Zlatan

We’re well into June. The high schools have had their graduations.

At the school where I used to work, the seniors did an especially good prank. They put LimeBikes everywhere inside the building.

It was effective because whenever a janitor would try to remove a bike from the school, the bike would play a recorded message, threatening to call the police.

Eventually, though, the bikes were brought out into the parking lot.

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Today, FIFA’s members voted to select the hosts of the 2026 World Cup.

They chose Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Morocco was the losing candidate.

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David will arrive in South Bend tomorrow night. He plans to watch the first week or so of this year’s World Cup with his family.

The first game, Russia vs. Saudi Arabia, will be played tomorrow morning.

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At IUSB, my newest tutee is a middle-aged woman from Mexico. We held our first session today. Afterward, we tried to schedule our next appointment.

“Let me view my calendar,” I said, and I brought out the schedule of World Cup games.

My tutee immediately understood.

“Such-and-such hour is no good,” she said. “Two of Mexico’s group opponents play at that time.”

We agreed to meet at 10:00am, the hour of inactivity between the 8:00am–10:00am game and the 11:00am–1:00pm game.

She told me that two years ago, during the Euros, she’d been in the stadium when Zlatan played his last official match for his national team.

“I don’t have much regard for Zlatan,” she said. “I think Sweden has more success without him.”

I told her I thought Sweden’s success was beside the point.

“Well, my husband likes Zlatan,” she said. “I suppose you like Zlatan?”

“Zlatan is incredible. You should read his book.”

Apart from our disagreement about Zlatan, we had an excellent tutorial. I think she’ll be a very good student to work with.

Two commencements

First, I want to congratulate my Uncle Tim (my father’s brother). During the recent commencement ceremony at Bethel College, he was honored as the Professor of the Year.

Although he’s a philosophy professor, he has taught many other subjects, including biblical literature, Latin American cultural geography, and the history of sport, and he has served as Bethel’s archivist.

He moved to Bethel in 1993, having previously worked as a missionary at the Jamaica Theological Seminary and the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the University of Chicago, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. As an undergraduate, he studied at Fort Wayne Bible College, which later became Summit Christian College and then Taylor University Fort Wayne. (That campus is now defunct.) Relishing the overkill, he likes to decorate the back of his van with stickers from all these schools.

He wears a beard, a poncho, and a fishing hat. He says “Shalom” a lot. People call him Brother Tim. On a conformist campus, he’s something of a countercultural icon. People who don’t know him mistake him for a 1970s-style Christian hippie. He likes to talk about the persons and practices of our denomination (especially those of the early twentieth century), Christians in the developing world, missionaries, athletes, and ecclesiastical and collegiate politics. Secular politics hold little attraction for him. The same is true of logic, science, and anything that smacks of positivism. His vision of Christianity is both ecumenical and rooted in tradition.

He impresses those who listen to him. My sense is that the people at Bethel are less receptive to him than they used to be, and so this award may have come a bit late. But maybe I’m too pessimistic.

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I didn’t attend Bethel’s commencement. I usually avoid those ceremonies. Yesterday, however, Karin & I attended IUSB’s graduation ceremony, which was held at Notre Dame.

The keynote speech, given by the President of Indiana University, was a defense of truth. (You can read the version delivered in Bloomington.) The speech was rather bland even though it took a side in a perennial dispute.

You relativists and subjectivists! – the speech insinuated but didn’t say – Look where your way of thinking has led us! To Donald Trump! To “alternative facts!”

I wondered how many listeners understood.

I marveled at how utterly boring these mass graduations are. Hundreds of people must be recognized (they’ve paid tuition, after all). This leaves little time for anything significant. And yet … this is the last opportunity to teach these students. Why settle for a recital of platitudes? Even if these are platitudes that, embarrassingly, many academics now reject?

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We attended the commencement because I’d been invited to watch one of my tutees collect his master’s degree in social work.

I believe he’ll do a lot of good for the youth that he intends to serve. As a tutee, however, he often was difficult to work with.

During tutorials, he’d complain about the unspoken racism at IUSB.

If my own classmates can’t be genuine with me – he’d say – how are they going to be genuine with the population they’re going to work with?

Then he’d thank me for listening to him.

It’s like free therapy, he’d quip.

Well, I wasn’t prepared to be his therapist. Listening to him wore me out – especially on those occasions when he was irate with me.

But he liked me well enough, and I think I helped him to write better. And so, when he invited me to the commencement ceremony, Karin & I went. He was the very last person to receive his degree. He lagged a little behind everyone else in the ceremony – he walks with a cane – and so he had the whole stage to himself, and the audience cheered and cheered for him. It was very moving.

Afterward, Karin & I went to his graduation party at a restaurant in downtown South Bend. He greeted us warmly and went around introducing me to everyone. Karin & I were pleased for him, and we ate as many chicken wings as we could.

I am gotten the better of by the Swedes

Last night, we had quite a nice storm, with bright lightning flashes and sheets of rain. Ziva ran to the bedroom, to hide. Later, she poked her little face around the blinds and peered out at the rain. In our neighborhood, there was just a little flooding, and a small section of our street was blocked off.

Today was my last workday of the semester. I’ll be at home for one week, and then Summer Session I will commence.

Today, also, I finished reading Roseanna, the first mystery in the famous series by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – perhaps the most “procedural” crime novel I’ve ever read. No quirky investigators here. Just meticulous ones. I found it quite gripping.

Reputedly, the book also is humorous, although, to me, that aspect was rather faint. I think I knew which parts were the funny ones. Oh, well: Swedes 1, John-Paul 0.

I’ve owned the first four of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s books for many years, and now it looks as if I’ll be acquiring the other half-dozen.

Armadale (finis)

I finished reading Armadale a little over a year after I began to read it. One reason why the novel took so long to read was that the tutee who got me interested in it spoiled the ending for me.

“The villainess gets hanged,” she let out after I’d asked her to say no more about the plot.

Happily, months later, I can report that my tutee got it wrong. The villainess doesn’t get hanged. I don’t know how my tutee got that idea.

You can all rest assured that that’s not how the book ends.

On the other hand, it was rather dreary for me, plowing ahead after the 600-page mark, expecting the villainess to get hanged but never reaching any such scene.

Armadale has its moments but is nowhere near as exciting as The Woman in White, which I read a decade ago, largely under the influence of jet lag. That book is still vivid in my memory, even chilling.

Armadale’s best characters are supporting ones: professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and private detectives who are called upon by the major characters to give expert advice, which they bestow elegantly and dramatically, with garnishes of delicious condescension. Oh, how they must suffer fools!

Among the major characters, the villainess, Lydia Gwilt, has the best literary reputation; but I prefer the anguished Ozias Midwinter. What a name! And what a backstory he has – as a child, he was a gypsy’s ward and had to sleep out on the open road, earning his livelihood by giving pathetic performances with dancing dogs. There is more than a little of the grotesque about Midwinter, and yet he behaves as quite the noblest person in the book.

Another of the book’s welcome qualities is its evocation of place. Key scenes occur in these locations: a sanitorium in Germany’s Black Forest; a ship, sinking in the Caribbean; a quiet village in Somerset; the Isle of Man, and a ship, sinking off its coast; the towns and wilds of Norfolk; crowded London; murderous Naples; a yacht, sinking in the Adriatic; and a mysterious medical house in Hampstead, worthy of being investigated by Sherlock Holmes. One comes away from the book having played the tourist.

I usually read only one old British novel at a time. I might try a short one next – Castle Rackrent or Vathek – and then another long one, such as Barchester Towers, Villette, or Wuthering Heights.

Suggestions?

Before the spring break

I’m now in that limbo prior to a journey when I don’t dare to order any new books, lest they pile up outside the apartment while I’m away. Such is the cost of seeing the world.

Karin’s routine also has been disrupted. She’d made an appointment for a mechanic to look at her car during our absence. But then the car began doing a grinding noise, and we figured it shouldn’t be driven before the appointment, either.

(The solution has been for Karin to use a car that belongs to my parents.)

At IUSB, the Spanish students have attempted their midterm exams. Those who’ve scored poorly enough have been told to make corrections, which are to be reviewed by the tutors before the holiday. The students were alerted to this requirement some time ago; so far, none of them has come to see me. I’ll probably have to deal with a dozen of them all at once on the day before the vacation.

At least it’s springtime. How to tell? Nelson’s port-a-pit chicken has sprung up outside the gas stations. Karin brought me some this afternoon, much to my delight. I would’ve enjoyed it better had the kitties not relentlessly begged to share it, gone digging in the trash after the bones, or knocked my glass of water over my books.

Towards elevator

Agatha Christie has a novel, Towards Zero, in which a murder is committed in a hotel by putting an “Out of Order” sign next to the lift (“lift” is British for “elevator”). The murder victim reads the sign, climbs the stairs, and dies of a heart attack.

I’ve recalled this novel often during the last few days. “Out of Order” signs have been posted onto the elevators in my building at IUSB, though at least one of the elevators seems to function well enough. The effect is that the students wheeze when they arrive to be tutored. (The tutors also wheeze.)

This tutor also snores when no students are with him (though he does so only for a few seconds at a time).

Indeed, in the last couple of days, it’s taken all my effort not to snore during the late afternoon. It isn’t even that I’m fully asleep; I’m quite aware of what’s happening, and I’m doing all I can to resist it. Still, the snores come out.

Karin thinks it’s because I’m a little sick.

A flood!

The St. Joseph River has flooded, what with all this raining and this melting of snow. Elkhart and Goshen (Indiana) and Niles (Michigan) seem to have been hit the hardest. South Bend also has been affected.

IUSB canceled its classes today. For the second time this week, I’m at home, not earning money.

I took this photo yesterday, through a window in the library at IUSB.

Let me explain a little. The school’s dorms are on the other side of the river. The footbridge that connects them to the main campus is partly under water. You wouldn’t know it, but several walking paths and a field are pretty well submerged.

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The apartment complex where Karin & I live, just across the street from the river, has remained dry. The water covers our street one block to the north of us and one block to the south.

Last night, we went out to look at the encroaching water, and Karin took this very dark photo.

You can see ducks swimming in the street (look where the light is reflected). They were quack-quacking all the lovely while.

“Let’s bring out the kitties,” we said.

We didn’t do that.

Yesterday and today have been dry, but more rain is supposed to fall tonight.

Disco JP

Somebody at work filmed me with his cell phone. He used the “disco ball” effect.

Little did he know, this really is what it’s like to be John-Paul.

My son

I’ll tutor one more student tomorrow, and then the first week of tutoring will have been completed. So far, everything’s gone smoothly. I’m especially glad for new rules that simplify the emailing of tutees. (I used to waste hours every week trying to schedule meetings with a couple of deadbeats.)

This afternoon, one of my old tutees brought me a copy of the book that she and I had gone through together during the fall: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. It was a lovely gesture.

She also told me that her husband had given her $50 to gamble in South Bend’s new casino, and that she’d won $300.

That’s great, I said.

Yes, she said, and I had the good sense to leave the casino while I still had $200.

Well, that’s still a nice haul. So your net gain was $150 once you returned the initial $50 to your husband?

It was $200, she said. I didn’t tell him I won anything.

I thought that was pretty good.

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Yesterday was the anniversary of Jasper’s adoption. He’s lived with Karin for three years. In a sense, I, too, have been his parent for three years: I was with Karin in the pet shelter when she chose him.

To celebrate Jasper’s adoption, we’ll give some tuna to both of the kitties. However, since it’ll be a celebration of Jasper, we won’t interfere if he tries to steal tuna from little Ziva.

(Actually, we probably will interfere.)

Here is my son:

And here he is with his sister:

Iterations

Karin & I hosted a dinner party last night. The guests were Karin’s grandpa, Karin’s mom, and Brianna. We had to spray Jasper with water to keep him away from the food. Even shy little Ziva came out of hiding a few times, and we had to spray her, too.

We discussed the Vikings’ dramatic playoff victory, which, in solidarity with Karin’s stepdad, we all had witnessed. (Here are some rather lengthy highlights, as well as the game’s winning play and the same play from a field-level perspective.) Later in the evening, Karin’s mom told me that “buffalo” is a verb. To buffalo is to baffle. Researching this, I learned that grammatical sentences of n words can be formed simply by saying buffalo out loud n times, for any cardinal number n; and that the writing of such sentences requires minimal punctuating. Here are a few examples:

“Buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that Buffalo’s buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to Buffalo’s buffaloes.

And so on.

I stayed out of bed until one o’clock forming longer and longer sentences from iterations of buffalo. Then I lay awake in bed until three o’clock. This morning, bleary-eyed, I went to my first regular tutoring shift of the new semester.

Lord Chesterfield

It was above freezing this afternoon.

Tomorrow: high of 46°F.

Thursday: high of 54°F, and rain to flush away the slush.

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Last summer, a fellow tutor lent me his Norton Reader (12th ed.). Since then, I’ve hardly read any of it. I had no incentive to return the book to him – he wasn’t around in the fall – but now that he’s back, I’ve been hurrying to get through the selections that interest me. So far, the best item has been this letter by Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son. (I’m reproducing the version posted by Project Gutenberg.)

London, October 16, O.S. 1747

Dear Boy:

The art of pleasing is a very necessary one to possess; but a very difficult one to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules; and your own good sense and observation will teach you more of it than I can. Do as you would be done by, is the surest method that I know of pleasing. Observe carefully what pleases you in others, and probably the same thing in you will please others. If you are pleased with the complaisance and attention of others to your humors, your tastes, or your weaknesses, depend upon it the same complaisance and attention, on your part to theirs, will equally please them. Take the tone of the company that you are in, and do not pretend to give it; be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present humor of the company; this is an attention due from every individual to the majority. Do not tell stories in company; there is nothing more tedious and disagreeable; if by chance you know a very short story, and exceedingly applicable to the present subject of conversation, tell it in as few words as possible; and even then, throw out that you do not love to tell stories; but that the shortness of it tempted you. Of all things, banish the egotism out of your conversation, and never think of entertaining people with your own personal concerns, or private affairs; though they are interesting to you, they are tedious and impertinent to everybody else; besides that, one cannot keep one’s own private affairs too secret. Whatever you think your own excellencies may be, do not affectedly display them in company; nor labor, as many people do, to give that turn to the conversation, which may supply you with an opportunity of exhibiting them. If they are real, they will infallibly be discovered, without your pointing them out yourself, and with much more advantage. Never maintain an argument with heat and clamor, though you think or know yourself to be in the right: but give your opinion modestly and coolly, which is the only way to convince; and, if that does not do, try to change the conversation, by saying, with good humor, “We shall hardly convince one another, nor is it necessary that we should, so let us talk of something else.”

Remember that there is a local propriety to be observed in all companies; and that what is extremely proper in one company, may be, and often is, highly improper in another.

The jokes, the ‘bonmots,’ the little adventures, which may do very well in one company, will seem flat and tedious, when related in another. The particular characters, the habits, the cant of one company, may give merit to a word, or a gesture, which would have none at all if divested of those accidental circumstances. Here people very commonly err; and fond of something that has entertained them in one company, and in certain circumstances, repeat it with emphasis in another, where it is either insipid, or, it may be, offensive, by being ill-timed or misplaced. Nay, they often do it with this silly preamble; “I will tell you an excellent thing”; or, “I will tell you the best thing in the world.” This raises expectations, which, when absolutely disappointed, make the relater of this excellent thing look, very deservedly, like a fool.

If you would particularly gain the affection and friendship of particular people, whether men or women, endeavor to find out the predominant excellency, if they have one, and their prevailing weakness, which everybody has; and do justice to the one, and something more than justice to the other. Men have various objects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel; and, though they love to hear justice done to them, where they know that they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel, and yet are doubtful whether they do or not. As, for example, Cardinal Richelieu, who was undoubtedly the ablest statesman of his time, or perhaps of any other, had the idle vanity of being thought the best poet too; he envied the great Corneille his reputation, and ordered a criticism to be written upon the “Cid.” Those, therefore, who flattered skillfully, said little to him of his abilities in state affairs, or at least but ‘en passant,’ and as it might naturally occur. But the incense which they gave him, the smoke of which they knew would turn his head in their favor, was as a ‘bel esprit’ and a poet. Why? Because he was sure of one excellency, and distrustful as to the other. You will easily discover every man’s prevailing vanity, by observing his favorite topic of conversation; for every man talks most of what he has most a mind to be thought to excel in. Touch him but there, and you touch him to the quick. The late Sir Robert Walpole (who was certainly an able man) was little open to flattery upon that head; for he was in no doubt himself about it; but his prevailing weakness was, to be thought to have a polite and happy turn to gallantry; of which he had undoubtedly less than any man living: it was his favorite and frequent subject of conversation: which proved, to those who had any penetration, that it was his prevailing weakness. And they applied to it with success.

Women have, in general, but one object, which is their beauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow. Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking, that she must in some degree, be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amends for it. If her figure is deformed, her face, she thinks, counterbalances it. If they are both bad, she comforts herself that she has graces; a certain manner; a ‘je ne sais quoi,’ still more engaging than beauty. This truth is evident, from the studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest women in the world. An undoubted, uncontested, conscious beauty, is of all women, the least sensible of flattery upon that head; she knows that it is her due, and is therefore obliged to nobody for giving it her. She must be flattered upon her understanding; which, though she may possibly not doubt of herself, yet she suspects that men may distrust.

Do not mistake me, and think that I mean to recommend to you abject and criminal flattery: no; flatter nobody’s vices or crimes: on the contrary, abhor and discourage them. But there is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people’s weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities. If a man has a mind to be thought wiser, and a woman handsomer than they really are, their error is a comfortable one to themselves, and an innocent one with regard to other people; and I would rather make them my friends, by indulging them in it, than my enemies, by endeavoring (and that to no purpose) to undeceive them.

There are little attentions likewise, which are infinitely engaging, and which sensibly affect that degree of pride and self-love, which is inseparable from human nature; as they are unquestionable proofs of the regard and consideration which we have for the person to whom we pay them. As, for example, to observe the little habits, the likings, the antipathies, and the tastes of those whom we would gain; and then take care to provide them with the one, and to secure them from the other; giving them, genteelly, to understand, that you had observed that they liked such a dish, or such a room; for which reason you had prepared it: or, on the contrary, that having observed they had an aversion to such a dish, a dislike to such a person, etc., you had taken care to avoid presenting them. Such attention to such trifles flatters self-love much more than greater things, as it makes people think themselves almost the only objects of your thoughts and care.

These are some of the arcana necessary for your initiation in the great society of the world. I wish I had known them better at your age; I have paid the price of three-and-fifty years for them, and shall not grudge it, if you reap the advantage. Adieu.

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At the end of the selection, the Norton Reader gives the following prompts:

1. Chesterfield recommends to his son the rule “Do as you would be done by” (paragraph 1). What kind of behavior does Chesterfield suggest? How does his injunction differ from Jesus’ injunction “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them” (Matthew 7.12; see also Luke 6.31)?

2. Chesterfield does not recommend “abject and criminal flattery” of vices and crimes but rather “complaisant indulgence for people’s weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities” (paragraph 8). Make a short list of what you consider vices and crimes and another of what you consider weaknesses and vanities. Be prepared to defend your distinctions.

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The selection is in the part of the Norton Reader called “Ethics.” It’s shockingly amoral, but no more so than the very next selection, Mark Twain’s “Advice to Youth.” Newer editions seem to have dropped it and kept the inferior selections.