This one follows Of Solitude, which covers the best way to approach retirement. Of Solitude ends with a lengthy paraphrase of Epicurus and Seneca, meant to contrast with not-so-good advice from Pliny the Younger and Cicero. It looks like the latter felt that retirement is the time to start burnishing one’s rep through books & letters, while the former figured that one had time enough for that in one’s prime. M. paraphrases
“Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company.”
In the next essay, he writes a little more about Cicero, and the practice of publishing one’s letters. M. finds this pretty sleazy, but what I enjoyed most was his description of his own letter-writing, mainly because it sums up my own conversational style awfully well:
I have naturally a humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for public negotiations, as my language is in every way, being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words. I have neither the faculty nor the taste for those lengthy offers of affection and service. I do not really believe all that, and I dislike saying much of anything beyond what I believe. That is a far cry from present practice, for there never was so abject and servile a prostitution of complimentary addresses: life, soul, devotion, adoration, serf, slave, all these words have such vulgar currency that when letter writers want to convey a more sincere and respectful feeling, they have no way left to express it.
I mortally hate to seem a flatterer; and so I naturally drop into a dry, plain, blunt way of speaking, which, to anyone who does not know me otherwise, verges a little on the disdainful. I honor most those to whom I show the least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony. I offer myself meagerly and proudly to those to whom I belong. And I tender myself least to those to whom I have given myself most; it seems to me that they should read my feelings in my heart, and see that what my words express does an injustice to my thought.
In welcoming, in taking leave, in thanking, in greeting, in offering my services, in all those verbose compliments imposed by the ceremonial laws of our etiquette, I know no one so stupidly barren of words as myself. And I have never been made use of to write letters of favor and recommendation but that the man for whom they were written found them dry and weak.
Last week, I fussed endlessly over a recommendation letter for a member of my magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. He’s an Indian pharma-scientist, trying to get a green card so he can take a new job here in the U.S. I felt defeated by the time I was done writing it, ashamedly e-mailed the text to him, and heard back minutes later, “This is great! Thank you so much! Please put it on letterhead and send it over!”
So maybe M. & I just have low self-esteem.