6 Crop Rotation
6 CROP ROTATION
An Attempt at a Theory of Social Prudence
CHREMYLOS: There is too much of everything.
Of love,
KARION: Bread,
CHREMYLOS: Songs,
KARION: And candy.
CHREMYLOS: Of honour,
KARION: Cakes,
CHREMYLOS: Courage,
KARION: And figs.
CHREMYLOS: Of ambition,
KARION: Barley-bread,
CHREMYLOS: High office,
KARION: And pease-porridge.
Cf. Aristophanes, Plutus, vv. 189ff.
PEOPLE of experience maintain that it is very sensible to start from a principle. I grant them that and start with the principle that all men are boring. Or will someone be boring enough to contradict me in this? This principle possesses to the highest degree that power of repulsion one always requires of any negative that genuinely provides the principle of motion.1 Not merely is it repellent, it is infinitely forbidding; and the person with this principle behind him must necessarily have an infinite momentum to make discoveries with. For if my principle is true, to slacken or increase one’s impetus one need only consider with more or less moderation how ruinous boredom is for man; and if one wants to risk doing injury to the locomotive itself by pressing the speed to the maximum, one need only say to oneself: ‘Boredom is a root of all evil.’ Strange that boredom, so still and static, should have such power to set things in motion. The effect that boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion.
How ruinous boredom is everyone also recognizes in relation to children. So long as children are enjoying themselves, they are always well-behaved. This can be said in the strictest sense, since if they sometimes get out of control even in play, really that is because they are beginning to get bored; boredom has already set in, though in a different way. So in choosing a nursemaid one pays attention not just to her sobriety, faithfulness and decency; one also takes into consideration, aesthetically, her ability to amuse the children. And one would not hesitate to dismiss a nursemaid lacking in this qualification even if she possessed all other desirable virtues. Here, indeed, the principle is clearly acknowledged; but so remarkable are the ways of the world, so much have habit and boredom gained the upper hand, that justice is done to aesthetics only in the case of the nursemaid. Were one to demand divorce on the grounds that one’s wife was boring, or a king’s abdication because he was boring to look at, or a priest thrown out of the land because he was boring to listen to, or a cabinet minister dismissed, or a life-sentence for a journalist, because they were dreadfully boring, it would be impossible to get one’s way. What wonder, then, that the world is regressing, that evil is gaining ground more and more, since boredom is on the increase and boredom is a root of all evil.
We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then the nations were scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And think of the consequences of this boredom! Man stood high and fell low, first with Eve and then the Tower of Babel. Yet what was it that stayed the fall of Rome? It was panis and circenses.2 What is it people do nowadays? Do they think of ways of diverting themselves? Quite the contrary, they accelerate the ruin. They think of calling a constitutional assembly.3 Can anything more boring be imagined, as much for the gentlemen taking part as for those who have to read and hear about them! There is a proposal to improve the State’s economy through savings. Can anything more boring be imagined? Instead of increasing the national debt, it is proposed to pay it off. From what I know of politics, it would be an easy matter for Denmark to take out a loan of fifteen millions. Why does no one think of that? That some person is genius enough not to pay his debt, that at least is something one hears of now and then; why shouldn’t a state be able to do the same if only all are agreed? So we take out a loan of fifteen millions yet use it not to pay our debts but for public pleasure. Let us celebrate the thousand-year reign with joy and merriment. Just as there are boxes everywhere to put money in, so there should be bowls of money everywhere. Everything would be free, people would go to the theatre free, have free access to the streetwalkers, take free drives to the park, be buried free of charge, have someone speak over their coffin free of charge; for when one always has money in hand everything is in a sense gratis. No one need own property. An exception would be made just in my own case. I personally reserve 100 dollars a day permanently in the Bank of London, partly because I cannot do with less, partly because it was I who came up with the idea, and finally because one never knows whether I might not come up with a new idea when the fifteen millions are used up. What would this affluence lead to? Everything great would pour into Copenhagen, the greatest artists, actors and dancers. Copenhagen would become another Athens. What would be the result? Men of wealth would all settle in this city, among them very likely the Shah of Persia and the King of England. So here is my second idea. We kidnap the Shah. It may be objected that there would then be rebellion in Persia, a new Shah would be placed on the throne – it has happened so often before – and the price for the old Shah would drop. In that case, my idea is we sell him to the Turks; they will know how to convert him into cash. And then there is something else our politicians seem entirely to overlook. Denmark holds the balance of power in Europe. No more fortunate existence can be imagined. I know it from my own experience. I was once the balance of power in a family and could do as I pleased; it was never I that suffered, always the others. Oh that my words might reach your ears, you who sit in high places to advise and rule, you king’s men and men of the people, wise and understanding citizens of all classes! Have a care! Old Denmark is foundering, what a sorry fate, and most fateful of all, it is going under from boredom. In ancient times he who sang the praises of the dead king most beautifully became the new king.4 In our time he should be king who comes up with the best witticism, he the crown prince who provides the occasion for its utterance.
But how you carry me away, beauteous, sentimental enthusiasm! Is this the way I should be opening my mouth to address my contemporaries, initiating them into my wisdom? Not at all. For my wisdom is really not zum für Jedermann,5 and it is always more prudent to keep one’s rules of prudence to oneself. Disciples, then, I have no wish for, but should someone happen to be present at my deathbed, and if I was sure it was all over with me, I might perhaps in a fit of philanthropic delirium whisper my teaching in his ear, uncertain whether I had done him a service or not. There is so much talk of man’s being a social animal;6 basically he is a beast of prey, as one can ascertain not merely by consideration of his teeth. All this talk of sociability and society is in part, therefore, an inherited hypocrisy, in part a calculated deceit.
So all people are boring. The word itself indicates the possibility of a subdivision. ‘Boring’ can describe a person who bores others as well as one who bores himself. Those who bore others are the plebeians, the mass, the endless train of humanity in general. Those who bore themselves are the elect, the nobility; and how strange it is that those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all. This species of animal life, surely, is not the fruit of man’s desire and woman’s pleasure. Like all lower forms of life, it is distinguished by a high degree of fertility and multiplies beyond belief. Inconceivable, too, that nature should need nine months to produce creatures like these which one would rather suppose could be produced by the score. The other class of men, the select, are those who bore themselves. As remarked above, generally they amuse others, outwardly occasionally the mob, in a deeper sense their fellow initiates. The more profoundly they bore themselves, the more powerful a means of diversion they offer others, when boredom reaches its zenith, either by dying of boredom (the passive form) or (the active form) by shooting themselves out of curiosity.
Idleness, it is usually said, is a root of all evil. To prevent this evil one recommends work. However, it is easy to see from the remedy as well as the feared cause that this whole view is of very plebeian extraction. Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is not bored. Certainly, idleness may lead you to lose your fortune, and so on, but of such things the man of noble nature has no fear; what he fears is boredom. The Olympian gods were not bored, they prospered in happy idleness. A beauty who neither sews nor spins nor irons nor reads nor makes music is happy in her idleness, for she is not bored. So, far from idleness being the root of evil, rather it is the true good. The root of evil is boredom, and that is what must be kept at bay. Idleness is not evil; indeed, one can say that any human who lacks appreciation of it proves he has not raised himself to the level of humanity. There is a kind of restless activity that keeps a person out of the world of spirit and puts him in a class with the animals, which from instinct must always be on the go. There are people with an extraordinary gift for transforming everything into business, whose whole life is business, who fall in love and marry, listen to a joke and admire a work of art with the same zealous sense of affairs with which they work in the office. The Latin proverb, otium est pulvinar diaboli,7 is perfectly correct, but when one isn’t bored the devil gets no time to lay his head on that pillow. Yet in so far as people think it is characteristic of man to work, idleness and industry are properly opposed to each other. My own assumption is that it is characteristic of man to amuse himself; my opposites are therefore no less correct.
Boredom is demonic pantheism. If we remain in it as such it becomes evil; on the other hand, as soon as it is annulled it is true.8 But one annuls it only by amusing oneself – ergo one ought to amuse oneself. Saying work annuls it is to betray confusion, for though idleness, certainly, can be annulled by industry, seeing the latter is its opposite, boredom cannot, as one also sees that the busiest workers of all, those who in their officious buzzing about most resemble humming insects, are the most boring of all; and if they don’t bore themselves, that’s because they have no idea what boredom is; but in that case boredom is not annulled.
Boredom is partly an immediate talent, partly an acquired immediacy. Here the English are, on the whole, the paradigmatic nation. One seldom encounters a born talent for indolence, one never meets it in nature; indolence belongs to the world of spirit. Occasionally you meet an English traveller, however, who is an incarnation of this talent, a heavy immovable ground-hog whose linguistic resources are exhausted in a single one-syllable word, an interjection with which he signifies his greatest admiration and most profound indifference, because in the unity of boredom admiration and indifference have become indistinguishable. No other nation but the English produces such natural curiosities; other nationals are always a little more lively, not so absolutely stillborn. The only analogy I know is the apostle of empty enthusiasm, who also journeys through life on an interjection – that is, people who are always making a profession of enthusiasm, everywhere making their presence felt, and whether something significant or insignificant is taking place, cry ‘Ah!’ or ‘Oh!’, because for them the difference between significant and insignificant has become undone in enthusiasm’s blind and blaring emptiness. The acquired form of boredom is usually a product of a mistaken attempt at diversion. That the remedy for boredom can bring boredom about in this way seems doubtful, but it does so only to the extent that it is incorrectly applied. A misconceived, generally eccentric form of diversion also has boredom within it, and that is the way it finds its way out and proves to be the immediate. As with horses one distinguishes between blind staggers and sleepy staggers, but calls them both staggers, we can also make a distinction between two kinds of boredom which are still united in being specifications of boredom.
Pantheism, in general, contains the quality of fullness; with boredom it is the opposite, it is based on emptiness, but is for that very reason a pantheistic category.9 Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite. That the eccentric form of diversion mentioned above is based on boredom can also be seen from the fact that the diversion reverberates without making an echo, just because in nothing there isn’t even enough to make an echo possible.
Seeing that boredom is a root of all evil, as enlarged on above, what more natural than to try to overcome it? But here, as everywhere, cool deliberation is clearly called for lest in one’s demonic obsession with boredom, in trying to avoid it one only works oneself further into it. ‘Change’ is what all who are bored cry out for. With this I am entirely in agreement, only it is important to act from principle.
My own departure from the general view is adequately expressed in the phrase ‘crop rotation’. This phrase might seem to contain an ambiguity, and in wanting to make it commodious enough to cover the general method, I should have to say that the method of rotation consisted in constantly changing the soil. That, however, is not the sense in which the farmer uses it. Still, I will adopt this use for a moment, so as to talk of that ‘crop rotation’ which depends on the unlimited infinity of change, on its extensive dimension.
This rotation is the vulgar, the inartistic method, and is based on an illusion. One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one travels abroad; one is europamüde,10 one goes to America, and so on; finally, one indulges in a dream of endless travel from star to star. Or the movement is different but still in extension. One is tired of dining off porcelain, one dines off silver; one tires of that, one dines off gold; one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the conflagration at Troy. This method defeats itself; it is the bad infinite.11 And what did Nero achieve? No, Antonine was wiser; he says, ‘It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view.’12
The method I propose consists not in changing the soil but, as in the real rotation of crops, in changing the method of cultivation and type of grain. Here, straightaway, we have the principle of limitation, which is the only saving one in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life is most resourceful, a spider can cause him much amusement. One thinks of one’s schooldays. When one is at the age when no aesthetic considerations are taken in the choice of one’s teachers and the latter are for that very reason often very boring, how inventive one is! How amusing to catch a fly and keep it imprisoned under a nut shell and watch how it rushes about with the shell! What pleasure one can get by cutting a hole in the desk to imprison a fly in it, and spy down on it through a piece of paper! How entertaining it can be to hear the monotonous drip from the roof! How thorough an observer one becomes, the slightest noise or movement does not escape one! Here we have the extreme of the principle that seeks relief, not extensively, but intensively.
The more inventive one can be in changing the mode of cultivation, the better; but every particular change comes under the general rule of the relation between remembering and forgetting. The whole of life moves in these two currents, so it is essential to have control over them. Only when one has thrown hope overboard is it possible to live artistically; as long as one hopes, one cannot limit oneself. It is really beautiful to see a man put out to sea with the fair wind of hope; one can use the opportunity to be taken in tow, but one should never have it aboard one’s own ship, least of all as a pilot; for hope is a faithless steersman. Hope was therefore also one of the dubious gifts of Prometheus;13 instead of the foreknowledge of the immortals, he gave men hope.
To forget – all men want to do that, and when they come across something unpleasant they always say, ‘If only I could forget!’ But forgetting is an art that must be practised beforehand. Being able to forget depends always on how one remembers, but how one remembers depends in turn on how one experiences reality. The person who sticks fast in it with the momentum of hope will remember in a way that makes him unable to forget. Nil admirari14 is therefore the real wisdom of life. Every life-situation must possess no more importance than that one can forget it whenever one wants to; each single life-situation should have enough importance, however, for one to be able at any time to remember it. The age that remembers best, but is also the most forgetful, is childhood. The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for remembering poetically is really just an expression of forgetfulness. In remembering poetically, what was experienced has already undergone a change in which it has lost all that was painful. To remember in this way, one must be careful how one lives, especially how one enjoys. If one enjoys without reservation to the last, if one always takes with one the most that pleasure can offer, one will be unable either to remember or to forget. For then one has nothing else to remember than a surfeit one wants to forget, but which now plagues you with an involuntary remembrance. So when you begin to notice that you are being carried away by enjoyment or a life-situation too strongly, stop for a moment and remember. No other expedient gives a better distaste for going on too long. One must keep reins on the enjoyment from the beginning, not set all sail for everything you decide on. One indulges in a certain distrust; only then can one give the lie to the proverb which says that no one can have his cake and eat it too. The carrying of secret weapons is forbidden, indeed, by the police, yet no weapon is as dangerous as the trick of being able to remember. It is a peculiar feeling when, in the midst of enjoyment, one looks at it in order to remember.
Having perfected the art of forgetting and the art of remembering, one is then in a position to play battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence.
A person’s resilience can really be measured by the power to forget. A person unable to forget will never amount to much. Whether a Lethe flows somewhere I do not know,15 but what I do know is that this art can be developed. Yet it does not at all consist in the total disappearance of particular impressions; for the art of forgetting is not the same as forgetfulness. It is also easy to see what very little understanding people in general have of this art, for usually it is only the unpleasant they want to forget, not the pleasant. This betrays a complete one-sidedness. For forgetting is the proper expression of the real conversion that reduces experience to a sounding-board. The reason for nature’s greatness is that it has forgotten that it was once chaos, but this latter thought can recur whenever need be. Since one usually only conceives of forgetting in relation to what is unpleasant, one usually conceives it as an untamed power that drowns things out. Quite the contrary; forgetting is a quiet occupation and ought to be exercised as much in relation to what is pleasant as to what is unpleasant. As something past, indeed precisely as past, what is pleasant contains also an unpleasant side by being able to arouse a sense of privation. This unpleasantness is overcome by forgetting. The unpleasant has a sting, everyone admits that, and it, too, is removed by forgetting; but if one pushes the unpleasant aside altogether, as many of those who dabble in the art of forgetting do, one soon sees what good that does. In an unguarded moment, it often takes one by surprise with all the force of the sudden. This is in absolute contradiction to the well-organized arrangement in a reasonable mind. No misfortune, no hardship, is so hard to approach, so deaf that it cannot be flattered a little; even Cerberus accepted honey-cakes, and it is not just young girls one beguiles.16 One talks it round and in doing so deprives it of its bite, by no means does one want to forget it; one forgets it in order to remember it. Yes, even with those memories for which one might think eternal oblivion was the only remedy, one permits oneself this cunning, and the deft will succeed in the deception. Forgetting is the shears with which one clips away what one cannot use – though, mind you, under the overall supervision of memory. Forgetting and memory are thus identical, and the skilfully achieved identity is the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world. In saying that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved.
The art of remembering and forgetting will then also prevent one’s sticking fast in some particular circumstance in life and ensure perfect suspension.
So one must be on one’s guard against friendship. How is a friend defined? A friend is not what philosophy calls ‘the necessary other’, but the superfluous third. What are the ceremonies of friendship? One thous and thees in a glass, one opens an artery, one mixes one’s blood with the friend’s. The exact arrival of this moment is hard to determine, but it mysteriously proclaims itself, one feels it, one can no longer use the formal ‘You’ in addressing each other.17 Once this feeling has occurred, one can never prove mistaken, as was Gert Westphaler, who discovered that he had been drinking with the public hangman.18 – What are the infallible marks of friendship? Antiquity answers, idem velle, idem nolle, ea demum firma amicitia,19 and extremely boringly at that. What significance has friendship? Mutual assistance in word and deed. So two friends form a close association in order to be everything for one another, regardless that all the one can be for the other is in the way. Yes, they may help each other with money, on and off with each other’s coats, be each other’s humble servant, join in a sincere New Year’s greeting, likewise in matrimony, birth and burial.
But to abstain from friendship doesn’t mean that you are to live without human contact. Quite the contrary, human relationships of the kind may also sometimes take on a deeper surge, except that, although you share the speed of the movement for a time, you always have enough speed in hand to be able to run away from it. One no doubt thinks that such behaviour leaves unpleasant memories, that the unpleasantness consists in the fact that, after having meant something to you, the relation dwindles away into nothing. But this is a misunderstanding. Unpleasantness is a piquant ingredient in the contrariety of life. Besides, the same relationship can acquire significance again in another way. What one must watch out for is never to stick fast, and for that one must have one’s forgetting up one’s sleeve. The experienced farmer now and then lets his land lie fallow; the theory of social prudence recommends the same. All things, no doubt, will return, but in another way; what has once been taken into rotation remains there but is varied through the mode of cultivation. It is quite consistent, therefore, to hope to meet old friends and acquaintances in a better world; but one does not share the fear of the masses, that they will have changed too much for one to be able to recognize them again. One fears, rather, that they may be unchanged. It is incredible how much significance even an insignificant person can gain through such rational management.
One never enters into marriage. Married couples promise each other eternal love. That is all very fine but does not mean very much, for when one is finished with time, one will no doubt be finished with eternity. So if, instead of saying ‘forever’, the parties said, ‘until Easter’, or ‘until the first May-Day’, then at least their words would have meaning for they would have actually said something, something they could perhaps keep to. And how does it go with a marriage? After a little while one party begins to notice that something’s wrong; then the other party complains and cries out, ‘Faithlessness, faithlessness!’ After some time the other party arrives at the same point and a state of neutrality is brought about, in that the mutual faithlessness balances out to the satisfaction and contentment of both. But now it is too late, for there are great difficulties connected with divorce.
Such being the case with marriage, it is not surprising that it has to be stiffened in so many ways with moral supports. When a husband wants to be divorced from his wife, people cry, ‘He is contemptible, a scoundrel’, etc. How silly, and what an indirect attack upon marriage! Either marriage has reality in it, in which case he is sufficiently punished by forfeiting the latter; or it has no reality in it, in which case it is indeed absurd to abuse him, for he is wiser than others. If a man grew tired of his money and threw it out of the window, no one would say he was a contemptible person; for either the money has reality, and then he is sufficiently punished by depriving himself of it, or it has no reality, and then indeed he is wise.
One must always be careful not to enter into any life-relation in which one can become several. For this reason friendship is already dangerous, even more so marriage. A married couple are indeed said to become one, but this is a very dark and mysterious saying. When you are several you have lost your freedom and cannot order travelling boots when you will, cannot roam aimlessly about. If you have a wife it is difficult; if you have a wife and may have children, it is troublesome; if you have a wife and do have children, it is impossible. We do, indeed, have the example of a gypsy woman carrying her husband on her back through life,20 but for one thing it is a rare occurrence, and for another, in the long run wearisome – for the husband. Besides, in marriage one falls into extremely fateful line with practice and custom, and, like wind and weather, practice and custom are very hard to pin down. In Japan, I am told, it is practice and custom for the husbands too to he in childbed. Why shouldn’t the time come when Europe introduces the customs of foreign countries?
Friendship is already dangerous, marriage still more so, for the woman is and will remain the husband’s ruin as soon as he enters into a permanent relation with her. Take a young man, ardent as an Arabian horse, let him marry, he is lost. First of all the woman is proud, then she is weak, then she faints, then he faints, then the whole family faints. A woman’s love is only dissimulation and weakness.
But not entering into marriage need not mean that one’s life lacks eroticism. The erotic should also have infinitude, but poetic infinitude, which can just as well be limited to an hour as to a month. When two people fall in love and suspect they are made for each other, the thing is to have the courage to break it off, for by continuing they only have everything to lose and nothing to gain. It seems a paradox and is so, for feeling, not for understanding. In this domain it is especially important to be able to use moods; if one can do that, then one can bring off an inexhaustible variety of combinations.
One never accepts any vocational responsibility. If one does so, one simply becomes Mr Anybody, a tiny little pivot in the machinery of the corporate state; you cease to direct your own affairs, and then theories can be of little help. One acquires a title, and in it is contained all the consistency of sin and evil. The law one is then in thrall to is equally boring, whether promotion is rapid or slow. A title is something one can never be rid of again, it would have to be lost through some crime which incurs a public whipping, and even then you are not certain, for you may be pardoned and have your title restored to you by royal decree.
Though one abstains from vocational responsibility, one should not be inactive but stress all occupation that is identical with idleness; one must engage in all kinds of breadless skills. Yet in this connection one should develop oneself not so much extensively as intensively, and in spite of being on in years, prove the truth of the old proverb that it takes little to please a child.
If, then, in accordance with the theory of social prudence, one to some extent varies the soil – for if one were to live only in relation to one person the rotation method would turn out as badly as if a farmer had only one acre of land, the result of which would be to make it impossible for him to let land lie fallow, which is of the utmost importance – then one must also constantly vary oneself, and this is really the secret. To that end one must necessarily have control of moods. Controlling them in the sense of being able to produce them at will is impossible, but prudence teaches how to make use of the instant. As an experienced sailor always looks out searchingly over the water and sees a squall far ahead, so should one always see the mood a little in advance. One must know how the mood affects oneself, and in all probability others, before putting it on. One strokes the strings first to elicit pure tones and see what there is in a person, and the intermediate tones follow later. The more practice you have, the more readily you will be convinced that often there is much in a person which one never considers. When sensitive people, who as such are extremely boring, become angry, they are often very diverting. Teasing in particular is an excellent means of exploration.
The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People think it requires no skill to be arbitrary, yet it requires deep study to succeed in being arbitrary without losing oneself in it, to derive satisfaction from it oneself. One’s enjoyment is not immediate but is something quite different which one arbitrarily injects. You see the middle of a play, read the third part of a book. In this way one derives a quite different enjoyment from the one the author has been so good as to intend for you. One enjoys something entirely accidental, one regards the whole of existence from this standpoint, lets its reality run aground on it. I will give an example. There was someone whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. He was ready at every opportunity with a little philosophical lecture which was utterly boring. Driven almost to despair, I discovered suddenly that he perspired unusually profusely when he spoke. I saw how the pearls of sweat gathered on his brow, then joined in a stream, slid down his nose, and ended hanging in a drop at the extreme tip of it. From that moment everything was changed; I could even take pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, just to observe the sweat on his brow and on his nose.
Baggesen says somewhere of a man that he was no doubt a very decent person, but that he had one objection to make to him: nothing rhymed with his name.21 It is extremely beneficial to let the realities of life neutralize themselves in this way on an arbitrary interest of this kind. You transform something accidental into the absolute and, as such, into an object of absolute admiration. This works particularly excellently when tempers are aroused. For many people this method is an excellent stimulus. One looks at everything in life as a wager, and so on. The more consistently one can sustain the arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations. The degree of consistency always shows whether one is an artist or a dabbler, for to some extent people all do the same. The eye with which one looks at reality must constantly change. The Neo-Platonists supposed that those human beings who had been less perfect on earth became, after death, more or less perfect animals, depending on their deserts. Those, for example, who had exercised civic virtues on a smaller scale (retail traders) became civic animals, bees for example. Such a view of life, which sees all persons transformed into animals or plants (Plotinus also thought that some were transformed into plants), offers a rich multiplicity of variations. The painter Tischbein has tried to idealize every human being as an animal. His method has the fault of being too serious, and that it seeks a real resemblance.22
To the arbitrariness within oneself there corresponds the accidental outside one. One should therefore always keep an eye open for the accidental, always be expeditus23 if anything should offer. The so-called social pleasures, for which one prepares eight or fourteen days in advance, have no great interest. Through accident, on the other hand, even the least significant thing can become a rich source of amusement. It is impossible here to go into detail, no theory can stretch that far. Even the most comprehensive theory is still but poverty compared with what, in his ubiquity, the genius easily comes by.