Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in the English language during the nineteenth century and he remains one of the best selling authors of all time.

He can seem remote: the frock coat, velvet collar, the fishtail beard, bow tie…

But he has a lot to say to us today. And that’s because he had a remarkable ambition: he believed writing could play a big role in fixing the problems of the world.

Entertainment

Dickens didn’t just write. From the very beginning, he was a showman. As a child, he loved putting on plays in the family kitchen and singing songs standing on a table in the local pub.

He was a performer – a star, an exceptional showman.

Often to the dismay of later literary friends, entertainment remained at the heart of the literary enterprise for Dickens. Even after he had secured his reputation as ‘the Inimitable’, he adapted his own novels for public readings and from 1858 took them out to perform himself to audiences in Britain and America. Profound as his works were, he was never any doubt that they were also entertainments.

Dickens is always hoping to get us interested in the evils of an industrialising society – horrendous working conditions in factories, child labour, vicious social snobbery, the degradation of the poor, the reckless scramble for money and the maddening inefficiencies of government bureaucracy… In theory we recognise that these – and their modern versions – are worthy themes. But when we are honest with ourselves, we admit that they don’t sound very inviting as things to read about in a novel in bed or at the airport.

Dickens’s genius discovery was that the big ambitions to educate his society about its failings and to spur social reform didn’t have to be opposed to what his critics called ‘fun’ – racy plots, a chatty style, clownish characters, weepy moments and happy endings. He rejected the idea that we have to make a fatal choice between being worthy but dull or popular but shallow. He set out to educate via entertaining – because he so well understood how easy it is for us individually and collectively to resist certain tricky but important lessons.

Dickens is significant because he was working out – for his own time – how to do something that’s crucial for ours: how to be seductive about serious things.

Sympathy

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on February 7 1812. His father was a clerk in the Navy Office; they had to constantly move to follow his different appointments. It was a genteel life at first but there were always money troubles looming. When he was only ten,Dickens had to leave school because his parents could no longer afford the modest fees. He was sent to work in London at a blacking factory where they made polish for giving a dark sheen, much admired at the time, to metal surfaces. It was a grim experience. He hated the fumes and numbing speed with which he had to carry out repetitive tasks; the people he worked around were bullying and sinister.

Then his father was arrested for debt. At that time debtors could be confined to prison, along with their dependents, by their creditors until they they were able to start paying off what they owed. The whole family moved into the squalid Marshalsea Prison, except young Dickens who lodged nearby and continued with his horrible job.

Part of the continuing popular affection for Dickens comes from his strong sense of the precariousness of life and the deep compassion for those who are its victims. When his life improved (in his early twenties he discovered that he was an outstandingly brilliant journalist), Dickens was very good at remembering his own suffering. He used it in a very clever way. He always put really nice characters into the awful places of Victorian England. The blacking factory is described in David Copperfield, through the eyes of young David – who is a sensitive, intelligent, charming child. David is the reader when young, or the reader’s son or nephew. Dickens is saying: imagine someone like you, or someone you like, was in there.

When he writes about Poor Houses (which were local forced labour camps for people unable to support themselves) Dickens sends in little Oliver Twist – who actually belongs to a well to do family from whom he has been separated by a series of tragic accidents. He’s not at all typical of the people who ended up in Poor Houses, but he’s there so his readers (who at that time would be generally quite prosperous) can think: what if it were me?

On one occasion when Dickens shows us the miseries of a debtor prison, it’s in the company of a loveable buffoon – a rather muddled but very sweet and well meaning man called Mr Micawber. The background, protective assumption that only rather shady types could end up here is punctured.

Dickens was working with a key assumption: of course everyone knew already that there were Poor Houses, horrible working conditions and Debtors’ Prisons: these were obvious facts of early 19th century life in England. The point was that comfortable people – the kind of people who had the power to change things, if they were motivated – generally didn’t feel much sense of urgency. They didn’t feel personally connected to the problems.

Dickens used his own experience to get people to feel interested in, and sympathetic to, the plight of others that they’d normally have been emotionally distanced from. He didn’t say: look how awful it is for them; he says: here’s what it would be like for you.

In an ideal world, we’d perhaps care equally about everyone; but, in reality, our concern is much more readily directed towards the misfortunes of people we find likeable. So, if like Dickens, your project is to draw attention to a failure of the system, it’s probably a good strategy that he’s using: get us to like the people who are having a hard time and we’ll start to feel engaged.

Nice, ordinary things

The other thing that Dickens did – to keep us on board with his high-minded vision of social reform – was to keep on showing how well he understood the cosy, pleasing, enjoyable things of life. He desperately didn’t want the big causes to come across as meaning you couldn’t keep on liking all the sweet comforts of life. He was particularly good at evoking the pleasures of home. In one of his novels (Our Mutual Friend) he take us to the house of a loveable old eccentric who has refashioned his small suburban house as a miniature castle, complete with a tiny drawbridge that can be pulled up (by lengths of twine) to keep the wild world at bay. Dickens loves picnics, games of cricket in the park, going shopping for a new tie, a sizzling chop, doughnuts, sitting by the fire, having friends round for dinner, warm blankets and going on holiday. Being a caring and good person – he is saying – doesn’t mean disdaining the ordinary small pleasures.

It’s a key element in his general strategy. He knows that it’s hard to get people to care about difficult things if you don’t start from a deep recognition of what we like already. Otherwise you come across as cold and a bit obsessive.

Business

Dickens took the practical, business side of writing very seriously. He was immensely productive. He didn’t have the ideal of producing a single perfect work, polished over many years. He churned out his books. And he was deeply concerned about copyright laws, sales figures and profit margins.

But Dickens didn’t simply want to sell a lot of novels; he wanted to change things in the world; but he knew perfectly well that a book wouldn’t have an effect unless it was in wide circulation – unless the business side was going well.

His writing draws attention to many things that were going wrong: the Poor Law (which forced people into Work houses); the dreadful state of schools, rampant nepotism, and harsh working conditions. But he wasn’t trying to advocate specific schemes of reform. If you’d asked Dickens what exactly the Government should do to improve the conditions in factories or what a better legal system would look like he wouldn’t have had a carefully worked out alternative policy to hand.

What he was doing was shaping the climate of feeling and opinion. Which makes it much easier for people trying to get an act through parliament, raise funds, or make local improvements. Others can much more readily see the point, the issues move up the mental agenda and feel closer to home.

* * *

Dickens was very interested in trying to help the world, and hugely sensitive to the suffering of others. But closer to home things didn’t work out so well. He wasn’t a good husband or father.

He got married in 1837 (when he was in his mid-twenties) to Catherine Hogarth and they had ten children together, eight of whom survived into adulthood. But Dickens increasingly found her dull and passive and when he was in his mid-forties, he fell in love with an 19-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. He couldn’t get divorced – it was completely taboo for a major public figure to take such a step. They separated. His wife left, after twenty years together, and never saw him again.

Catherine Hogarth

Dickens was unimpressed by all of his children, whom he regarded as idle and ever ready to sponge off him. They were prone to drinking too much and to gambling.

He’s a painful reminder of the terrible conflicts that can arise between different kinds of devotion. Dickens was immensely painstaking with his work, he’d stay up as late as needed, he’d think of it first thing in the morning; he’d exhaust himself, he’d use every resource of his imagination to improve it. Yet around his children and his wife he was plodding, conventional and often coldly detached.  

Ellen Ternan

We could blame him and say he should have been a better partner and father. Or we could feel a touch of pity for the horrible limitation of our nature which makes it hard for us to be very good at two very different kinds of thing at the same time. And hopefully a little of this pity can extend to ourselves, since we are the ones who now actually need it.

On 8 June 1870, when he was 58, Dickens died at home after his usual intense day’s work. He was at the early stages of his fifteenth novel. The Guardian published an obituary the next day:

‘Wherever the English language is spoken the intelligence we publish this morning of the decease of Mr Charles Dickens will be received with feelings of deep regret. Early last night it became known that the distinguished novelist had been seized with paralysis, at his residence, Gad’s Hill, Kent.’

Dickens’s power doesn’t lie just in the particular things he wrote. What’s even more impressive is the bigger idea to which he was loyal all his life: that the task of writing, and art more generally, is to make goodness attractive; to make it easier and bearable for us to learn uncomfortable lessons; and to broaden our sympathies by helping us identify with people whose outwards lives may be unlike ours but whose inner lives are not dissimilar – and through this – to create the cultural foundation for a more humane and happier society.

James Joyce is one of the most revered writers in the English language and a central figure in the history of the novel. He is still hugely important to us because of his devotion to some crucial themes: the idea of the grandeur of ordinary life, his determination to portray what actually goes through our heads moment by moment (what we now know as the stream of consciousness) and his determination to capture on the page what language really sounds like in our own minds.

Born in 1882, James Joyce spent the first 20 years of his life in and around Dublin and the rest wandering in and between the European cities of Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. In three decades, he published two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, a play, and three novels, all of them different in scope and scale, but sharing one thing in common: Dublin, a city he loved and hated. “Each of my books,” he once explained to a friend, “is a book about Dublin. Dublin is a city of scarcely 300,000 population, but it has become the universal city of my work.”

Joyce in Zurich, c. 1918

At the end of the 19th century, Dublin was the second city of the British Empire. Like his father, Joyce was fiercely opposed to Ireland’s status as a British colony, and supported the cause of Irish independence. Joyce was educated by the Jesuits, and early on at school, began to reveal his knack for foreign languages. By the time he arrived at University College, Dublin, Joyce was writing book reviews, poems, and short stories, but he also needed to find a career. He tried medical school in Paris, but spent more time in brothels and bars than the library.

In 1904, he met a young woman from Galway named Nora Barnacle, who was uneducated but highly erotic and compelling to Joyce. When she first saw him she thought he was a nordic seaman, with ‘electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls. But when he spoke, well then, I knew him at once for just another worthless Dublin boaster trying to chat up a country girl.’ But she fell in love with him and remained devoted through all their difficult life together.

James Joyce, Giorgio Joyce, Nora Barnacle and Lucia Joyce in Paris, 1924

After a few months, she agreed to follow him to Europe for a self-imposed exile, free from the morality of the Catholic Church and the subjugation of the British Empire. They eventually landed in Trieste, an Austro-Hungarian port town where they would spend the next 10 years, raising two children, both of them given Italian names (Lucia and Giorgio). Joyce eked out a meager existence as a language teacher at the Berlitz School and translating Irish writers like Yeats and Oscar Wilde into Italian.

1914 turned out to be Joyce’s year of breakthrough when a publisher in London finally decided to bring out his book of short stories, Dubliners which had been rejected 22 times, and the American poet, Ezra Pound, arranged to get his novel, A Portrait of the Artist, serialised. This was followed by the serialisation of Ulysses in 1918, the book which made Joyce’s name around the world.

Joyce’s grave in Zurich

For the next 23 years, Joyce’s reputation grew and he took his experiments with language and literary form ever further – until his unexpected and sudden death in Zurich in 1941. He was buried in Fluntern Cemetery, just near Zurich’s main zoo.

1. The grandeur of everyday life

Joyce’s principle work Ulysses is named after the most dramatic adventure story the ancient Greeks handed down to Western civilisation. It is seen as a pinnacle of high culture and tells the story of the long wanderings of the hero, Ulysses, on his journey back from the siege of Troy to Ithaca, his home. But the major character of Joyce’s novel is not a warrior king or a great hero. He is, instead, a very flawed, quite kindly and quite foolish man called Leopold Bloom. He works as a minor player in the advertising industry, he is married (but his wife is having an affair), he’s been sacked from a string of jobs and he is very much given to daydreaming about all the things he would love to go right in his life – but which we know won’t happen. He farts, he likes looking at women in the street, he dreams of winning competitions in weekly magazines and of owning a cottage by the sea. Being Jewish, he is a bit of an outsider in Catholic Dublin and there are various little humiliations which he has to put up with all the time. He is very unlike a traditional hero, but he is representative of our average, unimpressive, fragile – but rather likeable – every-day selves.

Joyce lavishes attention on Leopold Bloom. He treats him a deeply worthy of respect and immense interest, he’s someone (Joyce suggests) we should learn from and try in certain ways to be like – just as in the ancient world, Ulysses was held up as an inspiring model of resourceful and brave conduct.

Joyce’s drawing of Leopold Bloom

We follow Bloom for a whole day as he wanders around Dublin, we see him having lunch, buying his supper, drinking coffee and cocoa; he worries about his relationship with his wife and his daughter, he goes to work, he listens to someone singing, he has various conversations. Joyce is saying that the apparently little things that happen in daily life (eating, feeling sorry for someone, feeling sorry for oneself, putting the washing on the clothes line, getting embarrassed) aren’t really ‘little things’ at all. If we look at them through the right lens they are revealed as beautiful, serious, deep and fascinating. Our own lives are just as interesting as those of the traditional heroes, but we’re less good at appreciating them. The helpful lens is supplied initially by Joyce’s novel, but ideally we should internalise it and make it our own: we should accept ourselves as minor legitimate heroes of our own dignified lives.

2. Stream of Consciousness

Traditionally, novels (like most films today) shows us people speaking in well-formulated, clear and relevant sentences. And we tend to suppose (without really thinking about it) that this is a fair reflection of their inner life. They speak the thoughts and feelings they have.

But this isn’t Joyce’s way at all. Joyce takes us into our minds and tries to show us what thinking really sounds like. At one point in Ulysses Leopold Bloom muses on the cycle of life while he’s watching the tram cars and people in the street.

Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging, clanging. Useless words. Things go on the same day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

It’s a strange – and yet actually very familiar – muddle of high and low concerns, he’s thinking about birth and death and the random shortness of life and the idea of religion (‘washed with the blood of the lamb’ is a line from a Christian hymn) but also thinking about that he fed some birds, the ordinary rhythms of daily life, the noisy trams and the fundamental oddity of language – in which sounds we make with our mouths stand for things in the world.

If we could slice the top off people’s heads and get a view into the diverse thoughts that circulate and cut across one another – contradicting and confusing one another – we’d have a much more accurate picture of our fellow humans. And one radically at odds with the image we typically have: that people are psychological monoliths with clear, definite and fixed views who are very clear what they believe and care about (and don’t care about). Joyce – like other modernist describers of stream of consciousness thoughts and feelings – is suggesting that if we knew more about what others and ourselves really thought and felt we’d have a clearer sense of what it means to be human; and we’d also perhaps be slower to anger, quicker to forgive; we’d love more and hate less. We’d be more curious about the apparently strange byways our own minds – and those of others – are endlessly following.  

3. The Wonder of Language

The more Joyce went beneath the surface of our utterances to reveal the cacophony of our minds, the more he felt the need to twist and remould language itself to capture how we sound to ourselves.

In his last and truly puzzling novel, Finnegans Wake, Joyce decided to create his own version of English, a “tower of babble,” by mixing together bits and piece of more than 40 languages. Sometimes the words on the page look entirely foreign, but if you sound them out, you can often find the sense. “Hereweareagain” means what it says: it’s just that the words are jammed together, to reflect the speed of the mind in action. Joyce went in for many “portamanteau” words, two or more words stuck together to create a new one. A “funferall” is a fun funeral or a fun for all: a bisexcycle is a bisexual or a bicycle for sex. He twisted prestigious names: so Shakespeare becomes Shakehisbeard and Dante Alighieri Denti Alligator.

A drawing of Joyce by Djuna Barnes from 1922, the year in which Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake

The plot, in so far as there is one in Finnegans Wake, is about a man called Tim Finnegan, who falls from a ladder, dies, and comes back to life when someone spills whiskey on his face during the wake. It is intended as a universal story about the fall of mankind, and the character of Tim Finnegan is also meant to be, simultaneously, Adam, Noah, Richard III, Napoleon, and the Irish nationalist Charles Parnell. There is indeed a plot in this book, but it is not one, Joyce explained sarcastically, that can “be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

In attempting to be completely faithful to real life in all its true confusion and complexity, Joyce ended up writing a book that is fascinatingly, instructively unreadable. The fourth sentence of the first chapter runs: ‘Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.’ It’s a reminder of how much fiction, when it seems logical and understandable, is always necessarily a drastic foreshortening of what is actually going on in the world and the minds of characters. Joyce pushed one possibility of the realistic novel as far as it could go – into a realm as mysterious, haunting and perplexing as the dreams of a stranger.

Conclusion: What is art for?

Joyce spent the greater part of his life writing. What was he hoping to achieve through his art? What is art for?

In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce gets his spokesman Stephen to have a go at spelling out an answer. He follows a surprisingly traditional route, using two terms from the medieval philosopher St Thomas Aquinas.

Joyce in Zurich in 1915

The first is Integritas: This means that an artist is someone who attempts to grasp with unusual vigour the true integrity and identity of what is being studied. It might be a tree, a moment of history or the life of a fictional character in 20th century Dublin. We don’t normally do this, we don’t really concentrate on what a person is saying or doing, or what objects around us really are and look like – we don’t normally isolate and study carefully. Art has the job of doing this for us, and teaching us to do so habitually.  

The second step for an artist is to bring Claritas – or clarity: which means shining the light of reason into the murkier parts of experience and life.

The paradox is that Joyce did just this, but in his attempt to be clear about what being human is actually like, he created works which are in places utterly baffling to the reader in a hurry. That shouldn’t surprise us too long though. Art – as Joyce sees it – should be a corrective to our natural, but dangerous, blindness and inattention, to cliché and over-rapid summary. If it sometimes puzzles us, we know – says Joyce – that it’s doing its job properly; it’s re-awakening us to mysteries we have too quickly grown blind to.

Jacques Derrida was one of the most famous, controversial, but also wise figures in recent French intellectual life. He invented a way of doing philosophy that he called deconstruction, which fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields, especially literary studies.

There have been places and periods of history when only a congenital optimist could have had any hope for the future of our species. Think of the end of Athens’s golden age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the petering out of the Renaissance, the close of the Enlightenment, the rise of fascism…

It’s when things look bleak indeed that it pays to remember the German 19th century philosopher Hegel. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, published in 1830, Hegel offered us a way of looking at the darker periods of history that neither glosses over their pain nor refuses to give up hope – but intelligently helps us to understand why human progress cannot be linear while encouraging us to trust that it does occur nevertheless.

For Hegel, history moves forward in what he termed a dialectical way. A dialectic is a philosophical term for an argument made up of three parts:

1. A thesis
2. An antithesis
3. And a synthesis

Both the thesis and the antithesis contain parts of the truth, but they are also exaggerations and distortions of the whole, and so need to clash and interact, until their best elements find resolution in a synthesis. 

Hegel thought this pattern a constant in history. The world makes progress by lurching from one extreme to another, as it seeks to overcompensate for previous mistakes and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found.

For example, the Ancient Athenians discovered the idea of individual liberty, but their regime was blind to the need for collective discipline and organisation. The Ancient Persians knew all about that and were thereby able to conquer the Athenians on the battlefield, yet they were also despotic enemies of free thought, which with time became its own liability. It took many centuries for the correct synthesis between liberty and discipline to be worked out in the form of the Roman Empire.

In Hegel’s own era, the stifling, unfair 18th-century system of inherited monarchy had been abolished by the French Revolution – but what should have been the peaceful birth of representative government ended up in the anarchy and chaos of the Terror. This in turn led to the emergence of Napoleon, who restored order but became a military brute, trampling on the liberty he had professed to love. Only after forty years and much bloodshed did the modern ‘balanced constitution’ emerge, an arrangement which more sensibly balanced up popular representation with the rights of minorities.

Or to take another example, the European Enlightenment had stressed the importance of Reason, but it had in many parts been sterile and reductive. The movement known as Romanticism had then swept in to assert the importance of Emotion but this had carried excesses of its own. Only eventually had a correct reconciliation been worked out between the legitimate, competing needs of Reason and Emotion.

Hegel’s argument has a highly consoling feel at moments when it seems that one kind of progress has been entirely lost. He is on hand to reassure us that we are merely seeing the pendulum swing back for a time but also wisely counselled that this was needed because the initial move forward had been blind to a range of crucial insights. All sides on a matter will contain important truths lodged amidst exaggerations, and bombast  – yet will eventually be sifted through the wisdom of time.

Hegel reminds us that big overreactions are eminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction. The dark moments aren’t the end, they’re a challenging but even in some ways necessary part of an antithesis that will – eventually – locate a wiser point of synthesis.

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In March 1845, the United States acquired a new president – James K. Polk – a forceful, aggressive political outsider intent on strengthening his country and asserting its pre-eminence in front of other world powers, especially Mexico and Great Britain. Within a year of his inauguration, he had declared full-scale war on Mexico because of squabbles over the Texan border, and was soon rattling his saber at Britain over the ownership of Oregon. To complete the picture, Polk was a vigorous defender of slavery, who dismissed the arguments of abolitionists as naive and sentimental.

James K. Polk

Polk was a popular president, admired by many for his gung-ho manner, but a sizeable minority of the citizenry disliked him intensely. One especially committed opponent was a writer from Massachusetts called Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is now a canonical American literary figure, studied in every high school for his lyrical masterpiece, Walden. But there is another, more political side to Thoreau, now usually air-brushed out of the story, which came to the fore in relation to the President.

Thoreau quickly realised he was opposed to everything Polk stood for: he hated what became the Mexican-American war, instinctively siding with the losing Mexican side, was wary of Polk’s squabbles with Britain and was appalled by the administration’s policy of hunting down and returning runaway slaves to their masters in the South.

His anger against his President found its impassioned expression in an essay he published in 1849, now known as Civil Disobedience. At the heart of the essay is the question of what an honest citizen should do about a president he or she wholeheartedly opposes. The prevailing view was that because Polk had won a majority, those who were against him should now fall silent. It should – it was often said – be the duty of a good citizen to fold away their objections and respect the will of the majority.

But this was precisely the point Thoreau wished to probe and upturn. He suggested that true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration. They were those who followed their own consciences and in particular, the principles of reason. Thoreau wished to redistribute prestige away from blinkered obedience towards independent thought. What marked out a noble citizen of the republic, a real American, was not – in Thoreau’s view – that they respectfully shut up, but that they thought for themselves every day of an administration’s life.

On the basis of just this kind of independent thinking, Thoreau signalled a radical opposition to Polk’s term. He denounced the Mexican-American war, the repatriation of slaves and the outlook of the government more generally. So as to underline his opposition, Thoreau held back payment of his taxes. In July 1846, he walked into Concord, Massachusetts to get his shoes repaired and was arrested and thrown into the town’s jail. Thoreau saw nothing undignified about spending some time behind bars. As he wrote: ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is a prison.’

‘All machines have their friction,’ Thoreau admitted, but when injustice is too great, you should ‘let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.’

Thoreau didn’t advocate the non-payment of taxes as a rule, and in fact, a well-meaning aunt soon paid his bill. The non-payment was just one example of the many non-violent ways that a democratically elected government could and must be resisted when its actions veer into aggression and unreason. An election settles who the president might be, it doesn’t determine that everything that president does is right or that one should simply do nothing until the next election.

Thoreau

Above all, Thoreau hated political passivity. Sarcastically he wrote: ‘There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.’ This would not be his way: ‘How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.’ He argued that the citizen must never just ‘resign his conscience to the legislation’ and put himself ‘at the service of some unscrupulous man in power.’

He mocked that ‘most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders… are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.”

Thoreau would not be such a servant. This most American of writers knew exactly whom it was right for him to serve: his own mind and conscience.

Machiavelli was a 16th century Florentine political thinker with powerful advice for nice people who don’t get very far.

His thought pivots around a central, uncomfortable observation: that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act with the darkest ingenuity and cunning to further their cause. They are not held back by those rigid opponents of change: principles. They will be prepared to outright lie, twist facts, threaten or get violent. They will also – when the situation demands it – know how to seductively deceive, use charm and honeyed words, bedazzle and distract. And in this way, they conquer the world.

It’s routinely assumed that a large part of what it means to be a good person is that one acts well. One doesn’t only have good ends, one is committed to good means. So if one wants a more serious world, one needs to win people over through serious argument, not clickbait. If one wants a fairer world, one has to judiciously and gently try to persuade the agents of injustice to surrender willingly, not through intimidation. And if one wants people to be kind, one must show kindness to one’s enemies, not ruthlessness.

It sounds splendid but Machiavelli couldn’t overlook an incontrovertible problem. It doesn’t work. As he looked back over the history of Florence and the Italian states more generally, he observed that nice princes, statesmen and merchants always come unstuck.

This was why he wrote the book for which we know him today, The Prince, a short deeply original manual of advice for well-disposed princes on how not to finish last. And the answer, in short, was to be as nice as one wished, but never to be overly devoted to acting nicely: and indeed to know how to borrow – when need be – every single trick employed by the most cynical, dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.

Machiavelli knew where our counter-productive obsession with acting nicely originated from: the West was brought up on the Christian story of Jesus of Nazareth, the very nice man from Galilee who always treated people well and wound up as the king of kings and the ruler of eternity.

But Machiavelli pointed out an inconvenient detail to this sentimental tale of the triumph of goodness through meekness. From a practical perspective, Jesus’s life was an outright disaster. This gentle soul was trampled upon and humiliated, disregarded and mocked. Judged in his lifetime and outside of any divine assistance, he was one of history’s greatest losers.

And so, proposed Machiavelli, the secret to being effective lies in overcoming all vestiges of this story. The Prince was not, as is often thought, a guide to being a tyrant; it’s a guide about what nice people should learn from tyrants. It’s a book about how to be effective, not just good. It’s a book haunted by examples of the impotence of the pure.

The admirable prince – and today we might add, the CEO, political activist or thinker – should learn every lesson from the slickest, most devious operators around. They should know how to scare and intimidate, cajole and bully, entrap and beguile. The good politician needs to learn from the demagogue; the earnest entrepreneur from the trickster.

We are all ultimately the sum of what we achieve, not what we intend. If we care about wisdom, kindness, seriousness and virtue, but only ever act wisely, kindly, seriously and virtuously, we will get nowhere.

 We need to learn lessons from an unexpected source: those we temperamentally most despise. They have the most to teach us about how to bring about the reality we yearn for – but that they are fighting against. We need weapons of similar grade steel to theirs.

Ultimately, we should care more about being effective than simply nobly intentioned. It is not enough to dream well: the true measure is what we achieve. The point is to change the world for the better, not reside in the quiet comfort of good intentions and a warm heart.

All this Machiavelli knew.

He disturbs us for good reason; because he probes us where we are at our most self-serving. We tell ourselves we didn’t get there because we are a little too pure, good and kind. Machiavelli bracingly informs us we are stuck because we have been too short-sighted to learn from those who really know: our enemies.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, a celebrated Romanian-French philosopher and aphorist was invited to speak in Zurich. He was introduced with rhetorical pomp and flattering comparisons to the likes of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. The speaker smiled, and immediately confounded his German interpreter by beginning his presentation with the words: ‘Mais je ne suis qu’un déconneur’ / ‘But I’m just a joker’.

A few of his critics might agree, but they would be wrong. For Emil Mihai Cioran is very much worthy of inclusion in the line of the great French and European moral philosophers and writers of maxims stretching back to Montaigne, Chamfort, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld.

Cioran was born in Rasinari, Romania, in April 1911. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest. Both facts were to be key in his later work. The writer’s Romanian origins are often taken as the source of a brooding, Romantic, fatalistic temperament while his father’s ecclesiastical calling finds echoes in his son’s unswerving preoccupation with themes of religion, sainthood and the dangers and joys of atheism.

From 1920 to 1927, Cioran studied at the lycée in Sibiu, in the outer reaches of Transylvania.

In 1934, at the age of only 23, he published his first book in Romanian, On the Heights of Despair. The book contains in embryo much of the lucidly bleak, nihilistic thinking that he’d develop throughout his life. He explained that writing had been an alternative to shooting himself.

This is an author to read at moments of despair and melancholy. He doesn’t depress us, merely makes us feel less alone with our sorrows.

Here is a peak inside his work:

‘It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.’

‘Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?’

‘Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.’

And:

‘What do you do from morning to night?’

‘I endure myself.’

1937 proved a pivotal year for Cioran. He moved to Paris and soon became a French citizen. He never returned to the country of his birth. It was a move that provided him with another reason to be sad: exile. And yet he asserted that anyone who doesn’t feel themselves to be an exile has no imagination. ‘Only the village idiot thinks they belong,’ he noted.

Cioran sat out the Second World War in Paris. In its aftermath, he approached the famous publishing house, Gallimard, with his first work in French, A Short History of Decay, published in 1949. Writing in French was he said, ‘like writing a love letter with a dictionary’.  

The book became a bestseller, the first in a series of devastatingly wicked and dark texts composed mainly of aphorisms and tart short essays. Each title comes as a provocation or a punch: Syllogisms of Bitterness, The Temptation to Exist and his masterpiece: The Trouble with Being Born.

Each book deals relentlessly with themes of illness, death and suicide. It was a rather touching irony that the author lived to the ripe old age of 84. By the time Cioran died in 1995, he had become a cult in France, attracting the sort of faddish attention he witheringly denounced in his work. Every life, he maintained, is utterly peculiar – and wholly unimportant.

In the age of Walt Disney, this kind of darkness matters.

Cioran’s writing belongs in the line of those great aloof European miserabilists, including La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Leopardi, Nietzsche and Beckett. Like them, he saw civilization as an absurd distraction from the ultimate meaninglessness of existence.

‘Only an idiot could think there is a point to any of this,’ he insisted.

But he always kept his wit and good cheer.

One of his greatest sources of sorrow was that he couldn’t sleep very well – and was often up at 3am. He’d walk around the streets of Paris until dawn. He noted sardonically in The Trouble with Being Born, ‘What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac suffers?’

Cioran was obsessed by suicide. But better to live, he wrote, and yet think and act as though one were already dead. After all, he said: why deprive oneself of the consoling idea of no longer being around?

‘Continuing to Live is possible only because of the deficiencies of our imagination and our memories.’ he wrote.

‘I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?’

But suicide was a constant relief as an idea:

‘We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.’

‘Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.’

Our age is notably optimistic and it makes us suffer hugely from being so. We are all, in private, a lot sadder than we are allowed to admit.

Writers like Cioran provide an occasion for the sadness inside all of us to be communally expressed and thereby a little, but only a little, diminished and softened.

In his beautiful book, The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran wrote:

‘I can be friends with people only when they are at their lowest point and have neither the desire nor the strength to restore their habitual sentimental illusions.’

It’s precisely in that kind of mood – into which all thoughtful people must sink on a fairly regular basis – that we can be blessed to find the dark and consoling works of Cioran waiting for us.

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The Book of Life is brought to you by  The School of Life – a global organisation dedicated to developing emotional intelligence. You can find our classes, films, books, games and much more online and in our branches around the world. Below is a feature from our shop which we think you might find of interest:

Pessimistic Greetings Cards – Set of 5 

An antidote to over-optimism.

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