The Little Virtues

We believe that we can always return to that secret moment of ours, that we can draw on the right words; but it isn’t true that we can always go back there, often our return there is false; we make our eyes glow with a false light, we pretend to be caring and warm towards our neighbour and we are in fact once more shrunken and hunched up in the icy darkness of our heart. Human relationships have to be rediscovered and reinvented every day.

Every day homesickness grew in us. Sometimes it was even pleasant, like being in gentle slightly intoxicating company.

the true defence against wealth is an indifference to money.

And so we have no authority; we have no weapons. Authority in us would be a hypocrisy and a sham. We are too aware of our own weakness, too melancholy and insecure, too conscious of our illogicality and incoherence, too conscious of our faults; we have looked within ourselves for too long and seen too many things there. And so as we don’t have authority we must invent another kind of relationship.

We do not bother to teach the great virtues, though we love them and want our children to have them; but we nourish the hope that they will spontaneously appear in their consciousness some day in the future, we think of them as being part of our instinctive nature, while the others, the little virtues, seem to be the result of reflection and calculation and so we think that they absolutely must be taught.

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

And the story of human relationships never ceases for us; because little by little they become all too easy for us, all too natural and spontaneous—so spontaneous and so undemanding that there is no richness, discovery or choice about them; they are just habit and complacency, a kind of intoxicated naturalness.

We shyly search within us for the right words. We are very pleased to find them, shyly but as it were without any trouble; we are pleased that we have so many words within us, so many words for our neighbour that we seem intoxicated with our own ease and naturalness.

We are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too, and we who looked at them from the just place that is given to us: human beings, objects and memories—everything appeared to us in its just place beneath the sky.

we walk with the right person along the streets at the edge of the city, and little by little we fall into the habit of walking together every day.