Topical Guide 368
Mark Dorset
Generosity, Acts of; “Selfless” Acts
Herb lay in bed, awake, imagining how Bert and Ella must feel, at night, lying in bed in the room down the hall, inhibited by the fact of their living in his house, forced to be so quiet, so contained, constrained to whisper, so tense and awkward. He realized that the feelings he ascribed to them were those he felt himself.
“Lorna,” he whispered. “Lorna, are you awake?”
“Mmm.”
“It must be awful for them, Lorna.”
“What?”
“Living here with us.”
“Oh. I know.”
“You remember how you felt about living with your parents?”
“Indeed I do.”
“This is worse.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Back then, neither of us ever thought about what it might have been like for your parents if we had lived there. I mean, well, I never thought that they would feel — inhibited.”
Lorna sat up. “I never thought about them at all. I suppose I thought they were too old to care. I suppose I thought that when they went to bed they just went to sleep and that was that.”
“Now we’re finding out,” said Herb. “We have to whisper at night, just the way we would have if we had lived at your parents’ house.”
“And we have to be careful about not having one drink too many.”
“We have to talk in code.”
“And we haven’t set fire to anything for quite a while.”
“We’re hiding from them.”
“And they’re hiding from us, too.”
“They’re so quiet at night that sometimes I catch myself straining to try to hear something.”
“I know what you mean. Sometimes I worry that their marriage is breaking up. I never hear any — crackling flames. If it weren’t for Peter, I would have wondered whether they ever — well — ”
“ — struck a match.”
“We’ve got to get them out of here, Herb.”Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 16
One of Françoise’s nephews, who was killed at Berry-du-Bac, was the nephew also of those millionaire cousins of Françoise, former café owners who had made their fortune and retired a long time before. The nephew, also a café proprietor, but in a small way and with limited means, had been drafted at the age of twenty-five and had left his young wife alone to run the little bar which he expected to come back to in a few months. But he was killed. . . . The millionaire cousins, who were no relation to the young widow, left the country place to which they had retired ten years before and went to work again in the café business, but refused to accept a sou for their labor; at six o'clock every morning, the millionaire wife, a real lady, and her young lady daughter were dressed and ready to help their niece-in-law and cousin-by-marriage. And for more than three years, they had been rinsing glasses in this way and serving drinks from early morning till half-past nine at night, without a single day of rest. In this book of mine, in which there is not one fact that is not imaginary, nor any real person concealed under a false name, where everything has been invented by me to meet the needs of my story, I ought to say in praise of my country that, at any rate, these millionaire relatives of Françoise, who gave up their retired life in order to help their niece when she was left without support, are people who really are alive and, convinced that their modesty will not take offence because they will never read this book, it gives me a childlike pleasure and deep emotion to record here their real name, Larivière.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Past Recaptured: “Charlus During the War”
“Are there,” I found myself asking myself, “any truly selfless acts?”
The Larivières’ actions seem to be genuinely selfless. Herb and Lorna’s actions, however, are not entirely selfless. They expect a reward for helping Ella and Bert: their own privacy.
As a headnote to the chapter in Leaving Small’s Hotel entitled “September 22: Local Boy Snaps Shots,” Kraft used a quotation that he attributed to Denis Diderot, but without specifying the source: “Everything we do, we actually do for our own sake. We may appear to be sacrificing ourselves, when we are merely satisfying ourselves.”
I have spent two hours searching for the source of that quotation, and I had begun to despair of ever finding it, when, on the verge of giving up, I asked Kraft for access to his commonplace book. There I found the quotation with the attribution “Diderot, in a letter to Landois published in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, July 1, 1756.”
Ah-ha! Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire is available online, thanks to the University of Chicago, and in it I found a July 1, 1756, letter of Diderot’s to a M. Londors, not Landois, in which the following passage appears:
Qu’est-ce qu’un homme vertueux? C’est un homme vain de cette espèce de vanité, et rien de plus. Tout coque nous faisons c’est pour nous ; nous avons l’air de nous sacrifier, lorsque nous ne faisons que nous satisfaire.
What is a virtuous man? He is a vain man of that kind of vanity, and nothing more. Everything we do is for us; we seem to sacrifice ourselves, when we are only satisfying ourselves.
So virtue can be a kind of vanity. Generosity can be a kind of vanity. It may be that we are always acting only for our own sake.
See also: Friendship TG 27; False Modesty, Self-Deprecation TG 138; Fame: Desire for Enduring TG 96, Yearning for Lasting TG 100
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