Learning Goodness From Reading

La Rochefoucauld said that it is easier to give good advice than to take it, to which he might have added that it is also easier to agree with good advice than to act on it. Enacting wisdom is a little like speaking a foreign language that is pronounced perfectly in the head but comes out of the mouth with a strong accent.

If good advice were easy to take, the world would long ago have been perfect.

Last week I was writing a chapter of a book on medicine and poetry in which I quoted Doctor Johnson to the effect that it is better to be sometimes deceived than never to trust. I was writing about Mark Akenside, an eminent 18th-century doctor whose major published work on medicine was on dysentery, but who was also a famous poet in his day, now entirely forgotten. He appears to have been a somewhat sour and paranoid individual who thought, contrary to Doctor Johnson, that it was better to never to be deceived than ever to trust. This was not a recipe for a happy life.

Now, it so happened that on the very evening of the day during which I quoted Doctor Johnson I was called upon actually to take his advice. It was rainy, but not cold. There was a tentative knock on the front door and by the time I answered it, the young man who had knocked was in retreat.

He apologized for having disturbed me so late. He carried with him a large bag, and I knew at once from experience why he had come. He was (or would claim to have been) a former prisoner who was now going straight, who was trying to earn a living by selling things from door to door.

I knew also from experience what those things would be: feather dusters, chamois leather cloths for cleaning the windows of my car, etc., none of which I would want. The young man held out a certificate to prove that he was a “licensed hawker,” but it did not say who the licensing authority was and I did not ask.

I asked the young man to come in out of the rain. Say what you will, it cannot be much fun selling things from door to door in such weather to people you know perfectly well don’t really want to buy what you are trying to sell. If you are going to speak to them at all, it is better—I mean kinder and less aggravating to oneself—to do so with a good grace: and good grace is one of those things that one can teach oneself to exercise.

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