The theme of this brief discourse is writing to learn. What I have to say about writing grows out of nearly twenty years of teaching in the all-required liberal arts program at St. John’s College in Annapolis and advising a large number of student essays.

      Of all the features that sharply distinguish St. John’s from the more conventional colleges and universities in this country, the most striking is surely this -- all classes, including those in mathematics and laboratory science, proceed by way of conversation rather than lecture. Propositions are proved, sentences in Greek and French are translated, experiments are recreated, and musical works are analyzed; but all is done with an eye toward discussion rather than technical mastery. In light of the central place accorded to live discussion, one might well ask: What is the function of writing within such a program of study? This question turns out to be deeply connected with another: What is the function of the writing appropriate to human beings generally as opposed to professionals? Simply put, why write?

      I take my cue from something Socrates says in the dialogue Theaetetus. “Thinking,” he says, “is a conversation that the soul has with itself”(189E). Let me approach what Socrates says by saying what writing at St. John’s is not. Writing for us is neither a technique to be mastered nor a vehicle for self-expression. It is not for the sake of “arguing a thesis” (the written version of debate), although to be sure our students are expected to give reasons for what they think and say. In former days the senior essay, the culmination of the student’s four years of learning, was called a senior thesis, but that misnomer was emended to the term “essay,” whose French origin in the verb essayer points to writing as above all an intellectual effort, attempt and even risk. Nor does writing at St. John’s ever take the form of the research paper. Students read and discuss primary sources exclusively and are encouraged to think things out for themselves in the company of the very greatest authors. To return to Socrates, if thinking is a conversation that the soul has with itself -- if our inner private thinking mirrors the sort of thinking that goes on in serious conversation with others -- then writing is the natural outgrowth of this inner “talk.” And if serious conversation with others is essentially a joint inquiry, then writing, as the shaped record of our inner talk, is also an inquiry. We write in order to learn.

      If writing is the natural outgrowth of inner conversation, then it becomes clear, I think, why live conversation, although essential to the real awakening and nurture of our inner lives, is not enough for the full intellectual development of a human being. Live conversation arouses and provokes. In discussion I not only ask my questions but also hear other people ask theirs. I reap the benefit of hearing my opinions discussed, disagreed with and maybe even refuted. I learn by standing in the presence not only of ideas but of other human beings wrestling with ideas and with each other. In short, through serious conversation I am rendered intellectually alive. Now thinking does not stop with the exciting give and take of live talk. The private life of the mind goes on, recalling what was said by whom and why, mulling over the implications and in general continuing the conversation in private. But serious thought seeks to go beyond even this; it seeks some sort of closure and form -- not merely in order to express a thought but to think it through more clearly and deeply by giving it order and development. The written word is the attempt at just this sort of thinking. Viewed in this way, the written word is not the “other” of the spoken word but the attempt, the essai, to continue conversation by lifting it to a new level. As writer I bear a two-fold relation to spontaneous speech, whether it is the silent flow of my inner discourse or the conversation I have out loud with others. On the one hand, I try to capture some of the vitality of live speech by writing “for the ear” while staying firmly within the bounds of formal prose. On the other hand, I attempt to transcend the natural limitations of the spoken word, to banish the beguiling chaos of spontaneous conversation and to replace it with a thoroughly ordered reflection. Through the act of writing I thus become clearer to myself. It is not going too far to say that in ordering my thought, my inner conversation, I am also in some sense giving order to myself.

      As everyone knows, good writing must succeed in communicating to the reader the thoughts of the writer. But as I have described it, writing -- the sort of writing that pertains to us as human beings rather than as professionals -- is primarily for oneself and only secondarily, if importantly, for others. Why write? Not primarily to communicate but rather to inquire, that is, to grasp a thought with greater clarity and depth. The true beginning of such writing is the desire to know, and it is in this precise sense that writing may be said to spring from our erotic nature.

      Now the most critical stage of advising a student’s essay is the choice and delimiting of a topic. It is interesting how singularly unhelpful an otherwise good topic can be when it takes the form of a name tag in the student’s mind: “Justice in the Republic,” “Ratio in Euclid,” “Evil and Beauty in Baudelaire.” In cases such as this, the student knows what he wants to write about but not why he wants to write about it. He has a topic but no question, a task without an inner need. And until the topic takes the form of a question, the essay, lacking point, also lacks unity and direction. It is very often the student’s ability to put his topic in the form of a question or set of questions that makes for the difference between a real inquiry and a boring stream of declarations. Indeed the helpful sorts of outlines tend to emerge from the posing of a question rather than the other way around. Thinking becomes more ordered to the extent that the student is in touch with the heart, so to speak, of his thought. The reason for all this has to do with the erotic nature of inquisitive writing: Writing, as the natural outgrowth of thinking, originates in the desire to know, and proceeding by way of questions, in writing no less than in live conversation, is the conscious expression of that desire.

      I end this little discourse with a reflection on writing and surprise. In her collection of essays entitled Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks perceptively about what makes for a good writer of fiction. Much of what she says holds equally if not more so for the sort of writing I have tried to describe. She tells us that the true writer is perpetually and courageously open to surprises and even shocks, the sort of “shocks to the system” that inevitably attend the search for truth. She speaks of her own shock upon realizing how the story of Good Country People had to end. O’Connor’s experience points out how far good writing is from what goes by the name of “self-expression” (the epitome of the unerotic). To take writing seriously is to embark on a journey of discovery and above all self-discovery. The journey may involve disillusionment, dead ends and a confrontation with attacks on our most cherished opinions and beliefs. We can be undermined. But if we are committed to the journey, then we are committed to everything that goes with it. The positive side of such openness to inquiry is this -- that we are capable of making real discoveries precisely because we are open to being surprised by ourselves and by the concatenation of our thoughts. Writing to learn is thus a way of cultivating the habit of finding ourselves both questionable and interesting. As that oracular Greek named Heraclitus put it, “If you don’t expect the unexpected, you won’t find it.”

      Nothing, it seems, is more grim than a grammarian. “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,” begins a poem by Wallace Stevens. And yet to some people grammar is a matter of passion. “I live for syntax,” Raymond Chandler is reported to have said. Could it be that Lady Grammar is not a grim schoolmarm after all?

      Over the last twenty years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, I have assigned, corrected, advised and examined a great many pieces of student writing. While St. John’s is rightly called a “talking college” (all classes take the form of discussion rather than lecture), students are called upon to write a fairly large assortment of papers in the course of a single year. The model for all writing at St. John’s is the essay rather than the research paper. Students are directed away from secondary materials and toward the great works themselves. They are expected to write essays in good English, in which they explore an idea or question through careful attention to the details of a great book. The purpose of the essay is to reach a deeper understanding of something important -- to inquire. It is not to “prove a thesis,” although students are naturally expected to provide reasons along the way for their opinions and interpretations. In what follows I shall offer some reflections on the problems I have seen.

      Perhaps the most prevailing difficulty I have encountered in working with students on their writing has to do with the chasm they feel between writing and speaking. As a rule, students (and not only students) write without an ear to what they are saying and how they are saying it. They do not listen to their own words. They are like the fellow in Molière’s comedy who is amazed to discover that all his life he has in fact been speaking prose! It can be a revelation to students to hear someone read back what they have written. And with perceptive students, one has only to read their sentences out loud in their presence in order to get them to hear the various errors and unclarities. Here we touch on our most necessary task as teachers of good writing: getting our students to pay attention to what they are saying and how they are saying it when they write. We must make them aware that writing is in fact a form of saying something, and that what you say depends hugely on how you say it. One of the most helpful pieces of advice we can offer them on this point is: read your papers out loud, to a critical friend if possible. In any case, the problem with what’s on the page is very often traceable to what is, or rather what is not, in the ear.

      This problem of “what’s in the ear” is deeply related to another: students often write as though they are addressing no one, as though there were no reader of what they have written. The sentences are ejected, as it were, into a void. The clearest symptom of this is the lack of transition from one sentence to another, from one paragraph to another. The student here is unaware that to write is to lead through words. It is to initiate someone else into the as yet undisclosed country of one’s own thoughts. The student’s train of thinking very often simply does not make it to the page. He writes sentences but fails to record the line of thinking that connects the sentences into a coherent and followable whole. The infamous “run-on sentence” is a case in point. No other error in writing is more instructive of the unbreakable bond that exists between writing and thinking. In the run-on sentence, the mere juxtaposition of clauses replaces the spelling out of a logical connection. A transition is implied but not expressed. The run-on sentence is thus the very picture of intellectual hiatus.

      It is worth emphasizing this bond between thinking and writing. Very often we forget this bond and teach grammar as though it were simply a matter of obeying a set of rules. But the way a student writes, the way we all write, is deeply connected to the way we think. One of the most annoying things one can hear from a student’s lips is: “OK, it may not be what I said, but it’s what I meant.” The student here fails to grasp that that is precisely the task of writing -- to succeed in saying what one means, to write one’s whole thought. Another defensive strategy is the equally annoying: “But I meant it to be ambiguous.” The error here consists in the student’s refusal to grant a distinction between real depth and sheer incompetence. An intelligent writer will of course acknowledge genuine ambiguities. But these, these above all, he will take pains to present and discuss clearly so that the ambiguity may be grasped.

      The problem of the ear and the awareness of writing for a reader bring me to what I take to be the supreme goal of writing -- at least writing that takes the form of an essay. That highest goal is not successful communication but a deepened understanding of one’s own thoughts and opinions through a critical encounter with a first-rate mind, a mind revealed in a great book. The goal is not self-expression but self-knowledge.

      Over the years I have seen many forms of good, as well as bad, writing. The bad writing (apart from bad in the sense of technically incompetent) tends to fall into one of two extremes: the “subjective” and the “objective.” The subjective extreme is easy enough to spot. Here the student indulges in the statement of unfounded opinion or, what is worse, the mere expression of feeling. The goal of this irresponsible writing seems to be “saying what one thinks or feels” with no sense of explanation or argument. The text that the student was supposed to be discussing disappears. Usually, this form of bad writing is also poorly written. The objective extreme is also easy to spot. Its offpsring is the “book report.” Here it is the student who disappears. We get a rehash of the text with no thought content to speak of -- no questions, no problems, no exploration. Unlike the Spouter of Opinions, the student who writes essay-as-book-report often writes well, even elegantly. This is the hardest kind of essay to discuss in an oral examination, since the student had not really tried to say anything in the first place. What is there to ask him? Everything and nothing.

      The objective extreme reminds me that we often give our students faulty advice in our efforts to save them from their “evil ways.” I have met countless students whose high school teachers told them to avoid the first person singular at all costs: “Never say I!” Of course the trap the students immediately fall into is an inordinate dependence on passive voice constructions, for example, the antiseptic and odious “Later it will be shown that … “ The cure here turns out to be as bad as the disease. Good writing (and again, I speak here of essay-writing) is not the purging of all selfhood but the intelligent involvement of a human self with whatever he is writing about. It is neither self-indulgent nor detached. Naturally, such involvement of the I includes, in addition to intellect, various feelings and beliefs. As Strunk and White wisely tell us: “If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed, and not at the expense of the work.” They do not tell us: “Never say I!”

      No series of reflections on student writing would be complete without at least a mention of misplaced modifiers and the dangling participle, those impish saboteurs of seriousness. Like the run-on sentence, such errors are ultimately a breakdown of thinking. It is not so much that the student fails to apply a rule. It is rather that he fails to grasp the point of the rule. He fails to see how, in an uninflected language like English, logical and syntactic connections are expressed largely through word order. Change the word order and you change the thought of the whole sentence. The problem of modifiers is especially prevalent in an age that seeks linguistic brevity as one more form of speed. I once saw the following sign in a doctor’s office: “Gowns open in front unless told otherwise.” This hilarious nonsense is clearly the result of wanting to say something fast, of thinking in abbreviations. The point here is not just to get students to apply rules correctly and not make mistakes but to get them to think about what they are saying and how they are saying it, especially when it comes to word order (and word choice). Only in this way will they develop their powers of judgement and become their own best readers.

      A word about punctuation. It is all too easy for students to forget that here, no less than elsewhere in their writing, what a sentence says is intimately bound up with how it is actually written; that the comma, dash and semicolon are not just symbols with functions but vehicles of expression, servants of meaning. As all good writers of fiction know, the effect of precise punctuation is not limited to the intellect. In the words of Isaak Babel, “No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.”

      With this I return to my opening remarks on the notorious grimness of grammarians. “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns” -- which, for any decent grammarian, do not “open in front unless told otherwise!” When Raymond Chandler says “I live for syntax,” I take him to be saying that the grammatical structures that underlie spoken and written language -- “the rules” -- are not just standards of formal correctness. They are also the vehicle of effective and even inspired expression. Consider the music of Mozart. It is music according to rule. An overall form (so-called sonata form) dominates the whole in a way similar to the way that syntax dominates the sentence and unifies its various parts. Now rules are limits: they tell you what you can and cannot do. But it is precisely such limits that also make the music of Mozart and the stories of Raymond Chandler possible. Limits, rules, are conditions of possibility. When mastered, they do not constrain but liberate.

      The trouble with grammar is sometimes the grammarians. We teach the letter but not the spirit, the rules but not their point. We tell students what not to do, but we do not often enough help them to identify and examine the glories of syntax in great essays, speeches, novels and poems. We forget that rules are also conditions of possibility. We forget, too, that grammar is a liberal as well as professional art, that it aims at the liberation of human beings. Grammar is like the magic of Prospero: it is the art of knowing how, on the one hand, to tame the Caliban of self-indulgence and, on the other, to free Ariel, free the spirit of Thought, from the cloven pine of inarticulateness.

      Sentences. What could be more ordinary, more unconducive to questioning and reflection than sentences? We live with them from morning to night. We are their makers, their users and receivers. We not only utter, hear and write them but also think them and sometimes even dream them. So immersed are we in our sentence-making and sentence-transport (demonically assisted by the fax machine and computer), that we rarely if ever feel the need to ask: What is a sentence? Familiarity, the saying goes, breeds contempt, but in this case it breeds thoughtlessness. In approaching the sentence, we would do well to recall the famous cautionary sentence of Hegel: “On the whole, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not understood.”

      My concern in this brief discussion is not with what all sentences have in common, but with distinguished sentences. These are sentences that really “say something.” Throughout history, there have been human beings who excelled at the making of great sentences -- sententiae, as they are called by the Romans -- sentences that were intended to be memorized and taken to heart, not merely read, sentences that were wise. In the West we have the great sayings of Heraclitus, the obscurity of which earned him the epithet “Heraclitus the Dark.” We also have the exquisitely polished maxims of La Rochefoucauld and the provocative sayings of Pascal and Nietzsche. In what follows, I shall limit myself to two sayings of Heraclitus the Dark. My hope is that they will help to break the spell of the familiar by shedding light on the power of the isolated sentence.

      The word “sentence” derives from the Latin verb sentio, which means “feel, perceive or realize.” The sentences of Heraclitus are in full accord with this Latin meaning. They are formal statements of some realization founded in experience. They state some one thing that is felt and thought to be deeply and significantly true. Not fragments at all but perfectly sculpted wholes, the sentences of Heraclitus offer themselves to us neither as conclusions of some previous line of inquiry nor as premises of an argument to come. They simply and magnificently speak.

      My translation of the first sentence goes like this: “If you don’t expect the unexpected, you won’t find it out, since it is not to be found out and pathless.” Our first response to this saying is that we are arrested, held by the presence of something paradoxical, strange and initially incomprehensible. The sentence has thus performed its first important function. It has prevented us from blithely skimming the surface of our experience, of reading sentences in order to extract the information they contain and then, in effect, “throwing away the wrapper.” We are wrenched out of the comfortably familiar and compelled to pay attention.

      Human beings tend to live in one or another form of expectation. As creatures of time and passion, we rarely if ever rest content with what is merely given. The scientist, sometimes mistaken for a Fact Man, is a case in point. He engages in experiment not merely to observe a fact but to test an already formulated hypothesis. This hypothesis is the expression of his expectation, in some cases perhaps even an expression of a wish. But in all expectation there is the possibility and risk that what we eventually discover might prove surprising or extraordinary, perhaps even shocking. (Think of Ernest Rutherford, who proved, contrary to what he had set out to prove, that the atom consisted mostly of empty space!) The sentence of Heraclitus is about neither finding what we expected nor simply being surprised when the unexpected shows up. It is about how we are to expect or hold ourselves open to what has not yet arrived and has not yet been discovered and will, when it does arrive, take us by surprise. Heraclitus is speaking about nothing other than an attitude toward the unknown as such. What can it possibly mean to expect the unexpected? How can we be related to what we do not know at all?

      In approaching these questions, let us look closely at how Heraclitus casts his thought: “If you don’t expect the unexpected, you won’t find it out, since it is not to be found out and pathless.” An English translation cannot, unfortunately, capture the musical sound or the precise grammatical structures of the original Greek. What comes across much more strongly in the Greek than in the translation is the shocking juxtaposition of opposites -- “expect the unexpected,” “find out/ not to be found out” -- a juxtaposition that is conveyed as much by the sound as by the meaning of the words. The sentence is a mass of negation. Its two verbs are negative (“don’t expect”/ “won’t find”), and all the adjectives are negative (“unexpected,” “not to be found out” and “pathless”). The overall meaning is likewise negative. We have here, not an exhortation to expect the unexpected, but a warning: “If you don’t … you won’t … “ The sentence thus evokes alarm in its reader: “Good heavens! What am I missing in my constant and comfortable reduction of the strange to the familiar?”

      By means of this alarming negativity, the sentence of Heraclitus articulates the sufficient condition for the impossibility of true discovery. To fail to await something beyond our current knowledge is to remain trapped in the preconceptions of the familiar and conventional. It is to measure all things by the safe, the predictable, the already “known.” In his paradoxical sentence Heraclitus tells us that there is no track or path that leads to the unexpected, no smooth non-paradoxical route by which to move from the familiar to the strange. He thereby acknowledges the all-too-familiar discontinuities that tend to crop up within the continuum of learning. Such discontinuities, as we know, can be unpleasant as well as pleasant, unnerving as well as gratifying. Indeed, to have an expectation at all is to be vulnerable to having that expectation dashed. To expect the unexpected, in other words, requires the virtue of courage.

      So far I have taken Heraclitus’ sentence to be about expectation and the unexpected. But there is an alternate translation: “If you don’t hope for the unhoped-for, you won’t find it out, since it is not to be found out and pathless.” What does this version of the paradox mean? Aquinas defines hope (the passion of hope rather than the theological virtue) as a form of desire. Hope, he tell us, is the desire for some future good that is difficult to obtain but possible. This definition of hope is powerfully connected with the human desire to know. To know in the deepest sense of the term is not to have accurate information, nor is it to have a theory that “works,” nor is it to have a method for the sure solution of problems. To know is to experience some insight or realization, a revelation of something deeply and significantly true. This intellectual “seeing” is the ultimate hope of all learning. Great sentences, like the one before us, are the verbal expression of such insights.

      But how is this insightfulness something unhoped for? Nietzsche tells us that a thought comes when it wants to, not when we want it to come. Simply stated, we cannot make ourselves have an insight. We can strive for insight by working hard, staying focused, proceeding methodically, and watching out for error, prejudice and wishful thinking; but we cannot make an insight happen. This is the sense in which an insight is unhoped for. It is incapable of being summoned into our presence by mere human fiat and will. We can all think of numerous occasions on which we tried and tried but to no avail -- the coveted thought, the beloved insight, just didn’t, wouldn’t come. Sometimes, when we are “trying too hard,” it seems as though our very efforts to seize the object of desire only serve to distance it all the more. And yet effort and care are necessary, it seems, if the insight is to arrive at all. This is the expression of our hope. It is the hope that by extending ourselves towards an insight, making ourselves ready for and worthy of its arrival, the insight, of its own accord, will present itself. If we translate Heraclitus’ sentence in terms of hope and the unhoped for, we see that it speaks to us of the mysterious relation between intellectual desire and its ultimate gratification. According to Heraclitus, thinking is not the mastery and possession of ideas. It is rather a paradoxical and uncertain courtship of ideas and realizations.

      I now come to my second sentence. It is, as we shall see, intimately connected with the expectation of the unexpected. This sentence is much simpler than the first one and seems to contain no paradoxes at all. For that reason it is all the more deceptive. It goes: “I searched myself.” The sentence is so simple one wonders why Heraclitus even bothered to write it down. Was he merely being autobiographical, boasting of an accomplishment? The fact is that this little sentence is anything but simple. The reflexivity of the pronoun “myself” is the key to its inner complexity and, yes, paradox. What does it mean to search oneself? We search for what is not at hand, what is absent. The sentence of Heraclitus tells us that in some sense a human being is an “other” of himself, an unknown beyond. To be the object as well as subject of a search is to regard the closest and most intimate thing of all as something strange and remote, as though the human self were to its own self an uncharted land. In other words, we ourselves belong to that realm of the Unexpected in the first sentence. Again we come upon the tremendous power great sentences have to wrench us out of the familiar. Heraclitus, we must note, never explains what he means by these paradoxical utterances, nor does he tell us in this second sentence what it means to search oneself. He does not give us an injunction -- “Search yourself!” -- but speaks personally and retrospectively: “I searched myself.” The sentence reports that Heraclitus went on an odyssey of sorts into the strangest land of all -- the human soul. It does not tell us what he found there, nor is this the point of the sentence, which simply reports that he went. The sheer fact of self-searching was, for Heraclitus, itself momentous and worthy of being written down. It is as though the sentence implies a preceding “You’ll never guess what I did!”

      In seeking to draw attention to the power of the isolated sentence, I have deliberately chosen an author famous for his obscurity. Great sentences, apart from whatever else they may do, must succeed in stopping us, and those of Heraclitus are admirably suited to this end. They draw our attention to the depth that lies concealed beneath the surface of human experience, a depth that the surface itself invites us to explore -- if only we know how to expect the unexpected.

      In an earlier reflection on the power of the sentence, I took up two sayings by Heraclitus the Dark. On the whole, Heraclitus uses the sentence as a vehicle for the revelation of hidden depth. In one sentence he tells us, “Nature loves to hide”; and in another, “The hidden or non-apparent harmony is superior to the apparent one.” He also reminds us of our own unfathomable hiddenness when he says: “You could not in your going find the boundaries of the soul -- so deep is its logic.”

      If we now turn from ancient Greece to seventeenth-century France, we find another great maker of sentences: François de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (1613-1680). Like Heraclitus, La Rochefoucauld is fascinated by hidden depths. But whereas Heraclitus presents depth as a mysterious Beneath or Within that draws us to itself and inspires our wonder, something we human beings would want to know if only we could, La Rochefoucauld dwells on a perverse self-concealment we would prefer not to acknowledge. The word for this self-concealment is hypocrisy. Man, for La Rochefoucauld, presents himself to others and to himself as masked, and it is the function of the exquisitely polished sentence to show man for the hypocritical, self-masking being that he is. In moving from Heraclitus to La Rochefoucauld, we thus move from wonder to cynicism, from the sentence as oracle to the sentence as exposé. Let us see how the power of the sentence reveals itself in the hands of this modern Prince of Darkness.

      La Rochefoucauld composed hundreds of sentences which he collected in a book entitled Maxims or Moral Reflections. The word “moral” here must not be taken to mean that we are being given advice on how to live. The maxims are statements of fact distilled from their author’s experience of himself and other human beings. Moral Reflections are meditations on man as a moral being, that is, a being who most shows who he is in his relation to good and evil. In his article on La Rochefoucauld entitled “The Making of a Cynic,” Morris Bishop gives an excellent definition of a maxim: “A maxim is an observation on behavior, abstracted and generalized, laid to the account of humanity at large and expressed with the utmost concision.” Mr. Bishop reminds us that the brevity of a maxim is the soul of its wit, and that this brevity “is the product of long labor.”

      I begin with the sentence that La Rochefoucauld puts at the head of his book of maxims: Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés (“Our virtues are, most often, nothing but vices disguised”). The first thing to observe is that the maxim sounds good. There is a near-rhyme between sont and souvent and a striking play on v sounds in vertus, souvent and vices. Note that the first part of the sentence up to souvent is composed of fairly soft consonants, while the “punch line” jabs us with que and déguisés.

      The sentence is one of La Rochefoucauld’s briefest maxims and has the simple logical form “A is B.” Unlike the provocative but obscure sayings of Heraclitus, it is fairly understandable on first reading. Note, however, that the sentence is not so simple as to say, “Our virtues are in fact vices.” Abstracted and generalized though they be, the maxims often (though not always) express some bitter and repellent truth qualifiedly with expressions like “often,” “most often,” “ordinarily” or “most people.” We are reminded in such cases that the maxims are meant to be taken not as metaphysical propositions but as observations culled from experience. They tell us not so much who we are as what we tend to be like most of the time. Here our virtues (all of them, we must assume) are most often vices disguised. La Rochefoucauld does not rule out the possibility of a pure, non-hypocritical virtue. But if such virtue exists, it is the rare exception rather than the rule.

      The most characteristically French part of La Rochefoucauld’s “zinger” is the ne … que … construction that governs the sentence. While the sense of the construction can be conveyed by the word “only,” French prefers to spell out the negativity implied by this English word: “A is, most often, nothing but B.” This rendering of the formula is truer to the French in so far as “only” is a mere adverb, whereas ne … que … is an integral part of the verb. The ne sets us up to expect one of those two-word negations that abound in French: ne … pas … (“not”), ne … jamais … (“never”), ne … plus … (“no longer”). But unlike these less interesting negations, ne … que … ends up zeroing in on the predicate rather than excluding it: “Our virtues are, most often, nothing but (or, nothing other than) vices disguised.” It is, as it were, a negative way of being emphatically positive: We affirm something by excluding everything else from its domain. The force of the expression may be compared to those moments in English when nothing but “nothing but” will do: “He’s nothing but a common thief!” or, in a happier vein, “I have nothing but praise for her accomplishments.” The governing ne … que … of La Rochefoucauld’s sentence arouses our expectation: “Our virtues are, most often, nothing but … “ “Yes, yes,” we say, “nothing but what?” The predicate at last arrives and tells us, to our shock -- “nothing but vices disguised!”

      The accusation is doubly shocking, for not only are we told that our virtues are at bottom vices but also that we dress up our vices to make them look like virtues. Worse than bad, we are perverse and hypocritical. French word order helps to communicate this blow upon a bruise: “vices disguised” rather than “disguised vices.” Putting the adjective before the noun in English dampens somewhat the force of the adjective by placing the stress on the noun. To be sure, it is no small thing to say that virtues are disguised vices. But it is a more complex and more cutting thing to say first that virtues are vices and then to follow up this fatal transition into an opposite with the adjective “disguised.” The French sentence puts greater emphasis on the disguise than on the vices. Note, too, that the word déguisés is no simple adjective but a past participle and is made to sound more like one if the English translation puts it after the noun it modifies. Our virtues are vices that have had something done to them; they have been processed and made over. A less brief but perhaps more accurate rendering of the maxim would therefore read: “Our virtues are, most often, nothing but vices that have been disguised.” This is of course what the French sentence actually means, except that it can say what it means more concisely -- and therefore more cuttingly -- than English can.

      The sentence begins with the personal nos vertus and ends with the indefinite des vices. The shock of the predicate suggests that the opening “our” has special weight -- that the virtues are not simply ours in the sense that they belong to us, but that they are our beloved virtues, those noble qualities on which we pride ourselves. We cannot leave the maxim without having the word “virtue” leave a bad taste in our mouth -- no doubt the intended effect. Another important function of the “our” is that La Rochefoucauld thereby includes himself in the opening indictment of humanity. He is the forerunner of Baudelaire, who, in the opening poem of his Flowers of Evil, addresses us as “Hypocrite reader, -- my likeness, -- my brother!”

      Taken by itself, La Rochefoucauld’s maxim raises many questions: Is it possible that La Rochefoucauld is right? If we protest, how sure are we that our disagreement, especially if it is passionate, is not itself an instance of, say, disguised vanity? What virtues in particular does he have in mind, and what are the various ways in which virtues are vices in disguise? For special cases we must turn to other, more specific maxims. I observe in passing that maxims are like potato chips: It is difficult to stop with just one. So let us indulge in La Rochefoucauld’s proliferation of maxims.

      One of the most interesting has to do with sincerity. Of all the virtues, sincerity comes off as one of the most insidious. It is, we are told, “ordinarily nothing but a refined dissimulation for drawing out the confidence of others.” Like the opening maxim this one is characterized by an adverbial qualifier and by the use of that ever-effective tool of the French cynic: ne … que … Then there is the famous maxim that recalls Thomas Hobbes and the origin of the social contract: “The love of justice is, for most men, nothing but the fear of suffering injustice.” There is also the extremely witty (and illuminating) sentence: “The refusal of praise is the desire to be praised twice.” All are deconstructions of virtue -- the tracing of seemingly good qualities to their self-interested and base origin.

      Is the disguising of vice deliberate and self-conscious, or are we perhaps the unwitting victim of forces beyond our control? Are we hypocrites by choice, by habit or by nature? The maxims as a whole tend to point to the inescapable infirmity of our human nature. “If we resist our passions,” goes one maxim, “it is more through their weakness than through our strength.” The source of both our enslavement and our hypocrisy is something La Rochefoucauld calls amour-propre, which literally means “self-love” but is perhaps more tellingly rendered “self-esteem.” As we hear in another maxim, “Self-esteem is the greatest of all flatterers.” La Rochefoucauld does not miss the opportunity to point out that self-esteem and self-interest often display themselves most cunningly when they seem most dormant: “Self-interest speaks all sorts of languages, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterested.” The personification here is not just fancy speech. It is La Rochefoucauld’s carefully chosen, precise way of telling us two things about ourselves. The first is that we do not have self-interest -- it has, or rather possesses, us. And the second is that self-interest causes us to personify ourselves, that is, to put on various personae or masks for every occasion.

      Perhaps the deepest and most compelling maxims have to do with our moral condemnation of other people. One of the best goes: “If we didn’t have any faults, we wouldn’t take so much pleasure in remarking on those in others.” Note that this maxim is not about the mere pointing out of other people’s faults but about the perverse pleasure we take in pointing them out. It is in the gusto rather than in the act per se that we show our true colors.

      The maxims of La Rochefoucauld, apart from their truth or falsity, are masterpieces of sentence-construction. They take full advantage of the simplest grammatical elements of French; they are composed with amazing attention to euphony, word choice and logical balance; they claim to be truths about nothing less than the human heart; and they are brief. They are superb material for beginners. By spending time with the maxims, students can not only improve their French and discover the glories of the language but also -- through a discussion of the meaning and possible truth of a given maxim -- question, clarify and perhaps deepen their thoughts on human nature.

      I cannot leave this Prince of Darkness without attempting a maxim of my own. It takes its cue from what La Rochefoucauld has to say about amour-propre and grows out of my fascination with one of our most potentially dangerous passions -- indignation. With this maxim I bring my reflection to a close: “Nothing is more flattering to our self-esteem than the wrongs we imagine others to have committed against us.”