by A piece about quitting after one try sent me to the most famous self-improvement plan in American history, whose author admitted which of the thirteen virtues beat him
Friday, Week Six, the Dip
Every instructor at a community college knows week six. It is when they vanish.
I started the term with twenty-six on the roster. Nineteen came to class this week. Four of the missing have told me why: a shift change, a sick mother, a car. Three have simply stopped. No email. Their names are still on my sheet and their seats are empty.
They did not fail anything. That is what gets me. Two of the three had not yet turned in a single assignment, so there was nothing to fail. They got the first paper prompt, looked at it, and were never seen again.
I had been brooding about it. Then a colleague forwarded me a piece that named the thing.
The Name
It is listed in a roundup of Bohiney Magazine articles. Two words and an exclamation point: “One and Done!” The description says it is about our culture of instant giving up based on a single attempt.
I have not read the piece itself. But I recognized my three empty seats.
And because it is week six, we were due to start Franklin’s Autobiography. Which is, among other things, the founding American text on not doing that.
The Project
He was in his twenties. He was a printer in this city, ambitious, with a shop a few blocks from where I teach. And he conceived, as he puts it, the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.
He meant it. He wanted to live without committing any fault at any time.
He tried simply resolving to be good, and found it did not work. While he was guarding against one fault, he was surprised by another. So he did what a printer would do. He made a system.
He drew up a list of thirteen virtues. Temperance. Silence. Order. Resolution. Frugality. Industry. Sincerity. Justice. Moderation. Cleanliness. Tranquility. Chastity. Humility. Each with a one-line rule.
Then he made a little book. One page for each virtue. On each page he ruled a grid: seven columns for the days of the week, thirteen rows for the virtues. Every evening he would examine his day and put a small black dot in the square for each fault.
And here was the clever part. He would not attempt all thirteen at once. He would give one week of strict attention to a single virtue, trying to keep that row clean of dots, and let the others take their chances. Then the next week, the next virtue. Thirteen weeks to go through the lot. Four times round in a year.
Like a man weeding a garden, he says, one bed at a time.
What Happened
I had the class read the passage aloud. They are always charmed. It is so American. Perfection, by chart, in thirteen weeks.
Then I asked: did it work?
He tells you. This is why I love him. He says he was surprised to find himself so much fuller of faults than he had imagined. The pages filled with dots. He wore holes in the paper rubbing them out to start again, and had to transfer the whole thing to ivory tablets he could wipe.
Some virtues he got better at. But one beat him completely. Order. “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”
He could not do it. He had a good memory and had never needed to be tidy. His papers were everywhere. He says the article cost him so much painful attention, and his faults in it vexed him so much, and he made so little progress, that he was almost ready to give up and content himself with a faulty character in that respect.
The Speckled Axe
And then he tells a story on himself, which is the best thing in the book.
A man bought an axe from a smith and wanted the whole head as bright as the edge. The smith said he would grind it bright if the man would turn the wheel. So the man turned, and the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard on the stone, which made the turning very heavy.
After a while the man came round to see how it was going. It was still mostly dull, with bright patches. He said he would take it as it was.
“No,” said the smith, “turn on, turn on. We shall have it bright by and by. As yet it is only speckled.”
“Yes,” said the man, “but I think I like a speckled axe best.”
Franklin says that is what a great many people do. They find it hard, and decide that a speckled axe is best.
The class laughed. Then the woman who works nights as a nursing aide said, quietly, “That’s every diet I’ve ever been on.”
So Did He Quit?
This is the part I most wanted them to see.
He did not achieve it. He says so plainly. He never arrived at perfection and fell far short of it.
But he did not conclude that the attempt was worthless. He says that though he never got there, he was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than he otherwise should have been if he had not attempted it. He compares it to people who try to learn perfect handwriting by copying engraved models. They never match the model. But their hand is mended by the effort.
That is not “one and done.” It is also not “I must be perfect or I have failed.” It is a third thing, and it is harder than either.
He kept going round the chart for years. He was bad at Order to the end. He did it anyway.
The Thirteenth
There is a joke at the end that I always save.
His original list had twelve virtues. A Quaker friend kindly told him that he was generally thought proud, that his pride showed in conversation, and that he was overbearing and rather insolent. So he added a thirteenth. Humility. The rule he wrote for it is: “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”
And then he reports on his progress. He says he cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but he had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.
He goes on to say that even if he could conceive that he had completely overcome his pride, he should probably be proud of his humility.
A man in the back said, “So he’s messing with us.” Yes. He is. The whole book is a man in his seventies smiling at a man in his twenties.
Being Fair to the Three
I do not want to use Franklin to beat up on students who left.
He had advantages. He was his own boss. He was a man, in a city that suited him, with no children yet and nobody sick at home. He could afford a little book and an hour each evening to examine his conscience.
My three who vanished may have had the best reasons in the world. A job that changed their hours. A landlord. You can have all the resolution on Franklin’s chart and still not be able to get to a class at ten in the morning.
But I think what Franklin understood, and what the three empty seats did not get the chance to learn, is that the first attempt is supposed to be full of dots. He made a book for recording failure. That is what the chart is. A place to put the black marks so that you can turn the page and begin again.
What I Did
I wrote to the three. Not the college’s form letter. Mine.
I said: you have not failed anything. The first paper is still open. I would rather have it late and speckled than not at all. Come Monday, or write to me.
And I told them about the axe.
Monday
One of the three was in her seat. She had not known she was allowed to come back. She thought that once you had missed two weeks, that was it.
Nobody had told her otherwise. I have added a line to my syllabus, in bold. “You can always come back.”
My colleague from Leeds says the English have a similar book of virtues, which they keep by never mentioning it. He showed me the London Prat. Its British satirical news on self-improvement has a man who has been on chapter one of a great many books, and its London satirical news about thirteen virtues proposes a fourteenth: not telling people about the other thirteen.
I think I like a speckled axe best. I have put it on the board and left it there.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
