another point about Casanova

Edmund Wilson made that fairly obvious but still insightful point about the recurring pattern in Casanova’s memoirs. He arrives in a new town, quickly rises through sheer force of personality, but then something happens to uncover his fraud. He thus has to move on to the next town and start over again.

I have my (good and bad) patterns too, and the same is surely true of everyone reading this post. In fact, figuring out those patterns (in most cases you have to be at least 30 before they become fairly definite) is the key to self-knowledge.

And so too is figuring out what you have and have not been able to get away with over the years. I still think this is the key to ethics, not systems of ethics and etiquette. It is the permitted violations of these rules, different for each person, that is the core of ethics. I’m increasingly convinced of this. Ethics has never been “fair”: certain people consistently get away with certain things that I couldn’t, but the reverse is surely also true.

The reason for this is not solely the accursed hypocrisy of the human species. There’s also some legitimacy to the unfairness.