B07B91MJ8Y EBOK by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf
Language: rus
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Part Seven

Our Virtues

214

Our virtues? It’s probable that we also still have our virtues, although it’s reasonable to think that they will not be those naive, four-square virtues for whose sake we respect our grandfathers, at the same time holding them somewhat at arm’s length. We Europeans of the day-after-tomorrow, we first-born of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity, and art of disguise, our tender and, so to speak, sweetened cruelty in spirit and sense—if we’re to have virtues, we’ll presumably have only those which have learned best how to tolerate our most secret and most heartfelt inclinations, our most burning needs. So then let’s look for them in our labyrinths!— where, as we know, so many different things get lost, so many different things disappear for ever. And is there anything more beautiful than seeking out one’s own virtues? Doesn’t this mean that one already almost believes in one’s own virtues? But this phrase “believe in one’s own virtues”— isn’t that basically the same thing people in earlier times used to call their “good conscience,” that long worthy pigtail of an idea which our grandfathers hung behind their heads and often enough behind their understanding as well? Thus, it seems to follow that, no matter how little we may think ourselves as old fashioned and as respectable as our grandfathers in other things, in one respect we are nonetheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with good consciences: we, too, still carry their pigtail.—Alas, if you knew how soon, how very soon—things will be otherwise! . . .

215

Just as it sometimes happens in the realm of the stars that two suns determine the orbit of a planet, and in some cases suns of different colours cast their lights around a single planet, sometimes red light, sometimes green light, and then again lighting it both at once, flooding it with colours, in the same way we modern men, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry heaven,” are determined by different moralities; our actions change their lights into different colours. They are rarely unambiguous— and there are enough cases where we carry out actions with many colours.

216

Love one’s enemies? I think that has been well learned. These days it happens thousands of times, in small and big things. In fact, now and then something even higher and more sublime takes place—we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best: but all this is unconscious, without any fuss, without any pomp and circumstance, rather with that modesty and secret goodness which prohibit solemn words and virtuous formulas. Morality as a pose—that offends our taste nowadays. This is also a step forward, just as it was a step forward for our fathers when religion as a pose finally offended their taste, including hostility to and a Voltairean bitterness against religion (and everything that formerly went along with the sign language of free thinkers). It’s the music in our conscience, the dance in our

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