Of Husbanding Your Will

I was mayor of Bordeaux for four years, and I conducted myself in that office with a degree of detachment that some took for indifference and others, more charitably, for wisdom. I was not indifferent to the city’s welfare — I worked at the office and tried to serve it well. But I was careful never to let the office become myself, never to pour into its demands the reserves of feeling that belong to a man’s private life and private identity. When my term ended, I left as I had come: whole.

This is what I mean by husbanding the will. The will is a limited resource. We have only so much of it — so much capacity for commitment, for passionate engagement, for the kind of absorption in a cause that makes a man give everything to it. If we spend this capacity on public office, on political causes, on the management of other people’s affairs, we have less of it for the things that are inalienably ours — our own thoughts, our friendships, our pleasures, the work of understanding ourselves. The man who has used his will entirely in public life comes home at the end to find nothing there.

“The mayor and Montaigne have always been two people, clearly separated. A lawyer may defend a case with full commitment and still know that the verdict does not define him; the advocate’s passion is professional, not personal, and he remains himself when the court rises.”

I am aware that this argument is easily abused. The man who holds nothing at stake in the world’s affairs is not wisdom’s masterpiece — he is simply a bystander. I do not recommend disengagement. I recommend a precise and honest accounting of what belongs to the public sphere and what belongs to the private, and a refusal to let the former colonize the latter by degrees.

The hardest thing is to care enough to act well and not so much that the action’s outcome determines the condition of your soul. Caesar cared about his campaigns so intensely that their failure would have destroyed him — and so he could not afford to fail, and the world was bent to prevent his failure, whatever the cost to the world. A better arrangement is to serve faithfully and honestly and still be able to sleep on the night your side loses. That is not indifference. It is the long view.