THE FINISHING STROKE, by ELLERY QUEEN: REVIEW

My last posts, on the Pagan Copycat theory, made me recall this crime novel, written in the '50s but set during the Roaring Twenties...

I first got to know The Finishing Stroke during a summer in Sweden, as a teen; it was referenced in a linguistics book borrowed from my friend Stefan Olsson. The plot has much in common with Agatha Christie novels: the Closed Circle trope (an isolated location), the diverse rag-tag crew of suspects, the use of a folk song (nursery rhymes in Christie, a Christmas carol in Queen) as foreshadowing, etc.

Twelve people, all of them of different professions and zodiac signs: a detective/mystery writer (Ellery Queen, Gemini), a composer, a poet (Sebastian, Capricorn, a teenage heir who will inherit the family fortune on Twelfth Night), a thespian actress (Valentina, Sagittarius), a fashion designer (Rusty, Leo, Sebastian's fiancée), a college student (Ellen, Aries, Sebastian's guardian's orphan niece), a psychic/astrologer (the fashion designer's mother), a printer, a publisher (Samson Craig, a Pisces) a lawyer, a doctor, and an old vicar. A party that will last all twelve days of Christmas, from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night (I should have posted this on Christmas!). On an estate in the countryside, isolated by a blizzard and then snowed in (the Closed Circle trope in full effect!)

On Christmas Eve, suddenly a Santa Claus in full Santa getup (red suit, white beard, Santa hat) appears, suddenly ex nihilo, and delivers zodiac jewellery to each of the guests, cufflinks for the gents and brooches for the ladies, to each person their own sign. This Santa can't have come from outside; there are no footprints in the snow and the mansion is cut off from the outside world. But of course it's a Gothic-style Victorian estate, full of secret passageways...

"You’re Aries, Ellen (the student), so you get the lamb. Valentina (the thespian), you’re Sagittarius, so of course you get the archer. And so on. It was my inspiration, Sebastian (Capricorn), wasn’t it?”

“It certainly was. Rusty (the fashion designer, Leo) designed them, [...]"

On Christmas Day, the mystery thickens; Sebastian (but no one else) receives mysterious presents: an OX made of sandalwood, a doll-HOUSE without windows or door, and a wooden CAMEL with enamel coating, accompanied by a typewritten note (typewritten to be more anonymous, handwriting would give the sender away), parodying the classic Christmas carol The 12 Days of Christmas:

On the first day of Christmas your True Love sends to you:

A sandalwood OX in a holiday box,

an unfinished HOUSE for a soon-to-be spouse,

a gray and white CAMEL with skin of enamel.

As the days go by, each morning Sebastian receives more and more bizarre and ostensibly random gifts: toy animals, both plushies and wooden figurines, including a FISH and a SNAKE; missing parts of the doll-HOUSE (a DOOR, WINDOWS, and a FENCE); and body parts of a baby doll (the HEAD without eyes or mouth, an EYEBALL, a MOUTH full of TEETH, and both hands: an OPEN PALM and a CLOSED FIST), accompanied by typewritten 12 Days of Christmas parodies that grow more sinister for each day. The last gift, a KNIFE with a jewelled hilt and pommel, is found buried in Sebastian's back, on his lifeless body, on his birthday on Twelfth Night, and the typewritten message reads:

On the Twelfth Night of Christmas your True Love sends to you:

this final DAGGER, this jewelled KNIFE,

this finishing stroke to end your life.

(Very cliché to rhyme "knife" with "life," but very appropriate for a murder!)

But are there two Sebastians? Right after the body is discovered, another Sebastian comes downstairs and asks what the matter is. This one is the real Sebastian; the murder victim is his secret identical twin brother, concealed from the outside world à la Man in the Iron Mask.

But what struck me the most was the pattern - like Agatha Christie's nursery rhyme murders, the carol serves as a foreshadowing and also follows a pattern, like the victims of Themed Serial Killers (think Se7en or Theatre of Blood!  A Theme Serial Killer, according to TV Tropes, has to pattern his kills after a famous set, like the seven deadly sins, or a work of fiction. The killer will choose victims who match up with the set and/or he will kill them in manners befitting the set. Note that the killer will avoid repeating methods of murder: each death will represent, in some way, another portion of the set or story). Except that here it's not the murders but the WARNINGS to the victim that follow the pattern. And that pattern/theme are the LETTERS OF THE HEBREW ALEFBET (which I knew from Tarot - the Crowley-Thoth and Papus Tarots -, Kabbalah, and the Spanish fairytale fantasy En busca de las voces perdidas) in alphabetical order: the OX is ALEPH, the HOUSE is BETH, the CAMEL is GIMEL, the DOOR is DALETH, the WINDOWS are HE, [...] the OPEN PALM is YOD, the CLOSED FIST is KAPH, etc. 

My only gripe is that QOF, which became the Latin letter Q, was here represented by a MONKEY (which Sebastian received as a plushie), when it was actually a LASSO (the book was written in the 1950s and set during the Roaring 20s). Both Qof and Q look like a primate with a round body and a long tail, but this interpretation is actually wrong; there were and are no wild monkeys in Israel, while ancient Israelites used lassos to lasso horses and cows, and Q and Qof also look like a lasso. En busca de las voces perdidas suggests a lasso as the interpretation for the letter's origin, while Wikipedia suggests (the eye of) a sewing needle, or the nape of a neck.

Wikipedia on Qof:

The origin of the glyph shape of qōph () is uncertain. It is usually suggested to have originally depicted either a sewing needle, specifically the eye of a needle (Hebrew קוף quf and Aramaic קופא qopɑʔ both refer to the eye of a needle), or the back of a head and neck (qāf in Arabic meant "nape").

But I adored the theme of twelves: twelve days of Christmas (chronologically and in the carol), twelve guests, and nearly all of them connected to the number in some way or another:

"Think, Mr. Payn, hard. Does the number twelve in any context—strike fire anywhere in your personal experience?”

“Of course not!” Payn replied, not with grace.

”Your professional life? You’re a lawyer. Lawyer . . . Of course!” Ellery said, beaming. “What could be clearer? Lawyer, jury. Twelve good men and true. You see?”

“My God,” the lawyer groaned. “Arthur, never mind!”

“The title of it, of course,” Craig chuckled, with a side glance at Sebastian, was Lex XII. Tabularum—I have a copy of it around somewhere. The Law of the Twelve Tables, by Roland Payn.”

“So there we are,” Ellery said cheerfully. “Mr. Payn, you at least have now been connected with twelveness. In fact, come to think of it, you’re also a douzeper.”

“I’m a what?” Roland Payn gasped.

“Douzeper,” Ellery assured him. “The douze pers, the Twelve Peers, were the twelve paladins of Charlemagne. Surely you can’t have forgotten the most famous paladin of them all? Doesn’t Chanson de Roland ring a bell for you, Mr. Payn? ‘A Roland for an Oliver’? Childe Rowland? My dear sir, you’re up to your quiddities in twelves. Now, who’s next? Dr. Dark? Doctor, we’re waiting,” Ellery said in a chiding tone. “What does twelve mean to you?”

“The hour when I’m usually wakened from a sound sleep by a patient who’s positive she has the Australian pip,” the fat man said. “However, I could refer you to the twelve cranial nerves, an inescapable part of the anatomy, which terminate in the twelfth, or hypoglossal, nerve (On Old Olympus' Towering Top, A Finn And German Viewed Some Hawks; mnemonic)—”

“Remote, remote,” Ellery said with a frown.

“Think, Samson,” Craig chuckled.

“Samson! Did you say Samson, Mr. Craig?” Ellery cried.

“Certainly I said Samson. That’s his first name.”

“And I thought it was Samuel! (Mr. Craig goes by Sam) Well, that makes all the difference,”

Ellery said with satisfaction. “You see that, of course.”

“Frankly,” Ellen said, “no.”

“What do they teach you at Wellesley? Samson is the Biblical equivalent of the Greek Hercules. And what does Hercules suggest?”

“The Twelve Labours!” Freeman said, smiling broadly.

After that it was easy. Marius Carlo (the composer) qualified as a musical disciple of Schönberg’s, with his 12-tone system; Mr. Gardiner (the vicar) was linked with the 12 Apostles, one of whose names—Andrew—he actually bore; Mrs. Brown (Rusty's mother, the astrologer) and the twelveness of the zodiac were natural affinities; Arthur Craig was accepted through one of the annual staples of his press, the famous Craig Calendars (the twelve months); Valentina, denying that she had ever played Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, nevertheless insisted on inclusion because she was Sagittarius, the archer centaur, and her birthday was December, on the 12th—the 12th day of the 12th month! Rusty (the fashion designer) was a problem until Ellery ferreted from her the information that her baptismal name was not Rusty at all, but Yolanda; which, having seven letters, combined with the five letters of her surname to add up YOLANDA BROWN to the magic 12; and Dan Z. Freeman (the publisher), who was ofthe Jewish faith, was unanimously voted—by John’s nomination—Grand Twelveness, since his Jewishness not only suggested the 12 Tribes of Israel and their leaders, the 12 Sons of Jacob, but his first name, Dan, was the name of one of the 12 and his middle name, Zebulon—”after my maternal grandfather, olav hasholem,” Freeman assured them gravely—was the name of another.

The effect was rather spoiled when it was discovered that neither Sebastian (the poet, recipient of the gifts) nor Ellen (the student) could join the club. In spite of the best efforts of Ellen, she could think of no 12 in her life, nor could her uncle. As for Sebastian, if anyone thought of bringing up the 12 nightly gifts he was being threatened with, the thinker thought better of it.

“What about you, Mr. Queen?” Craig smiled. “You mustn’t leave yourself out.”

“Me? I’m in Sebastian’s and Ellen’s boat, Mr. Craig. I can’t think of a twelve that applies to me.”

“Your full name, ELLERY QUEEN,” Freeman suggested. “It has eleven letters. If you had a middle initial—”

“Unfortunately, I don’t.”

“Books!” Craig slapped his thigh. “You’re in this club on the basis of your association with books! You're a mystery writer! One of the technical book sizes is duodecimo, what we call 12mo. You see?”

This theme of twelve is fascinating, especially when you consider subsets that have ONE LEADER AND TWELVE FOLLOWERS, one of whom is often a TRAITOR: 

• Charlemagne and his twelve peers (including traitor Ganelon), 
• King Arthur and his twelve knights (including traitor Mordred), 
• Odin and his twelve Asgardians (including traitor Loki), 
• Jesus and his twelve disciples/apostles (including Judas Iscariot), 
• Jacob and his twelve sons/tribes (including traitor Judah), 
• Napoleon and his twelve field marshals (including traitor Bernadotte, then King of Sweden), 
• etc.

This pattern, from all I know, may represent the Sun (leader) and the twelve zodiac signs, as the Pagan Copycat theory (to which I subscribe) states.

PS. Ellery Queen has another nursery rhyme novel, far closer to Agatha Christie (the nursery rhyme is the base for a Theme Serial Killer's murder victims): Double Double, with a Shakespearean title but based upon "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor," something between nursery rhyme and superstition (like the magpie-counting rhyme "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy"): young girls counted the buttons on each other's jackets to divine their future husbands; the first button was "tinker," the second one "tailor," the third one "soldier," etc. (This rhyme inspired a song in the Radiohead album A Moon-Shaped Pool!)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,

Rich man, Poor man, Beggar, Thief,

Doctor, Lawyer, Police Chief

In Double Double, the killer starts at "rich man" in a rural area: 

• first the village hermit, who hoarded a large fortune (ostensibly poor, actually rich), dies of what appears to be a heart condition
• then the village "billionaire," actually destitute (ostensibly rich, actually poor), dies of what appears to be a suicide
• then the local homeless drunk (the beggar) disappears like into thin air, leaving only his hat and overcoat behind
• The next victim is a thief, then the doctor, then the lawyer... And Ellery is fearing for his life because now he is the local Police Chief, who will be the final victim!

Ten Days' Wonder, also by Ellery Queen, has the Ten Commandments as a theme:

• Howard the sculptor made sculptures of Greek gods - II. NO GRAVEN IMAGES / I. THERE IS NO OTHER GOD
• His signature is H. H. Waye - III. DO NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD IN VAIN (H. H. Waye is an anagram of Yahweh!)
• He desecrated the graves of his parents - V. HONOUR YOUR PARENTS
• The desecration of those graves took place on Sunday morning - IV. HONOUR THE SABBATH (Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, while Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath; the words for Saturday in Romance languages mean literally Sabbath)
• He had an affair with a married woman - VII. DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY / X. DO NOT COVET OTHERS' WIVES
• He denied having given Ellery this woman's necklace - IX. DO NOT LIE OR BREAK OATHS
• He robbed a bank - VIII. DO NOT STEAL
• The only Commandment Howard hadn't broken yet was the Sixth - VI. DO NOT KILL - but he planned to murder his stepmother...

And in Agatha Christie's novels, the theme is nursery rhymes. And Then Then Were None has obviously "Ten Little Soldier Boys" (with a more racist title in the original): There are 10 victims, eight guests and two servants, trapped by a tempest on Soldier Island, shaped like a soldier's head (the Closed Circle trope again!); a phonograph that plays the nursery rhyme in a loop; the Dwindling Party of ten characters are picked off one by one in ways that suggest the soldier boys' deaths in the rhyme; and at the start there are ten soldier nutcrackers on the mantlepiece, and after each victim dies, one nutcracker disappears - until the sole survivor commits suicide and the last nutcracker is gone: and then there were none, as the title foreshadowed:

Ten little soldier boys went out to dine; 

one choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little soldier boys stood up very late; 

one overslept and then there were eight.
Eight little soldier boys travelling in Devon; 

one said he'd stay there and then there were seven.
Seven little soldier boys chopping up sticks; 

one chopped himself in half and then there were six.
Six little soldier boys playing with a hive; 

the bumblebees stung one and then there were five.
Five little soldier boys going in for law; 

one got in Chancery and then there were four.
Four little soldier boys going out to sea; 

a sea monster swallowed one and then there were three.
Three little soldier boys walking in the zoo; 

a polar bear hugged one and then there were two.
Two little soldier boys sitting in the sun; 

one got frizzled up and then there was one.
One little soldier boy left all alone; 

he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.

1. In A Pocket Full of Rye, also by Christie, the nursery rhyme is "Sing a Song of Sixpence," in turn inspired by Henry VIII and his wives (Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn to be more precise); first the businessman and mansion owner Rex ("king") dies in his study, where he was counting money (poisoned with yew extract in his orange marmalade); then his wife Elvira dies in the parlour while eating bread and honey (but the cyanide was in her cup of tea); then Gladys, the maid and Rex's lover, dies in the garden, strangled with the clothesline, with a clothespin on her nose. The pockets of all three victims were filled with rye grain... 

The Twelve Labours of Hercules, also by Christie, has Hercule Poirot solve twelve cases inspired by his demigod namesake's twelve famous tasks, in the same order:

1. Nemean Lion - save a dognapped Pekingese, a very lion-like pet
2. Lernaean Hydra - stop a rumour and a stream of poison-pen letters
3. Arcadian (Cerynean) Deer - the culprit is a beautiful golden-haired ballerina, lithe as a fawn
4. Erymanthian Boar - the culprit is a pig-like thug, the crime occurs in the Austrian Alps (the real Erymanthian Boar was trapped in a snowdrift)
5. Augean Stables - clean the corrupt British Prime Minister's public image
6. Stymphalian Birds - the culprits appear to be two crowlike Polish women
7. Cretan Bull - a bull-like young man goes berserk at night and has to be trapped in the estate maze
8. Mares of Diomedes - stop a general's quadruplet daughters, who party every night with orgies and cocaine
9. Girdle of Hippolyta - save a British teenage girl who was kidnapped on the train to her girls' boarding school in Paris
10. Flock of Geryon - stop a Nazi cult leader ("Geryon") who drugs his "flock" into compliance
11. Golden Apples of the Hesperides - retrieve, from a convent in Ireland, a chalice made by Cellini for Rodrigo Borgia: the chalice is of solid gold, shaped like a tree with emerald apples at the top and the Serpent of Eden coiled around the trunk (it has also got a secret compartment for poison)
12. Capture of Cerberus - dognap the creepy guard dog of an underworld-themed nightclub, the HQ of a drug ring.

***********************************

PS 2: The Die Toten Hosen song "Zehn kleine Jägermeister" is a parody of "Ten Little Soldier Boys" and its versions across cultures. Here is my translation:

Ten little Jägermeisters were smoking joints;

one of them overdosed and then there were nine.

Nine little Jägermeisters wanted so much to inherit;

but for them to inherit, one of them had to die.

Eight little Jägermeisters were driving at top speed;

seven went to Düsseldorf and one went to Cologne.

Seven little Jägermeisters were having affairs;

one of them and his lover were surprised by her husband.

Six little Jägermeisters wanted to evade taxes;

one of them was imprisoned, the other five had to pay.

Five little Jägermeisters in a police control;

the police shot down one of them, the other four survived.

Four little Jägermeisters in the military;

they had a drinking contest, the winner is no more.

Three little Jägermeisters went to a restaurant;

there were two steaks with green beans and one with mad cow disease.

Two little Jägermeisters asked for asylum;

one was let into the country, the other one was too much.

Surprisingly, this version has a happy ending:

One little Jägermeister felt oh so alone,

thus, he invited nine more Jägermeisters to an Easter party...

StrixAlluka's Monster Blood Tattoo AU A Light to Their Path has "Ten Little Lantern-sticks," a folk song from the Half-Continent inspired by both the nursery rhymes and the Die Toten Hosen song; the author said that "upon listening to Zehn kleine Jägermeister, I realized that the Friends of the ABC die one by one as a Dwindling Party, and I wanted to work that into one of my AUs; since the Half-Continent is a world full of wars, monsters, disease... where anyone can die, the song creates a foreboding of death here, that neither Hogwarts nor Aritsar nor Panem (unless you're a tribute) nor any other universe can offer. 'Ten Little Lantern-sticks,' basically a filk song, was mainly a tribute to Agatha Christie and all her nursery rhyme murders, especially And Then There Were None." 

Ten little lantern-sticks,
marching in a straight line;
one of them was left behind,
and then there were...

Nine little lantern-sticks,
hastening not to be late;
the gates closed in on one of them,
and then there were...

Eight little lantern-sticks,
four their records given  (Every second lighter is issued a small book called a record to note down any lamps in need of repair for the seltzermen to attend to.);
...,
and then there were...

Seven little lantern-sticks,
still but lantern-sticks;
...
and then there were...

Six little lantern-sticks
left so far alive;
...
and then there were...

Five little lantern-sticks
bolting the cothouse door;
...
and then there were...

Four little lantern-sticks,
struggling to break free;
...
and then there were...

Three little lantern-sticks,
few, yet hardy few;
...
and then there were...

Two little lantern-sticks
stood right before a gun;
one took a bullet to the chest,
and then there was...

One little lantern-stick
thought he would be a hero;
he looked his death straight in the eye,
and then there were zero.

Or (bowdlerised version, the one Aunt Gillenormand 'the Old Maid' used to tell)

One little lantern-stick
took his ladylove to wife;
they cared for one another
and soon brought forth new life.

 

The "lantern-sticks" die (well, the first victim, Jehan Prouvaire, went missing in action as a lantern-stick, was left for dead, but changed his gender and joined the Right of the Pacific Dove; the others die as young adults but the rhyme, sung by Marius, calls them "lantern-sticks" to emphasize their innocence) one by one, their death wounds like those in canon but also like those in the nursery rhyme/filk song: Enjolras is the last one in the tragic version ("and then there were zero"), Marius the sole survivor in the bowdlerised, happy version his aunt tooks him ("they cared for one another and soon brought forth new life;" he obviously marries Cosette and here they have eight children, hinted to be the reincarnations of his brothers in arms... in bowdlerised versions of "Ten Little Soldier Boys" and its versions, in real life, the sole survivor doesn't commit suicide, but either gets nine new friends or a partner and eight children; there are ten people again, either a family or a group of friends)

THE PAGAN COPYCAT THEORY - MY VIEW

I subscribe to the Pagan Copycat theory, but, unlike others, I think there was a historical person in ancient Israel, Yeshuva ben Yosef the carpenter's son from Nazareth, a revolutionary leader upon whom layers of solar and resurrection myths - 12 disciples like twelve zodiac signs, the miracles [healing fools and cripples, calming tempests, multiplying food, exorcisms, etc.], omens during his birth [new stars in the sky, animals talking, no one allowed to be violent, etc.], attempt made on his life by a tyrant in infancy, raised by Muggle foster parents in a foreign country, virgin birth in a cave on the winter solstice, and death by violent execution on the spring equinox, then resurrection, etc. - were added through the ages, starting with the Gospels themselves, just like it happened to King Arthur and the heroes of the Trojan War. Otto Rank [focusing on birth and infancy, with a Freudian/Oedipal bent], Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell [the monomyth] and many others have found these parallels; already Count Volney - who thought all religions have a solar/zodiacal origin, Brahma and Saraswati are related to Abraham and Sarah, etc - and J-B Pérès - who said Napoleon having twelve field marshals may be a reference to the Sun and the zodiac signs, like Jesus and his disciples, King Arthur and his knights, etc; and that Napoleon's son by his Habsburg wife, the so-called "Eaglet," [the crops] was born on the spring equinox. Napoleon's Habsburg wife would be the fertile Earth, and her predecessor Josephine, the barren Moon. To Pérès, Napoleon defeating the Revolution is like a Chaoskampf between the sky-god and the serpent of chaos [Hercules vs. the Hydra, Thor vs. the Midgard Serpent, Indra vs. Vritra, etc]; the Revolution was very chaotic, described as a "hydra," and the word revolutus means "coiling," like a serpent). 

ONCE MORE - LOVECRAFTIAN CHILDREN IN ANDERSEN'S XENOFICTION

Finally The Midnight Archives released their Ugly Duckling episode - and I couldn't wait to get to the part where the protagonist spends the winter on a farm with Lovecraftian, monstrous (sadistic in his eyes) children, so I skipped ahead:

The farm children crowd around, excited by this strange pet bird their father has brought home. They've never seen anything like him. They want to touch him, to hold him, to play with him. But the ugly duckling doesn't understand play. He only understands danger. When the children reach for him laughing, he sees only hands coming to hurt him. The same human hands that have always hurt him. Every touch in his life has been violent. Every approach has been an attack. He panics. [...] The children laugh and try to catch him, which only makes his terror worse. The whole cottage descends into chaos. It's almost comedic if you don't think about what's happening inside the duckling's mind. He's been given a second chance at shelter, at safety, at warmth, and he's destroying it because he can't recognize kindness. He's been hurt so many times that even genuine friendliness looks like an attack. 

[...]

From the very beginning, Andersen was marked as different. He was a tall and gangly ginger, with a prominent nose and hands that seemed too big for his body. And, moreover, left-handed. He moved awkwardly, spoke strangely, didn't fit in with other children. He preferred putting on puppet shows and reciting poetry to playing normal games. While other kids in Odense rough-housed, he stood apart, watching, dreaming, already somewhere else. The other children thought he was bizarre, and bullied him. Most surely, he was autistic.

Very clever of the narrator to portray these children as "predators" from the Ugly Duckling's point of view! So far, the only humans he has known before them, the maid on the farm where he hatched (a teenage servant) and the huntsmen (adult men) have abused him; how can he understand play when all the other humans he's known are enemies? - and moreover small children ignore that a pet is not a toy - they haven't developed empathy yet. I have spoken before of Andersen's double standard - ie Children are Innocent (the Romantic ideal) when they're the protagonists VS. Kids Are Cruel (seen as predators by the non-human protagonists) when they're secondary characters. This is NOT unique to Andersen, but can also be seen in other authors, who, unlike Andersen, feature Innocent Children as the protagonists and Cruel Kids as the side characters (even as the villains!) in THE SAME stories. This includes Christoph von Schmid (Good Friedrich and Wicked Dietrich, Good Friederike and Wicked Dorothy, the list goes on), Victor Hugo (Cosette vs. Éponine, both as children and as teenagers), and most importantly Roald Dahl (Charlie Bucket vs. the four Bad Kids, Matilda vs. her brother Michael and Bruce Bogtrotter, the Narrator vs. Bruno in The Witches, the list goes on).

There seems to be a double standard. Whenever children are the protagonists (The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, etc). they are pure and innocent, and victims of suffering we should empathize with 

- but in Andersen's works of xenofiction, where the protagonists are non-human and the children are secondary characters, these children are portrayed as inhuman monsters who only want to play, to have fun, to eat sweets... But in that pursuit, they treat the non-human protagonists not roughly, but even cruelly, and lacking empathy (they chase the Ugly Duckling, pull the Fir Tree's branches, send the Tin Soldier downstream in a paper boat... Not even adult humans are spared, as seen in their treatment of the storyteller [Andersen inserting himself?] also in The Fir Tree, here). 

Long story short: children as protagonists=pristine angels to empathize with, children as secondary characters in xenofiction=sadistic Lovecraftian monsters without empathy. This double standard, especially in the light of Romanticism (Rousseau's and Locke's ideas, Andersen as a Romantic), has always fascinated me.

Here are Maria Tatar's comments on the monstrous, sadistic children in Andersen's xenofiction:

In The Ugly Duckling:

the duckling was afraid they would hurt him. Andersen’s surprising dislike of small children, given the audience for his stories today, is well documented. In the plan for a commemorative statue in Copenhagen, he asked that the child looking over his shoulder be removed from the design. But his hatred of one of the sketches, which reminded him of “old Socrates and young Alcibiades,” may have been inspired by very different anxieties. As a child he was an avid reader, who stayed away from other children. “I never played with the other boys,” he reported in a letter to his benefactor Jonas Collin, “I was always alone.” (Moreover, Andersen was bullied! Note from S. Dermark)

In The Fir Tree:

(This tale is absent from Maria Tatar's annotated edition, but note here how they treat the storyteller [Andersen inserting himself!], showing that not even the human adults are inmune to their lack of empathy!)

Here is the scene as translated by Jean Hersholt:

Suddenly the folding doors were thrown back, and a whole flock of children burst in as if they would overturn the tree completely. Their elders marched in after them, more sedately. For a moment, but only for a moment, the young ones were stricken speechless. Then they shouted till the rafters rang. They danced about the tree and plucked off one present after another.

Then the children had permission to plunder the tree. They went about it in such earnest that the branches crackled and, if the tree had not been tied to the ceiling by the gold star at top, it would have tumbled headlong.

The children danced about with their splendid playthings. No one looked at the tree now, except an old nursemaid who peered in among the branches, but this was only to make sure that not an apple or fig or gingerbread man had been overlooked.

"Tell us a story! Tell us a story!" the children clamored, as they towed a fat little man to the tree. He sat down beneath it and said, "Here we are in the woods, and it will do the tree a lot of good to listen to our story. Mind you, I'll tell only one. Which will you have, the story of Ivedy-Avedy, or the one about Humpty-Dumpty who sat on a wall and had a great fall, tumbled downstairs, yet ascended the throne and married the princess?"

"Ivedy-Avedy," cried some. "Humpty-Dumpty," cried the others. And there was a great hullabaloo. 

The fat little man told them all about Humpty-Dumpty, who sat on a wall, had a great fall, tumbled downstairs, yet ascended the throne and married the princess. And the children clapped and shouted, "Tell us another one! Tell us another one!" For they wanted to hear about Ivedy-Avedy too, but after Humpty-Dumpty the storytelling stopped.

In The Tin Soldier:

street urchins came running along. As is often the case in Andersen’s stories, schoolboys and street urchins can be counted on to engage in sadistic behavior. Saintly urchins like the little match girl are invariably female.

for no reason at all, (his owner) threw him right into the stove. The tin soldier seems to be a survivor, but in the end, he loses his life “for no reason at all”—just on a small boy’s whim. The Tin soldier attributes the boy’s urge to an evil power, suggesting that the jack-in-the-box has engineered his death.

......

So basically here we have the Kids are Cruel (sadistic, lacking empathy, caring only for their own amusement) trope in Andersen's xenofiction, in child secondary characters, stemming from his own hatred of children (misopaedia) stemming in turn from bullying trauma... One of the causes of the Kids Are Cruel trope in real life is explained in Developmental Psychology. It's called ego-centralism and until a child reaches a certain point in their mental development they don't understand that their actions can hurt others even though they are not hurt themselves. This is what happens in Andersen's stories, even though Andersen himself uses the trope to view them as sadistic monsters from the POV of non-humans, to channel his childhood trauma!

- vs. the Children are Innocent (pure, angelic, whose suffering elicits empathy) whenever children are the protagonists in Andersen, stemming from the Victorian / Romantic notions/Rousseaunian and Lockean myth of pristine, unsullied childhood as a black slate. This can lead to an unawareness that they are doing anything wrong. They can commit offenses unwittingly and face a Bewildering Punishment. Children have to learn empathy, and not to be self-centered, and also often have a poor grasp of consequences of their actions. This can then lead to Ambiguous Innocence. Again, ego-centralism.

A well-known experiment by Wimmer and Perner (1983) called the false-belief task demonstrates how children show their acquisition of theory of mind (ToM) as early as 4 years old. In this task, children see a scenario where one character hides a marble in a basket, walks out of the scene, and another character that is present takes out the marble and puts it in a box. Knowing that the first character did not see the switching task, children were asked to predict where the first character would look to find the marble. The results show that children younger than 4 answer that the first character would look inside the box, because the children have the superior knowledge of where the marble actually is. It shows egocentric thinking in early childhood because they thought that, even if the first character themself did not see the entire scenario, the first character has the same amount of knowledge as they did, and therefore should look inside the box to find the marble. As children start to acquire ToM (and empathy), their ability to recognize and process others' beliefs and values overrides the natural tendency to be egocentric.

---

Andersen's xenofictional children see the world as a huge playplace and everything as a toy - they are ego-centralists, they only want to play and have fun, they're rough-housing all the time, but they haven't learned yet that a pet is not a toy, that a plant is not a toy either, and neither is an adult human, no matter how good stories he might tell. They simply haven't developed empathy yet. At heart, all young children are like that, and that is why they're perceived as "naughty" or "rough-housing." I was the same myself as a toddler; I made potions with my shampoos and other cosmetics, I cut my dolls' hair and doodled on their faces, I cut out the characters in fairytales to use them as paper dolls... fortunately all my pets were confined to their habitats (the fish in their fishtank, the turtles in their terrarium, the budgies in their cage) and therefore spared a rough treatment from a young child who moreover needed constant external stimulation, with her autism and ADHD! Like Andersen's bullies, I rough-housed, but like Andersen himself, I also spent the hours away in daydreams and in books, and was bullied both for my social awkwardness and Nordic looks (and I'm left-handed too!). 

MYTH DEBUNKED: MERCURY DOESN'T CAUSE AUTISM

Back when "Asperger's" was still a thing (Hans Asperger was a Nazi who only diagnosed boys!), my dad and many others fell for the MYTH that mercury in vaccines (like the MMR or mumps shot) and fish (like pike or tuna) causes autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergences.

That is a MYTH, a HOAX, pure TARADIDDLE debunked since decades ago. The "doctor" who said it, Andrew Wakefield, is a worse FRAUD than Gilderoy Lockhart.

There are people who still believe this hoax, and they even say it's the mercury in the COVID shot! Including Christian novelist Karen Kingsbury, who in Unlocked blames the mercury in vaccines for love interest Holden's autism (more severe than mine, he is nonverbal and communicates via tablet and flashcards!):

Holden (as a toddler) would sing and laugh and dance with Ella (the protagonist, then also a toddler) and then … Then what happened? Was it the vaccines Tracy (Holden's mum) had read about a few years back? That must’ve been part of it, because he was whole and happy and here. He was so here back then. 

Even at the doctor’s office when Holden was three. Tracy had told him that evening that the doctor felt bad. So many shots in one day. Upsetting the child when he was so happy. And Dan (Holden's dad) could see like it was yesterday the way Holden looked the next day, tired and beat up, a fever racking his little body. “Why so many shots?” he’d asked Tracy. The reason had made sense to everyone: his previously scheduled checkups hadn’t worked out … Holden had been sick … or they’d been on vacation. Always something. By the time he came in that fall, he was behind on his vaccine chart. The preschool he and Ella attended wanted his immunizations up to date.

Dan had called. He’d at least done that much. When the doctor called back, Dan’s tone verged on short. “He’s sick. How many shots did he get?”

“Nine. But that’s very normal, Mr. Harris. Kids Holden’s age handle that many shots all the time.” 

“Nine shots!” Dan had argued with the guy, but it went nowhere. Since then they knew that a single shot contained three hundred times more mercury than the FDA considered safe in adults. Even so, the argument in favor of shots remained stronger than any opposed to them. Kids needed protection from diseases, and research on immunizations held no smoking gun.

What had happened? Was it the immunizations, the way some people believed? Or something in the food they fed him? She’d heard specialists tell parents not to panic about getting kids their shots. The inoculations protected kids against deadly diseases, after all. But maybe not so many at one time. That was the new thinking. The schedule of shots had changed in 1989, … become more aggressive. Maybe too aggressive for some kids —kids like Holden. It was hard to know.  

Moreover, Wakefield suggests that autism is CURABLE by the Grace of G*d, a worse taradiddle and snuffbumble than the mercury hoax. This is a cradle-to-grave, incurable condition, and the miracles of Jesus, where he heals "fools" and "cripples," are actually lifted from Apollo and Asclepius myths (I subscribe to the Pagan Copycat theory, but, unlike others, I think there was a historical person in ancient Israel, Yeshuva ben Yosef the carpenter's son from Nazareth, a revolutionary leader upon whom layers of solar and resurrection myths - 12 disciples like twelve zodiac signs, the miracles [healing fools and cripples, calming tempests, multiplying food, exorcisms, etc.], omens during his birth [new stars in the sky, animals talking, no one allowed to be violent, etc.], attempt made on his life by a tyrant in infancy, raised by Muggle foster parents in a foreign country, virgin birth in a cave on the winter solstice, and death by violent execution on the spring equinox, then resurrection, etc. - were added through the ages, starting with the Gospels themselves, just like it happened to King Arthur and the heroes of the Trojan War. Otto Rank [focusing on birth and infancy, with a Freudian/Oedipal bent], Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell [the monomyth] and many others have found these parallels; already Count Volney - who thought all religions have a solar/zodiacal origin, Brahma and Saraswati are related to Abraham and Sarah, etc - and J-B Pérès - who said Napoleon having twelve field marshals may be a reference to the Sun and the zodiac signs, like Jesus and his disciples, King Arthur and his knights, etc; and that Napoleon's son by his Habsburg wife, the so-called "Eaglet," [the crops] was born on the spring equinox. Napoleon's Habsburg wife would be the fertile Earth, and her predecessor Josephine, the barren Moon. To Pérès, Napoleon defeating the Revolution is like a Chaoskampf between the sky-god and the serpent of chaos [Hercules vs. the Hydra, Thor vs. the Midgard Serpent, Indra vs. Vritra, etc]; the Revolution was very chaotic, described like a "hydra," and the word revolutus means "coiling," like a serpent). 

Yes, mercury makes people crazy, but, like Paracelsus said, the dose makes the poison. An alchemist or a hatter, who was exposed to great quantities of mercury every day, would definitely go insane (hence the term "mad hatter's disease" and the unforgettable Lewis Carroll character!). There is such a tiny amount of mercury in a platter of tuna sushi or in a COVID shot that it barely affects mental health.

We all should separate the chaff from the wheat - and pity those who still believe in such snuffbumble!

SEXUAL PROFANITY TABOO: A VICTORIAN INVENTION

Today I was thinking about why so much foul language has to do with sex.

Swedish maledictologist Magnus Ljung distinguishes between the Genital Motif, könsorgansmotivet ("dick," "cock," "cunt," "tits," "coño", "polla", "cipote", etc.) and the Coital Motif, samlagsmotivet ("fuck," "bugger," "shag," "knulla," "joder", "foutre", etc.), but both have to do with SEX.

My puritanical maternal granny told me these are Very Ugly Words, and I should avoid them like the plague. I have followed her words to the T until NOW.

I was curious: why is sex ugly/disgusting? why does so much foul language have to do with it? And why did Renaissance and Baroque literati have no qualms about it? Where did the sex taboo come from?

At last I have sated my curiosity! And all my qualms are GONE, fwoosh!

Let's discuss Renaissance and Baroque literature and start with the GOAT of it, the One and Only Bard of Avon. As I read Othello and the Henriad I am surprised that Shakespeare has no qualms. The Moor calls Desdemona a strumpet, Iago has quite the potty mouth (no surprise given that he is a non-commissioned officer), as has Mercutio, Hamlet, though well-read, asks Ophelia about country matters, and even the prim and proper French Princess Catherine de Valois gets shocked during her English lessons that the very Saxon word FOOT sounds just like the French F-word.

Moving to Spain and to the king of conceptismo, Quevedo also throws sex words left, right, and centre with carefree abandon in his satirical verses:

los mando degollar, y no jodellos, (he had them slit their throats, and not fuck / shag them)

[...]

di: «Requiescat in culo, mas no in pace.» [Say "rest in the arse, but not in peace"]

Jane Austen, during the Regency or Napoleonic era, has her notorious "Rears and Vices" blue joke, about the keisters and queer immoralities of old Royal Naval admirals, and it has aged like a fine sherry.

But the biggest surprise came from my dad's country. Nowadays all Swedish profanity is infernal, and Swedes are so cowardly that they use euphemisms like "jäklar," "farao," and "Hälsingland" (poor Hälsinglanders!) instead of the real infernal profanities. Swedes never swear about sex in the present day. Even Fredrik Lindström gets in on the act, he says: "why do we Swedes swear like chickens?" Is this a Protestant thing? It isn't. Let's go back to the Baroque period...

...when the Court Bard of Queen Christina herself, George Stiernhielm, wrote an ode to the Peace of Westphalia and one of its major causes, the marriage of a Spanish Habsburg queen to a French Bourbon king (something unheard of until then!) The title? Kungens basse och drottningens mus, The King's Dick and the Queen's Beaver! Here are the main verses, translated from the Swedish:

The King's dick must be praised,

for it brought oss peace and joy!

The Queen's beaver must also be honoured,

for it brought us dear peace!

If kings had no balls,

we would still be firing cannons...

[...]

A French dick and a Spanish beaver

taught us how to find peace:

may they by the LORD's grace, all days,

shag as much as they please!

With poems like these at a Protestant court, it can't be a Reformation thing! What is this taboo then?

A Victorian bourgeois thing...

The Wikipedia article on "Profanity" talks about:

a dichotomy between the use of highbrow religious swears and lowbrow anatomical swears.

So, sex words are "lowbrow" (lower-class, working-class). Is it a bourgeois prejudice? This YouTube video confirmed my suspicions: 

The Victorian bourgeoisie saw sexual profanity as a class marker, and they avoided and loathed it to distinguish themselves from the working class! There's the rub!

I was not only raised by a Catholic granny, but I also pride myself on being "highbrow / high culture," on liking Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Giuseppe Verdi, fantasy set in the UK (or counterpart UKs like Westeros), cultured Disney villains (like Scar who says "quid pro quo," for example), Dark Academia, etc. But the literati of the ancien régime didn't have such qualms about sex words... Neither did, in 20th century Spain, Camilo José Cela, one more of my favourite authors!

So yes, I can be highbrow AND NOT squeamish about sex words. As I will be from now on...

PS. The Puritans also played a key role in the sex word taboo. Cromwell and his cronies thought that people saying, hearing, reading, or writing words like "cunt" or "fuck" would awaken forbidden, indecent lusts!

A BIRTHDAY SNOW MOON

 Today on Imbolc evening I turn 34, I go from being "the age of Jesus Christ" to "the age of Jesus Christ plus one."

I have received congratulations from all my friends and relatives, including such wonderful gifts as

A Gloria Vanderbilt perfume

Slip-on Skechers 

A strawberry necklace and watching ring

A USB Drive for all my ebooks

A wonderful lunch outside

But the BEST gift IS in the sky above Castellón. A Snow Moon that shines like a great silver coin.

I thank you all for all your gifts and wishes. And I thank the universe for a Snow Moon on such a special day

Cool Strategies / Reframing for Impulse Control (VERY IMPORTANT!)

In follow-up experiments of the Marshmallow Test, Mischel found that children were able to wait longer if they changed the way they thought about the marshmallow (focusing on its similarity to a cotton ball --tasteless, inedible--, rather than on its gooey, delectable taste).

You can chill a hot object of desire by representing it to yourself in Cool, abstract terms. Don’t think of the marshmallow as yummy and chewy; imagine it as round and white like a cotton ball. Or that it is literally a cotton ball. One little girl became patient by pretending she was looking at a picture of a marshmallow and “put a frame around it” in her head. “You can’t eat a picture,” she explained.

While coolly defusing a temptation, you can also make Hot the delayed consequences of yielding to it. Mischel was a three-pack-a-day smoker ignoring all warnings about cancer until one day he saw a cancer patient on a gurney in Stanford Hospital. “His head was shaved, with little green X’s, and his chest was bare, with little green X’s.” A nurse told him the X’s were for where the radiation for the patient's cancer would be targeted. “I couldn’t shake the image. It made hot the delayed consequences of my smoking.” Mischel kept that image alive in his mind while reframing his cigarettes as sources of poison instead of relief, and he quit. 

In one segment, Cookie Monster appears as a contestant on a game show and is presented with a single cookie on a plate. “This is The Waiting Game,” shouts the lantern-jawed Muppet host, “and if you wait to eat the cookie until I get back, you get two cookies.” As the host dashes away, Cookie Monster’s ordeal begins. He tries singing to himself. Then he pretends the cookie is only a picture. Next he distracts himself by playing with a toy, and finally imagines that the cookie is a smelly fish. “Me need new strategy,” he says as one mental trick gives out to another. A pair of back-up singers pops up every few seconds to croon that “good things come to those who wait.” Finally, the host returns with the second cookie. The exhausted monster’s patience has paid off.

Mischel himself served as a consultant to Sesame Street for last year’s season, and Cookie Monster’s self-mastering strategies bear the clear imprint of his thinking on this question. In Mischel’s view, emotions are the bane of self-control: These “hot” responses make us impatient and cloud our logical judgment of what’s valuable. And so in his experiments, Mischel had children try to override their emotional responses to the marshmallow by having them use “cool” strategies like singing to distract themselves, focusing solely on the treat’s colour, or pretending it was a cotton ball. When children tried these approaches, they demonstrated more willpower in resisting temptation.

Mischel is hardly alone in thinking of emotion as the villain in these scenarios. More than three centuries ago, the Jewish Dutch philosopher Spinoza (17th century) pretty well encapsulated what is still the conventional wisdom about emotions in human affairs: that “in their desires and judgments of what is beneficial, people are carried away by their passions, which take no account of the future or anything else.” As Ethan Kross, the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, recently told me, suppressing emotion has pretty much always been advocated as a primary tool for resisting temptation. 

If people don’t rest between temptations, it puts them in something of a death spiral in which each willpower success perversely increases the likelihood of willpower failure when facing the next temptation. In fact, Vohs’s most recent work shows that the people who appear the best at maintaining self-control succeed not because their willpower is actually greater, but because they employ the simple strategy of avoiding coming into contact with temptation in the first place (precommitment).

Yes, there are emotions that can lead to vice (envy, lust, anger). But there are also emotions associated with virtue (gratitude, compassion, love). At the same time, while it’s true that reason and willpower can engender virtuous action—as when people adhere to a code of ethics or a long-range plan—they can just as easily be used to motivate and justify quite impulsive behavior. (More on this later.) The first step in understanding how self-control really works, then, is to give up the idea that emotions necessarily lead to impatience.

Here, to my mind, lies the key to understanding self-control’s true raison d’être. Evolutionarily speaking, the capacity for self-control didn’t arise because it increased success on standardized tests, dieting, or saving for retirement. None of those were relevant concerns for our progenitors. What did matter to one’s well-being for all of human history was the ability to navigate the social world successfully—the ability to be viewed as a virtuous, and therefore, desirable partner. A predilection to be fair, to be honest, to share, to be other-oriented to some degree, is what builds social capital. Avoid cheating on your spouse with a lover, and you will ensure long-term gains at the cost of immediate pleasure. These are the qualities people look for in friends and leaders; they’re also ones that require an ability to resist temptation.

With this view in mind, I began to design and conduct empirical research related to decision-making and impulse control about eight years ago. At the time, I was specifically interested in the dynamics of trust and cooperation, and my lab group had been accruing finding after finding showing that manipulations of specific morally toned emotions enhanced both these behaviors—behaviors that themselves directly involve delays of gratification. Take trustworthiness, for example. At heart, any decision to behave in a trustworthy manner usually pits a desire to ensure long-term cooperation against a desire for immediate selfish gain. If you loan me $200 for rent and I don’t pay you back, I’m ahead in the short term. Long term, though, I’m likely to lose much more. You probably won’t help me again, and if I were to aggregate the losses over the years from not having you as a supportive friend, the $200 I kept today will look small in comparison. Being trustworthy, then, requires that I don’t give in to a desire to keep money that wasn’t mine, but rather that I repay you at immediate cost to myself.

How did feelings of gratitude alter greedy, untrustworthy behavior? As we reported in an article published in the journal Emotion, the results were quite clear. On average, the people who received help—and expressed gratitude for it—following their computer crash gave 25 percent more tokens to their partners. Put simply, feelings of gratitude nudged people to restrain their greed; the more grateful they felt, the less selfishly they acted, and the more willing they were to cooperate with people they didn’t know from Adam and Eve. 

First, we asked participants to describe in writing one of three types of events: something that made them feel grateful, something that made them feel happy and laugh, or the events of their typical day. As you might guess, this task, which was couched as a memory experiment, really served to induce one of three emotional states: gratitude, happiness, or a relatively neutral feeling. Then, using what has become a standard method for assessing financial impulsivity, we had participants answer a series of 27 questions. Each question took the form, “Would you rather have $X now, or $Y in Z days?” In all 27 variations, Y was greater than X. So, for example, a participant might be asked if she’d rather have $55 now or $75 in 61 days—the adult analogue of one marshmallow now or two later. And just to ensure that people were motivated to tell us what they really desired, these weren’t hypothetical questions. The stakes were real. We told participants that, for some of them, one of the questions would be picked at random—and their answer honored. So, if we picked the question that had asked “Would you rather receive $55 now or $75 in 61 days?” we’d immediately give the participant $55 if she’d chosen “now,” or, 61 days later, we’d mail her a check for $75. 

Here again, the impact of gratitude on self-control became apparent. People who were feeling happy were just as impatient as those who were feeling neutral. Both groups significantly discounted the value of future rewards—meaning they sold their future selves short. On average, they exhibited an annual discount factor of 0.18, meaning that they’d give up the chance to receive $100 a year from now in order to receive $18 immediately. Those who had been induced to feel grateful, however, were significantly more future-oriented. They required $30 now before forgoing the future $100 reward—a 12 percent increase, resulting only from a simple and fleeting nudge toward feeling grateful.

AT THIS POINT, YOU might be wondering what’s so special about gratitude. In reality, it’s not gratitude per se that’s important, but rather the class of emotions to which it belongs. Much as Robert Frank theorized in the 1980s, the emotions that enhance self-control are indeed the ones that are positively related to social life, whose purpose is to grease the wheels of social interaction by fostering moral behavior. While you might feel disgusted at the sight of carrion, or happy in response to a sunny day, you feel grateful when someone does something for you. You feel shame when you’re worried someone will think less of you. You feel pride when you believe you’ve succeeded in a way people will value. These and similar emotions are the ones that have helped us build social relationships for millennia, by combating impulses to be self-centered or lazy through increasing the value we attach to long-term rewards.

A quick look at the published work coming from my research group over the past decade makes the point. Our work, for example, clearly shows that pride leads people to persevere on difficult tasks. When we give participants acclaim for their performance on any type of test, they’ll work longer and harder to hone the relevant skill, with the length of time they persevere deriving directly from the amount of pride they felt when receiving acclaim from those around them. Compassion—another morally toned emotion—also leads to behaviours that go against immediate gratification. For instance, when we increase the compassion individuals feel for another by highlighting the similarities they share with him or her, they’ll expend considerably more effort to help that other person when needed, even at immediate cost to themselves. In these and similar cases, socially oriented emotions automatically facilitate decisions and behaviours that foster the long-term gains that come from building bonds with others.

You might, for instance, resist the temptation to overeat by trying to cognitively re-frame treats as unhealthy rather than delicious. Alternatively, you can go the route of focusing on the pride you felt, or will feel, on losing those initial few pounds. You might prevent yourself from making an impulse purchase by placing your money in an account with stiff penalties for early withdrawal—a type of strategy known as precommitment, which, interestingly, in and of itself implicitly acknowledges the limits of willpower. Or you might do the same by taking a few minutes to stop and count your blessings.

Which route is the better one? For two reasons, I think the less frequently advocated path—the emotional one—might just prove superior for enhancing self-control.

The first is that, unlike strategies based on cultivating emotions, those based on cognitive mechanisms involving executive control are, as you’ll recall, easily exhausted. As work by Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister, and their colleagues has demonstrated time and again, squelching desire quickly leaves willpower depleted. As if that were not problematic enough, the effects of relying on willpower to dampen emotional desires—a strategy recommended by many leading self-control theorists like Baumeister and Mischel—can be especially pernicious. Research by the Stanford psychologist James Gross, one of the nation’s leading experts on the science of emotion regulation, shows that suppressing emotions wreaks havoc on the mind and body. It hinders memory, increases physiological stress, and negatively impacts communication with others. Using this strategy, then, poses two hazards. Not only does it increase the odds that you’ll give in to temptation later; it can also debilitate thinking, learning, memory, social bonding, and communication.

SO WHAT’S THE ANSWER to the problem of self-control? Any strategy based solely on forcing adherence to a set of virtues through a bunch of cool-headed, cognitive strategies and a list of “thou shalt nots” is a fragile one. That’s not to say it won’t work at times, but it’s based on cognitive resources that can and do fail often. Of course, relying blindly on emotions would be just as foolish, as they, too, can certainly lead one astray. Rather, the answer is to cultivate the right emotions, the prosocial ones, in daily life. These emotions— gratitude, compassion, authentic pride, and even guilt—work from the bottom up, without requiring cognitive effort on our part, to shape decisions that favor the long-term. If we focus on instilling the capacity to experience these emotional states regularly, we’ll build resources that will automatically spring forth in reflexive and productive ways. In essence, we’ll be giving ourselves inoculations against temptation that, like antibodies in our bloodstream, will be ready and waiting to combat possible threats to our well-being.

We may also partially solve the question of how to instill grit. The concept of grit, which is sometimes defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” implicitly acknowledges that the capacity for self-control isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to predicting success; the motivation to resist temptation and persist is equally important. As the University of Michigan’s Ethan Kross told me, “For self-control to work correctly, a person needs two things: ability and motivation.” One or the other alone just won’t cut it. Emotions, at base, are the motivating engines of behaviour. The beauty, then, of cultivating moral, socially oriented emotions is that they will serve not only to increase the value we attach to future gains, but also automatically and efficiently drive the behaviours in question. They provide the passion for success, irrespective of whether we consciously recognize it.

The lack of attention we as a society give to learning how to use emotions to reach goals is regrettable, because if we’re going to conquer the temptation to favor short-term pleasures—from relatively minor ones like overeating and cheating to global ones like favoring immediate profit over the long-term mitigation of climate change—we’re going to need every weapon at our disposal. And while willpower certainly offers assistance, we’ve been neglecting the weapon that comes straight from our nature as innately social beings, not just rational, calculating loners. We can’t just exert self-control by willing ourselves to resist the first marshmallow or averting our eyes from it; we have to be grateful that someone’s offering it to us in the first place.

If they focused on their abstract “cool” features (“The marshmallows are puffy and round like cotton balls”), they managed to wait longer than the researchers, watching them through a one-way observation window, could bear. And when they imagined that the treats facing them were “just a picture” and were cued to “put a frame around it in your head” they were able to wait for almost 18 minutes. When Mischel asked a child how she managed to wait so long, she replied: “well you can’t eat a picture.” 

A third way to boost self-control is to remove the emotional components (or the “hot” attributes) of the tempting object. This sounds way more complicated than it is! As a passionate tea collector, finding new flavors gives me thrills, and every addition to my tea cupboard is exciting. In order to strip tea (or any collector’s item) of its emotional component, try to think of it in an abstract way. At the end of the day, every tea is just a mix of dried leaves used to flavour water. What is so exciting about that? And you can apply the same analytic approach to other tempting items: What is wine but fermented grape juice? What is beer but fermented hop water? What are doughnuts but pieces of deep-fried dough? 

In a Japanese Zen story, a monk visits a politician who has a pretty wife, who wears fine silks and jewels, and the best perfume - moreover, the lady is rather frisky and makes advances on the monk: a serious temptation, considering his vow of chastity. That evening, while the politician is away, the wife makes advances on the monk, and nearly gets into bed with him - but then the monk imagines the lady as a corpse, foul-smelling, with brittle greenish skin full of bubbles, and maggots in her mouth and eye sockets. Obviously, this causes him to resist the temptation and preserve his chastity.

************************+

Treat desire as something temporary - don't act on it instantly. Set a timer (the New Personality Self-Portrait advises this exercise for the Mercurial personality - similar to the 7w6 or Sexual Seven) and distract yourself or "urge surf;" don't act on the urge, but watch it rise and fall and give way to disappointment if there is any - but NOT all desires lead to disappointment. The interesting thing is that desires are temporary and they change - what I want now, whether I get it or not, will be different to what I will want in another time.

THE MERCURIAL PERSONALITY - Exercise 7
To help prevent overindulging, time it. If you want one
cookie (or one sweater) but you usually eat the whole box
(or buy up the whole shop), carry a stopwatch or other
watch that has a timer. Take one cookie (purchase one
sweater). Now set your timer to go off in one hour (or half an hour, if you can't wait). 

You can have another cookie (make another purchase) one
hour/half an hour from now. Usually the urge will have passed by that
time. If not, take one more cookie (make one more
purchase) and set the timer to go off in another hour...