Still Looking for New Year's Resolutions?

How about becoming more like this description of Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall"?

"His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and spends it. He will take a bet on anything." (p. 25)

Cromwell's greatest talent is his practicality, which comes from a deep understanding of how people more and are moved through the world. In her portrayal, his concern is for lived experience over and above more abstract ideals -- even when, as in this passage, his thoughts follow a more imaginative line:

"Under his clothes, it is well known, [Thomas] More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell's, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. Someone combs the horsehair into coarse tufts, knots them and chops the blunt ends, knowing that their purpose is to snap off under the skin and irritate it into weeping sores. Is it monks who make them, knotting and snipping in a fury of righteousness, chuckling at the thought of the pain they will cause to persons unknown? Are simple villagers paid -- how, by the dozens? -- for making flails with waxed knots? Does it keep farmworkers busy during the slow winter months? When the money for their honest labor is put into their hands, do the makers think of the hands that will pick up the product?

We don't have to invite pain in, he thinks. It's waiting for us: sooner or later. . . .

He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs." (p. 72)

If only novelists wrote our inner monologues, maybe we would all be lucky enough to have these kinds of insights on a regular basis.

The scourge is a device of self-inflicted pain -- of religious devotion turned inward. But on the material plane, certainly in the marketplace (which is never far from Cromwell's mind -- how are the villagers paid, he wonders, "by the dozens?") nothing we do can be detached entirely from the communities we inhabit. We cannot inflict violence on ourselves without making others the instruments of that violence. And we cannot -- we should not -- forget that as consumers we do not just passively absorb the various objects that seem already to exist in the world around us. Instead, our desires drive the production of their own objects.