(1) I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years”, as the Bible would say; both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence calls on the two families on the same afternoon.

(2) At the first home, the son of the deceased woman said to me, “If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “If only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.”

(3) When things don’t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Priests know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course—keeping Mother at home, postponing the operation—would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?

(4) There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilt. The first is our pressing need to believe thatthe world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.

(5) The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence. A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when be is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen.

(1) During the holiday I received no letter from Myrtle and when I returned to the town she had gone away. I telephoned each day until she came back, and then she said she was going to a party. I put up with her new tactics patiently.

(2) The next time we spent an evening together there was no quarrel. To avoid it I took Myrtle to the cinema. We did not mention Haxby.

(3) On the other hand it was impossible to pretend that either of us was happy. Myrtle’s expression of unhappiness was deepening.

(4) Day by day I watched her sink into a bout of despair, and I concluded it was my fault—had I not concluded it was my fault, the looks Myrtle gave me would rapidly have concluded it for me.

(5) The topic of conversation we avoided above all others was the project of going to America. I cursed the tactlessness of Robert and Tom in talking about it in front of her before I had had time to prepare her for it.

(6) I felt aggrieved, as one does after doing wrong and being found out. I did not know what to do. When you go to the theatre you see a number of characters caught in a dramatic situation.

(7) What happens next? They usually do something and then everything is changed.

(8) My life is different. I never have scenes, and if I do, they are discouragingly not dramatic. Practically no action arises. And nothing whatsoever is changed. My life is not as good as a play. Nothing like it. All I did with my present situation was try and tide it over.

(9) When Myrtle emerged from the deepest blackness of despair—nobody after all, could remain there definitely—I tried to comfort her.

(10) I gradually unfolded all my plan, including those for her. She could come to America, too. She was a commercial artist. She could get a job and our relationship could continue as it was. And I will not swear that I did not think: “And in America she might even succeed in marrying me.” It produced no effect. She began to drink more.

(11) She began to go to parties very frequently; it was very soon clear that she had decided to see less of me. I do not blame Myrtle. Had I been in her place I would have tried to do the same thing.

(12) Being in my place I tried to prevent her. I knew what sort of parties she was going to: they were parties at which Haxby was present. We began to wrangle over going out with each other. She was never free at the times I suggested.

(13) Sometimes, usually on a Saturday night, she first arranged to meet me and then changed her mind. I called that rubbing it in a little too far. But her behavior, I repeat, perfectly sensible. By seeing less of me she stood a chance of finding somebody else, or of making me jealous, or of both. Either way she could not lose.

(1) For Mitchell and Skye Cohen, the third-generation owners of Economy Candy in New York City, the short period between Halloween and New Year’s is usually the busiest season. The store would serve upwards of a thousand customers in a weekend, when shoppers flocked to the small Lower East Side store to buy candy in bulk for holiday gifts and parties.

(2) But this year, the aisles of Economy Candy are uncharacteristically quiet, devoid of their typical crowds of loyal locals and curious tourists. When the pandemic hit New York City in March, the Cohens halted in-person shopping for the first time in the store’s 83 years. For a business that has always relied on foot traffic for the majority of its revenue, the decision was tough but necessary: the shop wasn’t big enough to keep people a safe distance from one another, and the costs of stocking, staffing and sanitizing far outweighed the profit they’d see if they stayed open. So, for the past nine months, the Cohens have sold their sweets primarily via their website, shipping orders or arranging curbside pickup.

(3) More than 30 million small businesses in the U.S. are struggling for footing in what should be their busiest quarter. A Visa survey found that 69% of small businesses still viewed the 2020 holiday season as a top sales opportunity—but retail looks vastly different when a health crisis is both upending the economy and changing the way we shop.

(4) For one thing, spending this year will be lower overall, so while small businesses can expect to see a boost in sales over the winter holidays compared with recent months’ sales, it will likely be a smaller uptick than in past years. “We found this year that the overall spending per household was going to be down about 7%,” said Rodney Sides, Deloitte’s vice chairman of U.S. retail and distribution. “People are still spending money, but they’re changing how they’re spending it and what types of things they’re buying. Travel is down, but home decor is up.”

(5) And in the age of social distancing, online shopping will see a boost. A McKinsey report found that 37% of consumers will shop more online this holiday season. As a result, many small businesses that may have had little to no digital presence are upping their online offerings.

(6) Some businesses are adjusting not only their way of reaching customers but also what they’re selling. For Su Beyazit, the founder of Su’juk, a vintage store and hair salon in Brooklyn, navigating a pandemic holiday season has meant switching up her inventory to meet the change in what people are looking for. In past years, party dresses, holiday sweaters and anything with sequins would fly off the racks, but this year she’s stocking more comfortable clothes and tried-and-true home goods.

(7) After closing her store for three months at the start of the New York outbreak, Beyazit has increased her online retail activity since reopening in the summer and also hosts sidewalk sales. Beyazit displays racks of floral dresses and colorful coats on the street, and keeps masks and sanitizer on deck for anyone who stops by. Ahead of the holidays, she’s teamed up with a local florist for a popup outside the store to sell seasonal wreaths and bouquets in a bid to make the most of their limited time outside before winter—and before a spike in cases could force them to close shop again. “We’re preparing for another shutdown creatively, but at least this time, we know what we need to do,” Beyazit said, adding that for now, “we’re still trying to make shopping fun.”

(8) Jenny DaSilva, the founder and director of Start Small Think Big, a nonprofit that helps underresourced small-business owners, believes that it’s up to consumers to support small businesses during this time. “These are businesses that typically have less than one month’s worth of cash cushion on hand, and they’ve been doing this for nine months,” DaSilva said. “Every day that goes by puts them closer to the brink. I think it is the responsibility of the consumer to meet those businesses.”

(9) The Cohens of Economy Candy have found that kind of support from their community. On the weekends, in an attempt at some kind of normality, they take orders by hand from longtime local customers who line up 6 ft. apart outside the store. But the majority of their revenue now comes from online orders, which were once just 10% of their total sales. And those sales are a fraction of what the store would normally do this time of year. “We rely on the holiday time: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, the general holiday spirit, businesses having their holiday and year-end parties,” Mitchell Cohen said. “We lost tourism, we lost parties, we lost events. We lost 75% of our business.”

(10) It’s a challenge unlike anything else the store has experienced over the nine decades it’s been in business, during which it has survived the Great Depression,⁹⁄₁₁and Hurricane Sandy. But the Cohens remain hopeful that their pivot to online sales can save them this holiday season. They’ve begun making candy care packages in Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and nondenominational themes that encourage customers to celebrate the season with loved ones, even if they have to do so from afar.

(1) The tourist trade is booming. With all this coming and going, you’d expect greater understanding to develop between the nations of the world. Not a bit of it! Superb systems of communication by air, sea and land make it possible for us to visit each other’s countries at a moderate cost. What was once the “grand tour”, reserved for only the very rich, is now within everybody’s grasp. The package tour and chartered flights are not to be sneered at. Modern travelers enjoy a level of comfort which the lords and ladies on grand tours in the old days couldn’t have dreamed of. But what’s the sense of this mass exchange of populations if the nations of the world remain basically ignorant of each other?

(2) Many tourist organizations are directly responsible for this state of affairs. They deliberately set out to protect their clients from too much contact with the local population. The modern tourist leads a cosseted, sheltered life. He lives at international hotels, where he eats his international food and sips his international drink while he gazes at the natives from a distance. Conducted tours to places of interest are carefully censored. The tourist is allowed to see only what the organizers want him to see and no more. A strict schedule makes it impossible for the tourist to wander off on his own; and anyway, language is always a barrier, so he is only too happy to be protected in this way. At its very worst, this leads to a new and hideous kind of colonization. The summer quarters of the inhabitants of the Cite Universitaire are temporarily reestablished on the island of Corfu. Blackpool is recreated at Torremolinos where the traveler goes not to eat paella, but fish and chips.

(3) The sad thing about this situation is that it leads to the persistence of national stereotypes. We don’t see the people of other nations as they really are, but as we have been brought up to believe they are. You can test this for yourself. Take five nationalities, say, French, German, English, American and Italian. Now in your mind, match them with these five adjectives: musical, amorous, cold, pedantic, native. Far from providing us with any insight into the national characteristics of the peoples just mentioned, these adjectives actually act as barriers. So when you set out on your travels, the only characteristics you notice are those which confirm your preconceptions. You come away with the highly unoriginal and inaccurate impression that, say, “Anglo-Saxons are hypocrites” and that “Latin peoples shout a lot”. You only have to make a few foreign friends to understand how absurd and harmful national stereotypes are. But how can you make foreign friends when the tourist trade does its best to prevent you?

(4) Carried to an extreme, stereotypes can be positively dangerous. Wild generalizations stir up racial hatred and blind us to the basic fact—how trite it sounds—that all people are human. We are all similar to each other and at the same time all unique.

(1) Several years ago, Joseph J. Ellis, one of the most widely read American historians, ran into a career crisis of his own strange devising. Just months after his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the Pulitzer Prize and planted itself for a long run on the best-seller list, it emerged that Ellis, who spent the Vietnam War years doing graduate work at Yale and teaching history at West Point, had been offering his students at Mount Holyoke College wholly invented accounts of his days as a platoon leader in Vietnam. After his tall tales were exposed in the Boston Globe, Ellis was suspended without pay for a year and compelled to relinquish his endowed chair.

(2) But even after the story broke, his book continued to sell briskly. And why not? No one ever accused him of falsifying his scholarship, and his probing biographies remain some of the most psychologically penetrating portraits of the Founding Fathers that we have. His supple new book, His Excellency: George Washington (Knopf; 320 pages), is another in that line, full of subtle inroads into the man Ellis calls the most notorious model of self-control in all of American history.

(3) The Washington Ellis gives us is not the customary figure operating serenely above the fray but a man constantly seeking to govern his own passions. Ironically, telling Washington’s story truthfully requires Ellis to occasionally cast doubt on the great man’s honesty. Washington could lie when he needed to—for instance, by misrepresenting for posterity his role in the disastrous engagement at Fort Necessity during the French and Indian War. And throughout his career, he feigned a lack of ambition as cover for a relentless impulse to move upward in the world.

(4) Washington had no more than a grade-school education, but he had an early grasp of issues that would be crucial to America’s future, such as westward expansion and the vexing matter of slavery. He eventually concluded that slavery must be abolished, though his own slaves were freed only after his death. He also understood precisely what his role in the new nation should be. Washington emerged from the War of Independence as a kind of god. Like Caesar before him and Napoleon after, he might easily have parlayed military glory into imperial power. But he performed his greatest service to his country by refusing to yield to that temptation. At the end of his second administration, he turned down a third term, thereby establishing an enduring example of limited presidential tenure.

(5) Washington was willing to refuse a crown, but he was exasperated by Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s aversion to federal power. His experience during the war with Britain, when a rudderless Continental Congress left his army chronically short of supplies, convinced him of the need for a government strong enough to pursue national purposes. But as Ellis sees it, Washington’s views were also “projections onto the national screen of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality”. The Father of His Country had first to prevail as master of himself.

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PASSAGE FIVE