On the Comfort of Tidy Lives
The encounter began with a small act of neighbourhood etiquette.
She had left the light on in her car. I noticed it in the evening and walked over to her house to tell her. A couple of days later we met again. She wanted to thank me with a jar of honey.
She is a young teacher and lives in a house that belongs to a Christian association. When I first heard that, I asked half-jokingly whether she was a priest. She laughed and said no, she was simply a believer.
From there the conversation moved quickly into familiar territory. Religion. Values. People we both knew.
It was a friendly conversation. She was warm, polite, completely pleasant. Yet I felt something subtle underneath it. A kind of quiet moral clarity. Not aggressive, not judgmental, but very certain.
The world seemed to fall naturally into place for her.
Some people are believers.
Some people are not.
Some people live properly.
Some people do not.
There was also a tone of optimism in the way she spoke about life. As if a good and orderly life were not only desirable, but also fairly attainable if one simply lived correctly.
And that is where I noticed a strange reaction in myself.
Part of me admired it.
Another part of me recoiled.
The feeling was familiar. I had encountered something like it as a teenager when I briefly spent time in the YMCA. What bothered me back then was not the praying. Prayer never disturbed me. What irritated me was something else, something very Swiss.
A kind of moral neatness.
In Swiss German one might call it bünzlig. Not necessarily hypocritical. Often quite sincere. But orderly, tidy, correct. The belief that life can be shaped into a straight and respectable form.
The Christian element and this bourgeois neatness sometimes blend into a single atmosphere: the idea that a good life should also be a well-arranged life.
The car should be clean.
The values should be clear.
The intentions should be good.
The life should make sense.
Listening to her, I realized how different my own instinctive philosophy has become.
At some point in my life I came across a sentence attributed to the American criminal Carl Panzram:
“Today I am dirty, but tomorrow I will be just dirt.”
Panzram meant it in a dark and nihilistic way. He despised humanity and included himself in that condemnation. But when I heard the sentence years ago, I understood it differently.
Not morally dirty.
Simply earthly.
We walk through the world with bodies that sweat, age, desire, decay. We make mistakes. We sometimes behave selfishly. Sometimes we are fair. Sometimes we are not. We carry dust into our cars and crumbs into our kitchens.
And in a few decades we ourselves will be dust.
Seen from that angle, the project of becoming a perfectly ordered human being starts to look slightly strange.
Why must everything be so tidy?
Why must life resemble a carefully arranged living room?
The question is not an invitation to chaos. I am not interested in harming people or living recklessly. One can try to treat others fairly without imagining that one’s life must become a model of moral cleanliness.
Perhaps that is the difference.
Some people see life as something that should be shaped into a clear and exemplary form.
Others see life more like a brief and imperfect passage through matter. You do your best, you try not to be cruel, and you accept that things will never be entirely clean or coherent.
Standing there with the jar of honey in my hand, talking to this friendly young teacher, I felt both reactions at the same time.
Admiration for her clarity.
And a quiet suspicion that I would suffocate inside it.
After all, today I am dirty.
And one day, not very far from now, I will simply be dirt.