(the) American (Novel of)

Make It Look Easy
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disciplined movement must contain some small sinuous possibility if it
is to move at all—otherwise, the transition is impossible, as perfect
efficiency would have us arrive at point B from point A without any
need to slide between them.
Ethics by itself is no way to live. Without etiquette, which is not
ethics, no system of ethical rules can hold: ethics is about human
behavior, and we cannot continue to interact without grace notes. It
would be absurd to impose with the stringency of an ethical requirement
the small, useless gestures that make up the social graces. We have
all known, surely, people whose ethical character was unarguable and
unshakeable, who were yet very difficult to cope with as human beings,
because their systems left them no room for interactions which were
unnecessary and situationally responsive—those who are so busy being
good they have nothing left with which to be gracious.
We might say that grace is the avoidance of systematic rigidity, of
stiffness, perhaps. It is the ability to keep manners from becoming
mannered. One must always, my overworked ballet teacher used to
insist, make it look easy. So too says Count Baldassare Castiglione in his
sixteenth-century guidelines for courtiers. Listed in “A Breef Rehersall
of the Chiefe Conditions and Qualitites in a Courtier” is the requirement
“To do his feates with a slight, as though they were rather naturally
in him, then learned with studye: and use a Reckelesness to cover
art, without minding greatly what he hath in hand, to a mans seeminge.” 12
So too says Miss Manners, who indeed regards etiquette in certain
senses a matter of ease: “It is a great deal easier to settle conflicts on
the superficial ground of manners than to fight them out as matters of
morals.” 13 “Make it look easy,” probably a command to lie, can never
be an ethical imperative. It belongs rightly in the diminutive, to etiquette.
But without it, our ethics is no ethics, no way to behave, no
ethos by which a human being can—or by which, at any rate, any
civilized human being ought—to live.
Notes
1. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes of spaces of knowledge,
spaces both opened by and opening the way for certain forms of discourse.
It is largely to his discussion there that the present remarks are indebted.