The Wit’s Guide to Guilt

Or, Eezi-Mind material

Young Woman Knows What She Did, Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1904

Is guilt is the only reason anyone does anything? Make your bed, go to the gym, call your mother, get back to work. But then, it also seems like a lack of guilt is why some people do the worst things. So perhaps more guilt would make us more productive and less evil, which explains religion. 

“All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”
― Cathy Ladman

And if guilt explains religion, can science explain guilt? Or failing that, science fiction? In the expanded Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams recommends that those preparing to leave the planet bring a blunt object with which to bludgeon monsters, as well as an “Eezi-Mind Anti-Guilt jacket or sweatshirt, for wearing after incidents such as the above. Guilt is now known to be an electromagnetic wave-form which is reflected and diffused by the material from which these shirts are made. Wearing them protects you from worrying about all sorts of things, including your unpaid phone bill.”

“Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone. A trap. Because he will be no longer without guilt. ”
― Stanisław Lec

If you are foolish enough to absorb the waves of guilt, you may suffer from the Felon’s Claw. In the thoroughly discredited art of graphology, this is the handwriting term for an arc at the bottom of a descending letter that signifies deeply repressed guilt. They try to hide it, you see, but it comes pouring out of their pens! Graphologists claim that three-quarters of the prison population exhibits this stroke, which suggests the other quarter ought to hire handwriting analysts to get them exonerated. Though with cyber crime, who can even tell?

“It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.”
― Hannah Arendt

For more proof of the futility of searching for telltale signs of guilt in writing — and a unique case of guiltless productivity — consider the post-war career of P.G. Wodehouse. After the creator of Jeeves failed to evacuate his villa in the north of France in 1940, he and his wife found themselves prisoners of war. Wodehouse amiably agreed to participate in wartime broadcasts for the Nazis, noting on one transmission that “all that happened, as far as I was concerned, was that I was strolling on the lawn with my wife one morning, when she lowered her voice and said, ‘Don’t look now, but there comes the German army.”

For these naive musings, he was attacked as a traitor and a quisling. Though ably defended by George Orwell, he was persona non grata in his homeland. In the words of Churchill, “We would prefer not ever to hear about him again.”

“True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself.’
― R.D. Laing

So Wodehouse spent the long remainder of his life writing delightful stories of Edwardian England from suburban Long Island. He didn’t wrestle with his wartime actions in his stories, or anywhere else that his biographers have documented. The fabric of his soul clearly consisted of Eezi-Mind Anti-Guilt material. As one of his last interviewers summed it up: “Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: he simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome, or confusing in the world around him.”

“To be honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don’t feel worse. That is the intellectual’s problem in a nutshell.”
― Michael Frayn

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The Birth of a Riposte Card

Each month, my paying subscribers are mailed a limited edition postcard-sized illustrated quip. But everyone’s free to learn the fascinating backstory of how the June Riposte Card came into being!

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Quote Vote

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
― Stanisław Lec

Each week, I ask you to select the subject of the next Wit’s Guide. It’s like a witty Ouija board and reader, I love it. 

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That was issue 259 of Get Wit Quick, hopefully more of a pleasurable guilt trip than a guilty pleasure. What word comes to mind when I say “chocolate cake”? As Michael Pollan memorably recounted, the psychologist Paul Rozin asked citizens of different nations this question. The French chose “celebration,” while the Americans chose “guilt.” My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is presumably innocent. Tap the ❤️  to clear your conscience.