In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant, or a nobody. Had Richelieu spared the ax and Robespierre the guillotine, the former would be depreciated, the latter completely forgotten. The lesson to be drawn from this is hardly of a moral order.
— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14
This is worth remembering whenever someone speaks solemnly of leaving his mark on history. History is marked chiefly by blood, fire, conquest, collapse, and spectacular error. Its admissions policy should make obscurity look respectable. A quiet man who tends his garden, keeps his promises, and refrains from terrorizing his neighbors leaves little material for the chronicler. His life may be good precisely because it is uneventful. Eric Hoffer similarly noted that many problems are caused by nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up becoming busybodies. Aspire to be a nobody.
What is essential in every domain is always the work of quite obscure persons, nondescript, individually valueless. If they did not exist or were not what they are, nothing would get done. If nothing got done, it is they who would lose least. They are essential — and without importance.
Maintenance is so easily mistaken for insignificance. When it succeeds, it erases the tracks of its own necessity. The people who leave no trace are generally the people who keep everything running. They carry, clean, repair, stock, file, deliver, maintain, and dispose. Their success consists in preventing events. The shelves remain filled, the water runs, the garbage disappears, the lights stay on. Because nothing dramatic happens, nobody thinks of them.
The sanitation worker’s achievement is that nothing happens: no garbage mountains, vermin surge, or epidemic. Maintenance produces an absence, and absences attract no glory. We ordinarily imagine achievement as the creation of something visible — a building, a fortune, a victory, a name. But much of the most useful work leaves behind no object at all. Its product is continuity.
People who perform the most necessary tasks are looked down on; most honored is the man who is most helped.
Prestige increases with distance from direct necessity. One man cooks his own food, carries his own bags, answers his own correspondence, drives himself, cleans his own rooms, and keeps his own appointments. Another has a cook, driver, secretary, cleaner, assistant, adviser, scheduler, guard, and publicist. Society looks at the second man’s elaborate dependence and concludes that he must be important. The great man is not necessarily the man who can do the most. He may simply be the man for whom the most is done.
The tyrant receives a statue. The great man receives assistance. The nobody takes out the trash.