Virtue or Sanity?
"...however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them."
There is a slight tradeoff between virtue and sanity. The two aren’t orthogonal—virtue overwhelmingly aids sanity and vice-versa—but they don’t point in the same direction either. The narrow region at their joint is fertile ground for ambiguity and contradiction.
The perfectly virtuous man is an automaton. He’s disembodied, abstract, and void of temptations. He’s pure—but is he sane?
One may contend that virtue lies not in the absence of temptations, but in the defiance of their sway. I rejoin that a man in constant struggle with his desires is anything but sane.
The subtitle quotes the Four Great Vows as read in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.