The Masculine Character

Character is destiny. Two and a half thousand years ago, in the Greek city of Ephesus, a philosopher named Heraclitus wrote those words. In the original Greek, it's just three words. A man's character is his fate. Most men today are working on almost everything except their character. This film is about what character is, how it is cut one small stroke at a time, and where it actually shows: Theodore Roosevelt on what stands above body and intellect, the thirty flawed men of Theophrastus, William James on the choices that are always being counted, the Dunedin study, Montaigne on the ordinary hours, and the samurai who compared one virtue to the bones of the body. SOURCES Heraclitus, fragment 119 (Diels-Kranz). The page on screen is from Bywater's edition, where it is fragment CXXI (Oxford, 1877). Warren Susman, "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture" (1979), in Culture as History (1984). Theodore Roosevelt, "Character and Success", The Outlook, 31 March 1900. The page on screen is from The Strenuous Life (Philadelphia, 1903). Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 7th edition (Oxford, 1883), the entry for the Greek word for character. Theophrastus, Characters, no. 17, "the Grumbler". The engraved heads are from Francis Howell's edition (London, 1824). William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), volume 1, chapter IV, "Habit", pages 126 and 127. Terrie Moffitt and others, "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety", PNAS 108 (2011): the Dunedin study. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, book III, chapter 2, "Du repentir". The page on screen is from the edition of 1595 (Paris, Abel L'Angelier). Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Philadelphia, 1900), the chapter "Rectitude or Justice". PICTURES The paintings, prints, photographs and book pages in this film are in the public domain. The silhouettes, daguerreotypes, Claude's "The Ford", Hogarth's plate, Mellan's self-portrait and the Japa