Fern bars (4)

But here are some of music's pioneers
That time will not allow us to forget
For there's Basie, Miller, Sachimo
And the king of all Sir Duke
And with a voice like Ella's ringing out
There's no way the band can lose

That's from Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke. I like the stylized spelling of "Sachimo" here. That is the way Stevie says it I suppose. It got a lot of play everywhere not just in Fern bars but it is a good example of the sort of music that got played in Fern bars.

The people who picked the music for these places couldn't just pop a tape of Top 40 music of the day in the player because a lot of it wouldn't fit. It had to feel sophisticated to the people who frequented these places and 1970s pop music—1970s just about everything—was the opposite of sophisticated. The people who went to fern bars weren't sophisticated either but we wanted to be.

Even people who eat nothing but junk food have some notions of what gourmet food is like. And even people in the 1970s who'd grown up on the Led Zeppelin and Elton John had some notions about sophisticated music. There were two choices really: classical and jazz. Jazz was the choice. Well, not really jazz because really jazz meant John Coltrane and that wasn't music to socialize with. But there was music that, while not really jazz. was sort of "jazzy".

The music in fern bars was jazzy music and it came with a certain attitude about jazz. You can see it in the pantheon of greats that Stevie Wonder selected above. I think of Glen Miller as jazz but lots of jazz purists would not. In any case, if those are the names that matter: Basie, Miller, Satchmo. Duke and Ella, then you can be sure you are in jazzy world where John Coltrane. Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins need not apply. And, while she is welcome, Ella Fitzgerald would be well-advised not to scat.

The jazziness of the fern bar owes most not to Stevie Wonder, however, but to Van Morrison. He was the guy who put a jazzy veneer on pop music in 1970 with his record Moondance. That record was the soundtrack for fern bars and restaurants in the style. Only the first side of it. I never heard the second side played anywhere and even when I bought my own copy, I don't remember ever listening to the second side beyond the first disappointing listen. But you couldn't get away from the first tracks: And it Stoned Me, Moondance, Crazy Love, Caravan and Into the Mystic.

It produced a style that, while never intended for anything like a fern bar, fit in perfectly. It expanded to include all sorts of stuff. Stevie Wonder, Boz Scaggs, George Benson, Seals and Crofts, King Harvest, Jimmy Buffet, Chuck Mangione, Weather Report and Rashan Roland Kirk. It was, like the decor elements, stuff that was just lying around waiting to be put together almost like a soundtrack that someone might assemble for a period movie only we were actually living in the period.

The style extended not in any direct way from jazz but sounded like it had been suggested by it, as Phillip Larkin said of other jazz-like music. And I think it had echoes of an era that we (I mean those of us who rejected youth rebellion and aspired to adulthood) were nostalgic for even though we'd never lived it.

Here's a quote

If science shows that people behave better when they believe they have free will AND that people do not have free will...

... should that information be suppressed so that people will behave better?

That's from Ann Althouse. She uses this teaser to get us interested in this discussion at Blogging Heads.


It strikes me that this quote says a whole lot about just how confused our ideas of "free will" are.

For starters consider this, how could it be that our beliefs have an affect on our behaviour if we don't have free will?

In the  video at the link, the two participants start off by discussing self control and they say we do have some self control. How could we have any self control and not have free will?

Most obviously, let's suppose we didn't have free will, why then would we think it was worth discussing whether or not we can suppress the information that we don't?

What all of this suggests to me is that free will has come to mean something rather mystical and even magical to people of a rationalist bent. The only kind of free will they are willing to consider is a sort of god-like power that would be without restraint. This is more of a child's fantasy of freedom than the real thing. (A child's fantasy that has very deep roots that can be traced back from Sartre through Kant and back to the Stoics.)

Here's the comparison that struck me. Here in Ottawa we have a very ugly monument to human rights. One of the "rights" identified on it is "dignity". Every time I see it, I hear my mother's voice inside my head saying, "Dignity is not a human right but an achievement; a task that you can either succeed or fail at."

Free will is not something that we have but an achievement; a task that you can either succeed or fail at. (That is a grown up notion that can be traced back through my mother to Aquinas to Aristotle.)

More on family values

One of the seemingly dependable truths of modern life is that young people will be more culturally and politically liberal than their parents. The chart below, showing results of a Pew poll from earlier this year, shows some results that may surprise you. What the numbers represent is people's response to certain terms. The researchers read the terms and then asked people if they responded positively or negatively.

In many ways, the results here seem typical. You see more liberal attitudes in the young and then these youthful enthusiasms fade a bit. The two outliers are "progressive" and "capitalism". But I thing the high ratings associated with progressive probably reflect the fact that the term means nothing for most people; it has no meaningful content for most people. Capitalism's low rating is probably a reflection of this survey being conducted during an economic crisis.

But the number that ought to stun us is family values. The younger you go, the higher the approval rating. That is what the episode of Mad Men I discussed earlier today is reflecting back on its audience.

Our Father

The virtues of mad men
The inheritance
The way I see this episode, it is all about parents. It is, and I initially found this shocking, a very pro-family values episode. We might miss this because what it draws our attention to is the dearth of family values in these people's lives. The inheritance in question is an inheritance that is missing.

This is a Biblical theme. In a sense, the Bible tells the story of a people constantly in search of their true father. If they can find their true father they can find their true inheritance; meaning by this not a pile of money so much as a sense of who and what they are truly meant to be. Don Draper and Peggy Olson in this series are both fatherless and seem to have no moral inheritance from their families. Oddly, these two are the characters who seem to have the closest connection to the old values.

Betty and Pete are characters who seem most interested in moving into a new world. They both have or had fathers but both fail to inherit anything from their fathers; again, meaning by this not a pile of money so much as a sense of who and what they are truly meant to be.

Many Meanings of inheritance
Once you have a title, prove it. That is a bit of advice given by one of the classic writers of American song, I can't remember who right now. Maybe Ira Gershwin. In any case, it's great advice and it applies here too. The title of this episode is "the inheritance" and the writers make good by delivering many senses of inheritance. Here are some of the ones I noticed:

• Genetic. First Pete's mother threatens to disinherit him if he adopts. Then Betty's father Gene, after admitting that his recent stroke is not his first, says it runs in the family. There is much emphasis on how Betty inherited her mother's looks.
• Material. Betty remembers that her mother promised her the ceramic jardiniere. Pete's brother confirms that their father spent away the entire estate. (Oddly, though, Pete says, "this was all supposed to be ours" while talking to his brother this episode but he said to the same brother that he had been disinherited way back in the second show this season.)
• Cultural: It is made clear that Betty inherited her mother's sense of values and that her brother did not. The converse is true in Pete's family where his brother retains the family values even among the ruins while Pete is reaffirmed in his decision to be the prodigal.
• Statistical fluke. When Pete tells Peggy that his upcoming plane trip will be the first he takes since his father died in a plane crash, Peggy reassures him with the thought that it is statistically unlikely that two people from the same family would both die in plane crashes. (She is wrong about that by the way. It is statistically unlikely that anyone would die in a plane crash. But if someone related to has already died it doesn't alter the odds in your case.)

What is common in all cases, is that the show uses all these to show how thin family ties are for Betty and Pete. There is no common values beyond a lot of superficial manners connecting these two families.

The uptight white people
This is, I have to point out, a monstrous cliché. It is based on a thin, stereotypical vision of east coast preps that is as realistic as a Minstrel show.  Mostly, this turns out to be harmless. East coast preps are adults and they can take it. But I do want to digress a moment here about one detail that the show gets wrong; something it gets wrong not just about the period but that it gets wrong about istelf.

The childish notion that this show cannot resist is that east coast preps were emotionally repressed. Just as happened with Pete's family following the plane crash, we get a  scene of Betty's family dealing with a  family crisis by all sitting around uncomfortably not knowing how to behave. Similar scenes happen again as Pete and his mother and brother attempt to deal with the crisis brought about by their father's spending.

And then someone goes for a drink.

The stereotype doesn't bother me as much as the belief that fuels it. That is the belief that we'd all be better off if we just let our emotions out. That is nonsense. Controlling your emotions is very important. Controlling your emotions is not to suppress them. And the ability to control emotions was why the east coast preps were such a successful culture. Their controlled emotions served them very well. (And what is wrong with social drinking anyway?)

Return of the creep
The key line in the episode is Betty telling Don that the way they behaved in front of her family was "just pretending" and that there is no togetherness between them. Which way are we going to go with that? One line of logic is to say that Don is just pretending. He isn't who he says he is. But Betty is just pretending too. She has never accepted her adult responsibilities. Marriage and motherhood are just like playing house for her.

Perhaps surprisingly, the show takes Don's side on this one. He may be playing a role but he plays it devotedly. Betty keeps saying the right thing but fails to act the right way.

And we see this when creepy little Glen Bishop shows up again. He has been hiding in the Draoper family playhouse and she invites him in and offers to wash his clothes. He puts on Don's T-shirt and they quickly settle down into a childlike parody of married life. Betty slides into just pretending with him so easily that it's scary. And when Glen ultimately creeps her out it is with his suggestion that he is there to protect her—thereby threatening to usurp not Don's role, which did not trouble her, but her father's role, which does bother her.

And then we get this really ironic scene in which Betty repeats the advice about taking care of your family that Viola gave her to Helen Bishop. The painful irony is that Betty is so painfully unaware of herself that she fails to see that she is as much a failure as Helen.

This is a moment so stunningly "incorrect" I wonder how they got away with it. In the discussion, Helen even admits that her divorce changed nothing.

Children who had children
 One of the really powerful things about shows that trade in stereotypes like this one does is that they can actually touch some issues quite directly without offending. I think that is what happens here.

The divorce rate was still quite low in 1962. It was about to take off but it had not yet. The parents we see represented here are not typical of that era anymore than the blackface characters of a minstrel show were representative of real African-Americans.

But what the minstrel show often did was reflect the life of the whites in the audience back at them in a way that didn't feel too close for comfort because it was all in this weird dress up mode. That is what I think is happening here. What this episode shows us, and shows us very clearly, is not the parents of a past era but the parents of the 1970s and 1980s. They were the ones with the highest divorce rate in history.

Which is to say the parents of the people who watch this show. The mostly twenty and thirty something audience are seeing a portrayal of their parents. It's all here, the absent fathers who lived second childhoods, the selfish mothers who treated having children as being about them and who dumped their husbands (the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women) when the going got tough. But the portrayal is all dressed up in the early 1960s garb so it doesn't get in their faces.

Running awayIn the end, Betty sends Don away again and he deals with his crisis by running away. That may seem psychologically important but (as I'll expand on in end-of-season entry later) psychology doesn't matter in this series. What matters is the narrative reference that opens up. I'll tell you what that is next episode. Think Norwegian if you want a hint.

Season 2 blogging begins here.

The next episode blog will be here.

(Season one begins here if you are interested.)

Addendum to a Sunday thought

In line with what I said below, I note that my own Bishop today makes the mistake of reading an economic agenda into Jesus's teachings that just isn't there.

The third saying addressed marketplace issues ("what does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves"). Here we note that the NRSV plural translation, adopted for the sake of inclusiveness, takes some of the edge off challenges Jesus addresses to each person. Jesus contends that there are dimensions of life vital to happiness which cannot be satisfied by possessions or wealth. [Emphasis added.]

Taking the issues I have highlighted one at a time, where does Bishop Prendergast get the notion that Jesus has the marketplace in mind here? I suspect he gets it from one word and that word is "profit". But this is to read a modern usage back into the ancient world. For us, "profit" is a word that applies narrowly to marketplace goods. The world of Jesus saw all goods in the same terms. Good luck and semen were limited goods in the same sense that money and tradeable commodities were for them.

In context, by saying "profit" Jesus simply  means what do they gain.

More importantly, Jesus is not speaking of profit or gain in general here but of a very specific type of gain. He is saying, what good would it do you if you gained "the whole world" only to lose yourself. This is a question that applies more to the politically and socially ambitious than it does to someone making their living in the marketplace. (And, lest we forget, the reason most people go into the marketplace is love; they do it to make enough money to provide shelter, food and clothing for their families.)

Sadly, this focus on an economic issue leads my Bishop (who is an excellent Bishop) to wind up with a point that is trite and trivially obvious in the sentence emphasized in the quoted bit above. Jesus is making the far more profound point that our lives have to aimed at the right thing.

Sunday thought: (re)Distribution of wealth

There were interesting readings this past week. Fascinating because they covered a lot of political intrigue from the old kingdom. These make gripping reading but the religious, moral, political and economic significance for us is hard to discern. The reading that really struck a note with me is from Monday, June 14.

Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard to be my vegetable garden, since it is close by, next to my house. I will give you a better vineyard in exchange, or, if you prefer, I will give you its value in money.”

Naboth answered him, “The LORD forbid that I should give you my ancestral heritage.”

If we want to apply strictly representational truth standards in our reading of the Bible, passages like this one will give us fits. Did this conversation actually take place as reported? Who knows? Even today details of conversations like this are difficult to establish.

But even though we can't be certain about the details, this conflict is very typical of the period not just in Judah but all over the ancient world. The problem was this, if you start with a situation in which everyone has there own tract of land to feed their family it will inevitably be the case that the land will end up concentrated in a small number of hands over time. One day one family will manage its holdings badly and will be forced to sell out. Or a father might end up in debt and have to sell. Carry this on over time and the land and therefore the wealth gets increasingly concentrated.

And with the concentration of wealth goes the concentration of power. Aristocrats, well aware of this, will begin to use every means at hand to get more land and to keep others from getting any. And because these cultures were largely agrarian, there were no factories and offices for displaced farmers to work at. Ancient cities increasingly filled up with people who had no choice but to beg for a living or to sell themselves into slavery.

And little guys like Naboth got squeezed in just the way that Kings tells us Ahab squeezed him. The Bible authors were keenly aware of the injustices this brought about. Over and over again, they remind those with wealth of their responsibility to look out for those who are disenfranchised by the situation. Less noted is the fact that they did not worry about economic injustice in any general sense. They—like Jesus who assured us the poor will always be with us—assumed that poverty was a fact of life. Their message was to take care of the widow and the orphan and the poor man at your gate. It was not reform the economic system to make sure everyone has enough.

More or less the same thing happens in many third world countries even today. And the solution that many modern political activists came up with is redistribution. For some reason, modern Christians are also fond of redistribution although it is clearly not in Christ's message and, more importantly, it just doesn't work! And yet, the idea of redistributing wealth drives modern Christian thought about economics like no other.

There was a telling moment at last year's Trinity Sessions. Rowan Williams had just made his presentation in which he managed to say absolutely nothing new or significant. He was then questioned by a journalist named Susan Lee from NPR. She said, “Theologians have focused on the distribution of wealth. Economists have focused on the creation of wealth." Then she went on to remind Williams that historically the theologians efforts to alleviate poverty through government control and manipulation of the distribution of wealth had been failures whereas the economists concern with promoting greater creation of wealth has considerably improved the lives of the poor.

She did not say but could have added that the emphasis on redistribution has also led theologians to make some monumentally poor political judgments. They have chastised western governments in countries such as England, Canada and the United States—governments that have done more than anyone in history to extend and protect human rights and freedoms—while apologizing for some of the vilest oppressive thugs to ever live beginning with Lenin and running through Castro to Hugo Chavez in our time.

I'm sorry to say that Rowan Williams didn't respond to her questions but dodged them instead. And he is not the only one. Much as I love the Catholic church, the political economics that have grown out of Catholic social teaching are a murderers row of unfortunate mistakes from corporatism to liberation theology.

Who needs subtext?

Book 3, Chapter 8 (Chapter 44 in some editions)

“The lamp of the body is the eye.

If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light;

but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness.

And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.”

In my crueler moments, which happen far too often, I sometimes wonder if people who spend their time digging for subtexts have any idea how to enjoy reading. The surface, the text, of this chapter is so rich, so profound that I could spend a week blogging it and not come close to doing it justice.

Hamlet
Before beginning, let's stop and consider the sheer virtuosity that Willoughby lives his life with. One of the many things he has in common with Hamlet is is his ability to just do what he wants to do. No one wins duels with Willoughby. We see it here in his marriage. Consider what must have happened in the back-story for a moment. Willoughby, who has just been playing at life until now, suddenly finds himself in need of marrying a  woman of fortune. So he goes out and does it. Just like that.

You couldn't do that and neither could I. The problem with both men is that they don't want to do anything but wallow in their own feelings. Only in odd moments of necessity does either man actually stir himself up to actually accomplish anything. Otherwise, all they are good for is acts of desecration.

Also like Hamlet, this chapter opens with a dark hint of violence. Elinor encounters him alone and she is alarmed not just at the impropriety of his being there but also with the sense that she is encountering a wild man who might do who knows what. Again, think of Hamlet showing up at Ophelia's burial and jumping in her grave to confront her grieving brother. Think of how Hamlet treated Ophelia appallingly when he ought to have treated her well and then, when she was dead and the whole issue was moot because she was dead, suddenly speaking of his love for her.

And then remember that that "love" itself later turned out to be doubtful for Hamlet will tell Horatio that he jumped into the grave because he didn't like the way Laertes was expressing himself. As if life was some giant drama and the only thing that mattered was the tastefulness and delicacy of the performance.

And consider how people keep loving Hamlet no matter how worthless he proves himself to be. How Horatio wants to kill himself so he can die with this catastrophic failure of a human being. How generations of critics have killed trees trying to convince themselves and others that Hamlet is really a hero even though all the evidence suggests otherwise.

There you have Willoughby. No matter that he always proves himself to be a schnook, we want to trust and love him. Even Elinor feels this way about him.

And here we need to be honest with ourselves. We like to think that we hate vanity—or that we at least hate it in others. But we are very susceptible to the vanity of others especially if that vanity occurs in a beautiful person. In those cases it tends to produce something very like charisma.

Faith and honour
It seems to me that the key lines of the chapter are these:

I will not reason here -- nor will I stop for you to expatiate on the absurdity, and the worse than absurdity, of scrupling to engage my faith where my honour was already bound.

This is Willoughby explaining himself to Elinor. He is acknowledging that he initially allowed the relationship between he and Marianne to develop in directions it ought not to have been allowed to develop. And he is saying that when they were both in love with one another he still scrupled at the thought of declaring his love, a declaration that must lead to marriage. So he is saying, his honour required the move and yet he continued to hold back.

But, in typical fashion, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He  is really only hinting at the apology he ought to make and then holding back. "I will not reason here ...." Willoughby, you never reason anywhere, you let your feelings justify pretty much anything you want to do.

It seems to me there are two things to note here. First, just how commonplace this is. Who has not fallen in love and known, or at least strongly suspected, that this love was returned and yet held back because .... Well, because what? Because we weren't ready for it? Because we might meet someone better later? Because we are too busy having fun to make a commitment?

As we read this chapter we get constant reminders of what a cold, calculating swine Willoughby is. Read this again slowly:

"My fortune was never large, and I had always been expensive, always in the habit of associating with people of better income than myself. Every year since my coming of age, or even before, I believe, had added to my debts; and though the death of my old cousin, Mrs. Smith, was to set me free, yet that event being uncertain, and possibly far distant ...."

Willoughby is not overcome with any great love for his cousin here.

[By the way, note the parallel between Willoughby and John Dashwood. As a writer, I am amazed at the incredible number of parallels like this Austen employs. You'd think it would feel artificial and contrived and yet it never does. Probably because our real lives are just as full of such parallels as Austen's fiction is. Also, she never explicitly draws the parallel she leaves it for us to discover. Not hidden in any subtext, but right on the surface.]

The second thing to note is how Elinor is in a situation that mirrors that of Willoughby. She is hesitant to let down her guard, to let Willoughby engage her confidence too far because she knows that her honour must follow what her faith has already allowed. If she turns him away, doesn't allow him to enter and explain himself, then she would not have been bound to honour his request that she apologize for him to Marianne.

In the end, though, she does let him explain, does allow his charm to affect her, so that, when he asks, she has no choice but to agree. And thus sets up the tension for the last few chapters.

Blurting it out
Here, by the way, I think we can see why Austen had to switch from epistolary to dramatic narrative. This scene could not have played out convincingly if this were a letter. Then Elinor could read the letter all the way to the end and still returned it with a note saying, "I must return this letter to you sir, unread ...." It is the human contact that makes it all possible by engaging her faith and thus her honour.

This sort of scene—a scene where a character suddenly enters into a more intimate bond with another by blurting out the thing that otherwise should not and therefore would not be said—is a regular feature in Austen novels from now on. She did not originate the device but she uses it brilliantly enough that all her predecessors seem irrelevant.

What's fascinating here in Sense and Sensibility, is that the scene is accomplished through an intermediary. Willoughby does not blurt to Marianne herself the way that Darcy will blurt out his first marriage proposal to Elizabeth or the way Elizabeth will later blurt out the desperate situation her sister's elopement has created to Darcy. Here we have Elinor in the middle and Elinor must decide whether to keep her promise or not. And Elinor's chief worry is to not rekindle any passion in Marianne when she does keep the promise.

That may seem like a bad thing. Oh how we crave the moment when a Darcy or Elizabeth forgets themselves so completely that they cannot help but let their feeling spill out. There is something erotic about such a moment and there should be.

But let's stop and read it the right way. Austen is still discovering the power of such intimate moments. Remember that the blurt out moment in Northanger Abbey is one of pure shame, where Catherine is humiliated when she lets out what her feelings have led her to think. She is not more intimate with Henry as a consequence. Austen is easing herself into the moment. She is not ready to let her heroine let go. It will be a little easier every time after this but let's give our full appreciation to that first time.

Do you believe him?
There are three things that Willoughby gets away with in this chapter that he ought not to. Three ways he charms even the supposedly cold-hearted Elinor and probably fooled you too. He certainly fooled me the first time through.

The first is with regard to the character of Brandon's ward.

First, consider how he describes his falling for Marianne:

"To have resisted such attractions, to have withstood such tenderness! -- Is there a man on earth who could have done it!"

But Willoughby,  honey, "resisting attractions" isn't exactly your strong suit. You did, after all, if you'll pardon me putting it so crudely, nail Brandon's daughter before coming here. Willoughby's excuse here is that he he didn't know she was pregnant as a consequence of what he'd done. How exactly does that make a difference? You committed the crime, what matter that you didn't know you left your DNA at the scene of the crime?

And what possible difference could it make that your partner was a willing participant? Is the fact that the other person also wants to do this too all the justification that an act as intimate as sex needs?

Again, the Hamlet comparison is relevant here. Everything Hamlet does feels absolutely legitimate to him when he does it because it is in line with his feelings. Where he is a miserable failure is at hiding his feelings. When he should hide them during the play within the play, for example, he cannot, thereby alerting Claudius to the danger he represents to him.

A cheap seducer like Wickham has nothing on Willoughby. Willoughby will go through life seducing one person after another and be all the more deadly because he will genuinely feel himself to be in love every time he makes the other person fall in love with him.

So his account of what happened between he and Eliza should ring hollow. The thing that troubles us Willoughby, is not that the suspicion that you behaved like a libertine towards her but the suspicion that you fell deeply in love and felt that sex was justified by this love. Someone who just wanted to get some has potential for reform, someone who falls in love too easily does not.

The second thing we ought not to believe is his claim that it was his failure to see how Marianne's love could have made up for a life of relative poverty that stood in his way.

My affection for Marianne, my thorough conviction of her attachment to me -- it was all insufficient to outweigh that dread of poverty, or get the better of those false ideas of the necessity of riches, which I was naturally inclined to feel, and expensive society had increased. I had reason to believe myself secure of my present wife, if I chose to address her, and I persuaded myself to think that nothing else in common prudence remained for me to do.

Actually Willoughby, there was a bigger problem here that you must have been aware of even if you deny it now. And it is this: Marianne shared exactly the same character failings. Married, she would only have encouraged you in your lack of restraint. It would be no act of love to marry such a woman unless you really meant to reform yourself as part of your vow to her. And you have no intention of changing. (And his attempt at atonement now fails for the same reason, any genuine act of atonement must include a promise to attempt reform. He makes no such vow anywhere in this chapter.)

The third thing we ought not to believe is his claim that he has suffered because of his strong feelings and therefore ought to be forgiven. He has already used these feelings as an excuse to forgive himself:

"Thank Heaven! it did torture me. I was miserable. Miss Dashwood, you cannot have an idea of the comfort it gives me to look back on my own misery. I owe such a grudge to myself for the stupid, rascally folly of my own heart, that all my past sufferings under it are only triumph and exultation to me now. Well, I went, left all that I loved, and went to those to whom, at best, I was only indifferent. My journey to town -- travelling with my own horses, and therefore so tediously -- no creature to speak to -- my own reflections so cheerful -- when I looked forward everything so inviting! -- when I looked back at Barton, the picture so soothing! -- oh! -- it was a blessed journey!" 

As Willoughby sees it, he has already atoned in his mind. All that remains to be done is to convince others to see this. Again, this is purely a matter of feelings. He has suffered in his feelings and now it's all over except the moment of seducing others to feel the same things.That there might be moral requirements on Willoughby to forever act differently from now on doesn't occur to him.

The answer he deserves is, "You'll get over it Willoughby, you always do. And how can you comfort yourself when you have done nothing to comfort your victims?"

By the way, all the proof we need is right here in the chapter. At the outset, Willoughby is so overcome with feeling of his own guilt, he doesn't feel entitled to use Marianne's name.

"I mean," said he, with serious energy, "if I can, to make you hate me one degree less than you do now. I mean to offer some kind of explanation, some kind of apology, for the past -- to open my whole heart to you, and by convincing you, that though I have been always a blockhead, I have not been always a rascal, to obtain something like forgiveness from Ma -- from your sister." 

But, oh, how quickly he gets over this scruple. Just like he gets over everything else; like he always will get over his own sins.

Final shot at this moral midget. He blames—of course he does—the hurtful letter he earlier wrote to Marianne on his wife Sophia. That is bad enough, but notice how he manages to do the honourable thing and not do it at the same time:

'I am ruined for ever in their opinion,' said I to myself; 'I am shut out for ever from their society; they already think me an unprincipled fellow, this letter will only make them think me a blackguard one.'

A real man would have left it there Willoughby. He would have had the decency to  have left his victims the comfort of thinking him the vile one. Only a disgusting piece of wimpcrap like you would want to be forgiven for being what you are and somehow tried to imply your feelings lifted you above your actions.

Just like Hamlet that.