“Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,” he read aloud. “What's ‘Alexander Technique?’” “Theory of standing.”

I was thirteen, short, underweight, flat-chested, spindly-legged, disaster-permed and haircutted, and my face was growing around my nose.

All these connotations, even the positive and moral ones, are within the range of significations Machiavelli wants us to hear in “virtù.” For him the word suggests a kind of flexibility that can initiate effective, efficient, and energetic action based on a courageous assertion of the will and an ability to execute the products of one's own calculations. Such calculations are a significant adjunct to his ideas about virtù: they outline what might be called an internal or mental virtù.

You need to do work? Bruh!