9781945186240

20. My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature—the
wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.
21. Close to forgetting it all, close to being forgotten.
22. To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is
uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they’re human
too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you’ll both be
dead before long. And, above all, that they haven’t really hurt you. They
haven’t diminished your ability to choose.
23. Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculptor with wax.
And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person.
Then for something else. Each existing only briefly.
It does the container no harm to be put together, and none to be taken
apart.
24. Anger in the face is unnatural. † . . . † or in the end is put out for
good, so that it can’t be rekindled. Try to conclude its unnaturalness from
that. (If even the consciousness of acting badly has gone, why go on
living?)
25. Before long, nature, which controls it all, will alter everything you
see and use it as material for something else—over and over again. So that
the world is continually renewed.
26. When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they
thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy
rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same
as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense
of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided
and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?
27. Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have,
the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you
didn’t have them. But be careful. Don’t feel such satisfaction that you start
to overvalue them—that it would upset you to lose them.