9781945186240

A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While
the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung,
and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.
To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring.
How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through
patience, honesty, humility.
52. Not to know what the world is is to be ignorant of where you are.
Not to know why it’s here is to be ignorant of who you are. And what it
is.
Not to know any of this is to be ignorant of why you’re here.
And what are we to make of anyone who cares about the applause of
such people, who don’t know where or who they are?
53. You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen
minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of
self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)
54. To join ourselves not just to the air surrounding us, through breath,
but to the reason that embraces all things, through thought. Reason is just as
omnipresent, just as widely diffused in those who accept it as air is in those
who breathe.
55. The existence of evil does not harm the world. And an individual act
of evil does not harm the victim. Only one person is harmed by it—and he
can stop being harmed as soon as he decides to.
56. Other people’s wills are as independent of mine as their breath and
bodies. We may exist for the sake of one another, but our will rules its own
domain. Otherwise the harm they do would cause harm to me. Which is not
what God intended—for my happiness to rest with someone else.
57. We speak of the sun’s light as “pouring down on us,” as “pouring
over us” in all directions. Yet it’s never poured out. Because it doesn’t really
pour; it extends. Its beams (aktai) get their name from their extension
(ekteinesthai).
To see the nature of a sunbeam, look at light as it falls through a narrow
opening into a dark room. It extends in a straight line, striking any solid