9781945186240

So there are two reasons to embrace what happens. One is that it’s
happening to you. It was prescribed for you, and it pertains to you. The
thread was spun long ago, by the oldest cause of all.
The other reason is that what happens to an individual is a cause of
well-being in what directs the world—of its well-being, its fulfillment, of its
very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away
anything—anything at all—from its continuity and its coherence. Not only
its parts, but its purposes. And that’s what you’re doing when you
complain: hacking and destroying.
9. Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days
aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you
fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully
embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.
And not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and
egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment, a warm lotion.
Not showing off your obedience to the logos, but resting in it. Remember:
philosophy requires only what your nature already demands. What you’ve
been after is something else again—something unnatural.
—But what could be preferable?
That’s exactly how pleasure traps us, isn’t it? Wouldn’t magnanimity be
preferable? Or freedom? Honesty? Prudence? Piety? And is there anything
preferable to thought itself—to logic, to understanding? Think of their
surefootedness. Their fluent stillness.
10. Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good
philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the
Stoics have trouble. Any assessment we make is subject to alteration—just
as we are ourselves.
Look closely at them—how impermanent they are, how meaningless.
Things that a pervert can own, a whore, a thief.
Then look at the way the people around you behave. Even the best of
them are hard to put up with—not to mention putting up with yourself. In
such deep darkness, such a sewer—in the flux of material, of time, of
motion and things moved—I don’t know what there is to value or to work
for.