9781945186240

Quite the contrary. We need to comfort ourselves and wait for
dissolution. And not get impatient in the meantime, but take refuge in these
two things:
i. Nothing can happen to me that isn’t natural.
ii. I can keep from doing anything that God and my own spirit don’t
approve. No one can force me to.
11. What am I doing with my soul?
Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and
what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul, an adolescent’s, a
woman’s? A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?
12. Another way to grasp what ordinary people mean by “goods”:
Suppose you took certain things as touchstones of goodness: prudence,
self-control, justice, and courage, say. If you understood “goods” as
meaning those, you wouldn’t be able to follow that line about “so many
goods. . . .” It wouldn’t make any sense to you. Whereas if you’d
internalized the conventional meaning, you’d be able to follow it perfectly.
You’d have no trouble seeing the author’s meaning and why it was funny.
Which shows that most people do acknowledge a distinction. Otherwise
we wouldn’t recognize the first sense as jarring and reject it automatically,
whereas we accept the second—the one referring to wealth and the benefits
of celebrity and high living—as amusing and apropos.
Now go a step further. Ask yourself whether we should accept as goods
—and should value—the things we have to think of to have the line make
sense—the ones whose abundance leaves their owner with “. . . no place to
shit.”
13. I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can
ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be
reassigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transformed into
another. Ad infinitum.
I was produced through one such transformation, and my parents too,
and so on back. Ad infinitum.
N.B.: Still holds good, even if the world goes through recurrent cycles.