9781945186240

10. (i) Mixture, interaction, dispersal; or (ii) unity, order, design.
Suppose (i): Why would I want to live in disorder and confusion? Why
would I care about anything except the eventual “dust to dust”? And why
would I feel any anxiety? Dispersal is certain, whatever I do.
Or suppose (ii): Reverence. Serenity. Faith in the power responsible.
11. When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to
yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a
better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.
12. If you had a stepmother and a real mother, you would pay your
respects to your stepmother, yes . . . but it’s your real mother you’d go
home to.
The court . . . and philosophy: Keep returning to it, to rest in its
embrace. It’s all that makes the court—and you—endurable.
13. Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and
suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this
noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with
shellfish blood. Or making love—something rubbing against your penis, a
brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.
Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them,
so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all
through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and
see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.
Pride is a master of deception: when you think you’re occupied in the
weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.
(Compare Crates on Xenocrates.)
14. Things ordinary people are impressed by fall into the categories of
things that are held together by simple physics (like stones or wood), or by
natural growth (figs, vines, olives . . .). Those admired by more advanced
minds are held together by a living soul (flocks of sheep, herds of cows).
Still more sophisticated people admire what is guided by a rational mind—
not the universal mind, but one admired for its technical knowledge, or for
some other skill—or just because it happens to own a lot of slaves.
But those who revere that other mind—the one we all share, as humans
and as citizens—aren’t interested in other things. Their focus is on the state