第272页

Consolation for frustration

Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions. Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible on the adamantine wall of reality. 

…Anger results not from an uncontrollable eruption of the passions, but from a basic (and correctable) error of reasoning. 

If we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger.

…What makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like.

We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

We will cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.


                             A SENECAN PRAEMEDITATIO

[The wise] will start each day with the thought…
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own. 
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up?
How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die. Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.

Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.

If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen I scertainly going to happen.
Hecato: “what progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”

Those who are unfriendly with themselves find it hard to imagine that the cake seller is shouting in order to sell cakes.

For Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquility.

          What need is there to weep over parts of life?
                   The whole of it calls for tears.

There is nothing certain than uncertainty, nothing more miserable and more proud than man – pliny

From Montaigne
Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we should enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig?

It was questionable whether the mind gave us anything to be grateful for: We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to juedge and to know, but we have bought them a t a price which is strangely excessive.

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies

Intellectual arrogance
Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; We have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!

Montaigne might have begun writing to alleviate a personal sense of loneliness, but his book may serve in a small way to alleviate our own. One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead friend and explains that he needs quite when sitting on the toilet – enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality. 



A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Schopenhauer 'pondering on human misery'

‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it’

‘If you wish to draw pleasure out of life, you must attach value to the world’ - Goethe

Schopenhauer 
‘Love…interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate … to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts … It sometimes demands the sacrifice of … health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness.’

What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our conditions to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insight into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing of us. As Schopenhauer put it:
‘The … poet takes form life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. From this it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apophthegms, find frequent application in real life.’

‘In the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than of the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself … more as a knower than as a sufferer.’

We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavor always to transform our tears into knowledge.

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Nietzsche:

They took this all-too-human to be inescapable and , instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion; in deed, everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualitites but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days.

To be someone who ‘no longer denies’

Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.