Gustave Doré, Jacob's Dream (1866)
The Death of Marcus Aurelius
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Friday, March 27, 2026
Seneca, Moral Letters 85.13
To this the Peripatetics retort: “Therefore, poverty will make even the wise man worse, and so will pain, and so will anything else of that sort. For although those things will not rob him of his virtue, yet they will hinder the work of virtue.”
This would be a correct statement, were it not for the fact that the pilot and the wise man are two different kinds of person. The wise man’s purpose in conducting his life is not to accomplish at all hazards what he tries, but to do all things rightly; the pilot’s purpose, however, is to bring his ship into port at all hazards.
The arts are handmaids; they must accomplish what they promise to do. But wisdom is mistress and ruler. The arts render a slave’s service to life; wisdom issues the commands.
For myself, I maintain that a different answer should be given: that the pilot’s art is never made worse by the storm, nor the application of his art either. The pilot has promised you, not a prosperous voyage, but a serviceable performance of his task—that is, an expert knowledge of steering a ship. And the more he is hampered by the stress of fortune, so much the more does his knowledge become apparent.
He who has been able to say, “Neptune, you shall never sink this ship except on an even keel,” has fulfilled the requirements of his art; the storm does not interfere with the pilot’s work, but only with his success.
This would be a correct statement, were it not for the fact that the pilot and the wise man are two different kinds of person. The wise man’s purpose in conducting his life is not to accomplish at all hazards what he tries, but to do all things rightly; the pilot’s purpose, however, is to bring his ship into port at all hazards.
The arts are handmaids; they must accomplish what they promise to do. But wisdom is mistress and ruler. The arts render a slave’s service to life; wisdom issues the commands.
For myself, I maintain that a different answer should be given: that the pilot’s art is never made worse by the storm, nor the application of his art either. The pilot has promised you, not a prosperous voyage, but a serviceable performance of his task—that is, an expert knowledge of steering a ship. And the more he is hampered by the stress of fortune, so much the more does his knowledge become apparent.
He who has been able to say, “Neptune, you shall never sink this ship except on an even keel,” has fulfilled the requirements of his art; the storm does not interfere with the pilot’s work, but only with his success.
—from Seneca Moral Letters 85
The calculating cynic will laugh at such Stoic claims, because he thinks it more important to get something good than to be someone good. Whenever I suggest that an unaffected decency is its own reward, I am now accustomed to hearing the following sort of harangue:
“You can talk about virtue all you like, but it won’t be of any use to you without the means to put it into effect. If you don’t have any money, you can’t practice charity. If you don’t build your influence, you can’t promote an agenda. If you aren’t working from a position of strength, you won’t be able to beat your competitors.”
This might be true, if our happiness hinged upon the comforts of the body, and not upon an excellence of the soul. Perhaps love isn’t about a balance sheet, and the best way to improve the world is to first improve ourselves, and the profit of one never requires a loss for another. What we believe to be the most practical way of life follows from what we discern to be the most real about this life.
Like every analogy, the example of the pilot will fall short, once we recognize how a trade must still be bound to an external product, while the virtues remain complete in themselves, and are able to thrive under any conditions. Prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice are possible both in plenty and in want.
Even so, as Seneca observes, the task of the pilot may be hindered from the outside, though he can maintain his skill from the inside. Only a fool expects a batter to hit the ball every time he takes a swing, and we may be all the more impressed by his merits when the odds are firmly stacked against him.
I get worried for example, when I hear people making promises they might not be able to keep. It is one thing to pledge that we will absolutely do our best, but it is quite another to guarantee a certain outcome, however preferable it may be. A man has already done more than enough if he has given everything of himself, for that is far more valuable than any other state of affairs.
A husband cannot assure his wife that he will live a long life, yet he can assure her that he will be faithful as long as he shall live. It is in a like manner that our human worth is always to be found in the content of our character before the arrangement of our circumstances.
The calculating cynic will laugh at such Stoic claims, because he thinks it more important to get something good than to be someone good. Whenever I suggest that an unaffected decency is its own reward, I am now accustomed to hearing the following sort of harangue:
“You can talk about virtue all you like, but it won’t be of any use to you without the means to put it into effect. If you don’t have any money, you can’t practice charity. If you don’t build your influence, you can’t promote an agenda. If you aren’t working from a position of strength, you won’t be able to beat your competitors.”
This might be true, if our happiness hinged upon the comforts of the body, and not upon an excellence of the soul. Perhaps love isn’t about a balance sheet, and the best way to improve the world is to first improve ourselves, and the profit of one never requires a loss for another. What we believe to be the most practical way of life follows from what we discern to be the most real about this life.
Like every analogy, the example of the pilot will fall short, once we recognize how a trade must still be bound to an external product, while the virtues remain complete in themselves, and are able to thrive under any conditions. Prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice are possible both in plenty and in want.
Even so, as Seneca observes, the task of the pilot may be hindered from the outside, though he can maintain his skill from the inside. Only a fool expects a batter to hit the ball every time he takes a swing, and we may be all the more impressed by his merits when the odds are firmly stacked against him.
I get worried for example, when I hear people making promises they might not be able to keep. It is one thing to pledge that we will absolutely do our best, but it is quite another to guarantee a certain outcome, however preferable it may be. A man has already done more than enough if he has given everything of himself, for that is far more valuable than any other state of affairs.
A husband cannot assure his wife that he will live a long life, yet he can assure her that he will be faithful as long as he shall live. It is in a like manner that our human worth is always to be found in the content of our character before the arrangement of our circumstances.
—Reflection written in 1/2014
IMAGE: Carl Wilhelm Barth, Pilot Boat in Heavy Sea (1882)
Thursday, March 26, 2026
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Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Netherlandish Proverbs 13
To do too much to achieve a little.
Seneca, Moral Letters 85.12
“What then?” is the query; “if the sword is brandished over your brave man’s neck, if he is pierced in this place and in that continually, if he sees his entrails in his lap, if he is tortured again after being kept waiting in order that he may thus feel the torture more keenly, and if the blood flows afresh out of bowels where it has but lately ceased to flow, has he no fear? Shall you say that he has felt no pain either?”
Yes, he has felt pain; for no human virtue can rid itself of feelings. But he has no fear; unconquered he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings. Do you ask me what spirit animates him in these circumstances? It is the spirit of one who is comforting a sick friend.
“That which is evil does harm; that which does harm makes a man worse. But pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore they are not evils.”
“Your proposition,” says the objector, “is wrong; for what harms one does not necessarily make one worse. The storm and the squall work harm to the pilot, but they do not make a worse pilot of him for all that.”
Certain of the Stoic school reply to this argument as follows: “The pilot becomes a worse pilot because of storms or squalls, inasmuch as he cannot carry out his purpose and hold to his course; as far as his art is concerned, he becomes no worse a pilot, but in his work he does become worse."
Yes, he has felt pain; for no human virtue can rid itself of feelings. But he has no fear; unconquered he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings. Do you ask me what spirit animates him in these circumstances? It is the spirit of one who is comforting a sick friend.
“That which is evil does harm; that which does harm makes a man worse. But pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore they are not evils.”
“Your proposition,” says the objector, “is wrong; for what harms one does not necessarily make one worse. The storm and the squall work harm to the pilot, but they do not make a worse pilot of him for all that.”
Certain of the Stoic school reply to this argument as follows: “The pilot becomes a worse pilot because of storms or squalls, inasmuch as he cannot carry out his purpose and hold to his course; as far as his art is concerned, he becomes no worse a pilot, but in his work he does become worse."
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 85
The critic is free to stress the intensity of pain as much as he wishes, or to dwell upon the many ways we may fall short of achieving our preferences. That is neither here nor there when it comes to the virtues, which achieve their ends simply through being exercised. We can transcend the fear of pain by always placing what is lesser within the context of what is greater.
I regularly find myself returning to Seneca’s beautiful image: we are called to treat our hardships in the same way as we would offer consolation and reassurance during a loved one’s illness.
Over the last few years, I have been enjoying a television series about air disasters. Now this would hardly seem relaxing to most of us, but I am inspired by the way ordinary people react when they are in extraordinary situations, and I am fascinated by the process of uncovering the hidden causes of the accidents.
The one part that irritates me, however, is the inevitable bureaucrat who immediately wants to pin all the blame on the pilot, as if the fact that the plane crashed must surely reflect poorly on his abilities. Indeed, sometimes he may have failed to do his job, yet at other times he may have gone above and beyond the call of duty, and still the aircraft fell from the sky. While our decisions are always within our power, the events around us are not always within our power.
I take special note of BEA Flight 609 in 1958, well-known to soccer fans for the loss of so many players from Manchester United. Authorities in Munich insisted that pilot James Thain, an RAF veteran, had neglected to de-ice the wings, though later investigations showed that this would not have been necessary, and pointed to uncleared slush on the runway as the reason for the plane’s failure to reach takeoff speed.
Thain, of course, was cast aside, and he would never fly again, spending the rest of his days trying to clear his name. From what I can gather, he was not only a skilled pilot, but also a man of great integrity, who simply became a convenient scapegoat. Though he could not save his plane, this did no harm to his professional excellence.
Be careful to distinguish when defining a success and a failure.
The base pragmatist, concerned merely with the most convenient results, will not look beyond the arrangement of his circumstances, and so he is unable to rightly judge winning or losing by our inner comportment. To use a martial analogy, he believes victory requires crushing the enemy, and he thereby overlooks the virtues of the soldier who fight with honor, regardless of the outcome on the battlefield.
The critic is free to stress the intensity of pain as much as he wishes, or to dwell upon the many ways we may fall short of achieving our preferences. That is neither here nor there when it comes to the virtues, which achieve their ends simply through being exercised. We can transcend the fear of pain by always placing what is lesser within the context of what is greater.
I regularly find myself returning to Seneca’s beautiful image: we are called to treat our hardships in the same way as we would offer consolation and reassurance during a loved one’s illness.
Over the last few years, I have been enjoying a television series about air disasters. Now this would hardly seem relaxing to most of us, but I am inspired by the way ordinary people react when they are in extraordinary situations, and I am fascinated by the process of uncovering the hidden causes of the accidents.
The one part that irritates me, however, is the inevitable bureaucrat who immediately wants to pin all the blame on the pilot, as if the fact that the plane crashed must surely reflect poorly on his abilities. Indeed, sometimes he may have failed to do his job, yet at other times he may have gone above and beyond the call of duty, and still the aircraft fell from the sky. While our decisions are always within our power, the events around us are not always within our power.
I take special note of BEA Flight 609 in 1958, well-known to soccer fans for the loss of so many players from Manchester United. Authorities in Munich insisted that pilot James Thain, an RAF veteran, had neglected to de-ice the wings, though later investigations showed that this would not have been necessary, and pointed to uncleared slush on the runway as the reason for the plane’s failure to reach takeoff speed.
Thain, of course, was cast aside, and he would never fly again, spending the rest of his days trying to clear his name. From what I can gather, he was not only a skilled pilot, but also a man of great integrity, who simply became a convenient scapegoat. Though he could not save his plane, this did no harm to his professional excellence.
Be careful to distinguish when defining a success and a failure.
The base pragmatist, concerned merely with the most convenient results, will not look beyond the arrangement of his circumstances, and so he is unable to rightly judge winning or losing by our inner comportment. To use a martial analogy, he believes victory requires crushing the enemy, and he thereby overlooks the virtues of the soldier who fight with honor, regardless of the outcome on the battlefield.
—Reflection written in 1/2014
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Monday, March 23, 2026
Sunday, March 22, 2026
Maxims of Goethe 84
IMAGE: Philipp Foltz, The Funeral Oration of Pericles (1852)
Seneca, Moral Letters 85.11
“It is the doctrine of you Stoics, then,” they reply, “that a brave man will expose himself to dangers.”
By no means; he will merely not fear them, though he will avoid them. It is proper for him to be careful, but not to be fearful.
“What then? Is he not to fear death, imprisonment, burning, and all the other missiles of Fortune?”
Not at all; for he knows that they are not evils, but only seem to be. He reckons all these things as the bugbears of man’s existence.Paint him a picture of slavery, lashes, chains, want, mutilation by disease or by torture—or anything else you may care to mention; he will count all such things as terrors caused by the derangement of the mind. These things are only to be feared by those who are fearful. Or do you regard as an evil that to which some day we may be compelled to resort of our own free will?
What then, you ask, is an evil? It is the yielding to those things which are called evils; it is the surrendering of one’s liberty into their control, when really we ought to suffer all things in order to preserve this liberty.
Liberty is lost unless we despise those things which put the yoke upon our necks. If men knew what bravery was, they would have no doubts as to what a brave man’s conduct should be.
For bravery is not thoughtless rashness, or love of danger, or the courting of fear-inspiring objects; it is the knowledge which enables us to distinguish between that which is evil and that which is not. Bravery takes the greatest care of itself, and likewise endures with the greatest patience all things which have a false appearance of being evils.
By no means; he will merely not fear them, though he will avoid them. It is proper for him to be careful, but not to be fearful.
“What then? Is he not to fear death, imprisonment, burning, and all the other missiles of Fortune?”
Not at all; for he knows that they are not evils, but only seem to be. He reckons all these things as the bugbears of man’s existence.Paint him a picture of slavery, lashes, chains, want, mutilation by disease or by torture—or anything else you may care to mention; he will count all such things as terrors caused by the derangement of the mind. These things are only to be feared by those who are fearful. Or do you regard as an evil that to which some day we may be compelled to resort of our own free will?
What then, you ask, is an evil? It is the yielding to those things which are called evils; it is the surrendering of one’s liberty into their control, when really we ought to suffer all things in order to preserve this liberty.
Liberty is lost unless we despise those things which put the yoke upon our necks. If men knew what bravery was, they would have no doubts as to what a brave man’s conduct should be.
For bravery is not thoughtless rashness, or love of danger, or the courting of fear-inspiring objects; it is the knowledge which enables us to distinguish between that which is evil and that which is not. Bravery takes the greatest care of itself, and likewise endures with the greatest patience all things which have a false appearance of being evils.
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 85
While we could argue about the best words until the cows come home, it is good for me to embrace the feeling of caution, and it is bad for me to succumb to the feeling of fear. If something can do me genuine harm, it is wise to avoid it, and yet if something is merely alarming, I should not be intimidated by the impression.
All too often, we let the passions push us about, while the stable emotions are always grounded in a sound understanding.
Before I am gripped by terror, wouldn’t it be best to consider the true measure of what will either help or hurt my nature? My most crippling mistakes started when I let my desires rush ahead of my awareness, and they could so easily have been avoided by first knowing what I should want to get and what I should want to avoid.
Over the years, I have been frantically warned about countless dangers, and yet it turns out that so very few of them were really perilous at all.
Yes, the Stoic will make some shocking claims, including the one about no circumstance ever being an evil. We are appalled by this, however, because we haven’t started at the beginning, because we are constantly assuming the conclusions without establishing the premises. This also why we bicker about taxes, and guns, and abortion, while never reasoning from first principles about our human good.
If we swept away the clutter of the passions, we would see that man is a creature of reason and of will, made to know and to love, and the rest is window dressing. Virtue is his only good, and vice is his only evil. He should not fear poverty, or torture, or death, since they need not hinder the act of living well. Indeed, he should not fear anything at all, since it always remains within his power to do what is right, whatever fortune might happen to throw his way.
Will there be pain? Most certainly, and sometimes we will deceive ourselves into believing that the pains are the pleasures. The trick is in employing the hardship as an opportunity to express an excellence of the soul, at which point there is no need for running away from the pain or for chasing after the pleasure—there will be the simplicity of joy.
When I can master myself in this way, with no demands for ruling anyone or anything else, I will have attained a total freedom for myself. It sounds poetic to proclaim that fear is a form of slavery, but it is philosophical to explain why fear is a surrender to the things beyond our control, and therefore we ironically make indifferent things evil by giving them an authority over us.
A brave man no longer fears death, because he cares first and foremost for the integrity of his character, and what once felt so big now feels rather small. It is the same with the prudent man, who knows he can conquer his own ignorance, and the temperate man, who knows he can moderate his own appetites, and the just man, who knows he can gladly give what he owes without expecting any further reward.
—Reflection written in 1/2014
IMAGE: Briton Riviere, Daniel in the Lion's Den (1872)
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Delphic Maxims 93
Deal kindly with everyone
IMAGE: Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses (c. 1630)
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Stockdale on Stoicism 55
So much for Stoicism as a guide to where one begins and where one leaves off in the world of free will. I now take leave of that relatively happy place, stale and jaded though it may have become in those years, and shift to the much worse circumstances of a political prison, a house of compulsion. There I found Stoicism an even more perfect fit.
I’m about to tell you more about the psychological side of life in a political prison than many of you will want to know. I assure you it isn’t done for political instruction or shock effect but to take you inside the human mind in a state of its ultimate duress and show how Stoicism can elevate the dignity of man even in worst-case scenarios.
I got to that political prison just a little over a year after I blew those tanks off the map. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been passed by the Congress two days later, and the air war in North Vietnam was on. It was on September 9, 1965, after a couple of hundred bombing missions in that war, and just three years after I left graduate school, that my airplane was finally shot out of the sky. I arrived at the old French dungeon called Hoa Lo ("Fiery Furnace") Prison in Hanoi, as a stretcher case, three days later.
I identify Hoa Lo as a political prison rather than a "P.O.W. camp," not just because of its honeycomb of tiny cells, each with a cement-slab bed, leg irons at its foot, a food chute above the irons, a toilet bucket beside, and a "rat hole" to the outside drainage ditch for flushing, but because it was a place where people are sent to be used, to have their minds changed, or both.
Political prisons are not to be confused with penitentiaries or prison camps where people are locked up to preserve the public peace or pay their debts to society. Little attention is given to terms of confinement or time schedules. They are institutions devoted only to the discrediting of the inmates’ causes; when all the prisoner’s juices have been squeezed out, when his forced confession of crimes never committed are judged as convincing as they can be made to be, he is usually free to go.
It’s not generally known, but Americans held in Hanoi were free to go any time, provided the prisoner (1) cut juicy enough anti-American tapes, and (2) he was then willing to violate our prisoners’ underground organization’s self-imposed creed of comradeship: "Accept no parole or amnesty; we all go home together."
Thus we came to imprison ourselves, for honor, in accordance with our Code of Conduct. I might add that this mystified several high officials of our government here in Washington. They didn’t know their own code.
—from James B. Stockdale, Epictetus' Enchiridion: Conflict and Character
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Friday, March 20, 2026
Sayings of Ramakrishna 281
An angler was fishing in a pond. The Avadhûta, approaching him, asked, "Brother, which way leads to such and such a place?"
The float of the rod at that time was indicating that the fish was nibbling the bait: so the man did not give any reply, but was all attention to his fishing rod.
When the fish was caught, he turned round and said, "What is it you have been saying, sir?"
The Avadhûta saluted him and said, "Sir, you are my Guru. When I sit in the contemplation of the Paramâtman, let me follow your example, and before finishing my devotions let me not attend to anything else."
IMAGE: Robert Seldon Duncanson, Man Fishing (1848)
Seneca, Moral Letters 85.10
“He who is brave is fearless; he who is fearless is free from sadness; he who is free from sadness is happy.”
It is our own school which has framed this syllogism; they attempt to refute it by this answer, namely, that we Stoics are assuming as admitted a premise which is false and distinctly controverted—that the brave man is fearless.
“What!” they say, “will the brave man have no fear of evils that threaten him? That would be the condition of a madman, a lunatic, rather than of a brave man. The brave man will, it is true, feel fear in only a very slight degree; but he is not absolutely free from fear.”
Now those who assert this are doubling back to their old argument, in that they regard vices of less degree as equivalent to virtues. For indeed the man who does feel fear, though he feels it rather seldom and to a slight degree, is not free from wickedness, but is merely troubled by it in a milder form.
“Not so,” is the reply, “for I hold that a man is mad if he does not fear evils which hang over his head.”
What you say is perfectly true, if the things which threaten are really evils; but if he knows that they are not evils and believes that the only evil is baseness, he will be bound to face dangers without anxiety and to despise things which other men cannot help fearing.
Or, if it is the characteristic of a fool and a madman not to fear evils, then the wiser a man is the more he will fear such things!
It is our own school which has framed this syllogism; they attempt to refute it by this answer, namely, that we Stoics are assuming as admitted a premise which is false and distinctly controverted—that the brave man is fearless.
“What!” they say, “will the brave man have no fear of evils that threaten him? That would be the condition of a madman, a lunatic, rather than of a brave man. The brave man will, it is true, feel fear in only a very slight degree; but he is not absolutely free from fear.”
Now those who assert this are doubling back to their old argument, in that they regard vices of less degree as equivalent to virtues. For indeed the man who does feel fear, though he feels it rather seldom and to a slight degree, is not free from wickedness, but is merely troubled by it in a milder form.
“Not so,” is the reply, “for I hold that a man is mad if he does not fear evils which hang over his head.”
What you say is perfectly true, if the things which threaten are really evils; but if he knows that they are not evils and believes that the only evil is baseness, he will be bound to face dangers without anxiety and to despise things which other men cannot help fearing.
Or, if it is the characteristic of a fool and a madman not to fear evils, then the wiser a man is the more he will fear such things!
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 85
We have come to a point where the distinctions must be subtle, and I fear that I lack the proper words to express them, but it remains critical to maintain the power of the virtues to rise above the passions, for otherwise we will all settle for being just a little less vicious than the next fellow.
To be fearless must involve being free from fear, whether that means feeling no distress at all, or possessing a mastery over any passions that might be present. If I have no anxiety about my future, then my mind can truly be at peace, and so I can rightly say that I am happy; while the miserable man will always be consumed by worry, the blessed man can now face his hardships with confidence.
The critic, doubting the influence of our judgments, will protest that it is impossible to remove fear from our lives, and that an absence of fear could therefore only be a symptom of ignorance, recklessness, or insanity. As someone who still regularly struggles with dread, I am quite sympathetic to such objections, wondering whether the Stoics have crossed the line into dismissing the essential place of our emotions.
It is commonly said that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to conquer fear. Indeed, we are told that every soldier is terrified before he goes into battle, or even that every man has to tremble at the approach of his death, however ordinary. How can it be reasonable to expect a total lack of fear? How could we face any danger without feeling deeply disturbed?
Yet I have heard some veterans speak of the horror leaving them completely upon making a valiant choice, and I have watched people die in a state of absolute acceptance. I will not question their integrity, or attribute this to derangement. To say that perfect serenity might be rare makes it neither unattainable nor undesirable.
Some feelings come to us through the instincts of the body, and we must listen carefully to what they say, while never allowing them to decide for us. Other feelings come to us through the workings of the mind, and we must always be conscious of how our thinking informs the shape of those emotions. Slowly but surely, our feelings become ordered when they are in harmony with our understanding, since our estimation of good or bad is ultimately the measure of our desire or aversion.
No, the Stoic is not asking us to repress our emotions; he is instead suggesting that we take responsibility for them, and to direct them according to our reason. A passion, in the particular Stoic sense of an unhealthy feeling, can always be transformed into a healthy sentiment that supports our nature.
What was once gratification can now be joy. What was once lust can now be good will. What was once fear can now be caution. And there never needs to be any despair, because an attitude of acceptance always allows us to discover the opportunity within our own character.
The critic may be confused about the definitions of benefit and harm, assuming that certain things are evils, when they can actually be occasions for good. Poverty, obscurity, and even death itself are not, in themselves, to be feared. The vices of avarice, vanity, and cowardice are far more pernicious.
We have come to a point where the distinctions must be subtle, and I fear that I lack the proper words to express them, but it remains critical to maintain the power of the virtues to rise above the passions, for otherwise we will all settle for being just a little less vicious than the next fellow.
To be fearless must involve being free from fear, whether that means feeling no distress at all, or possessing a mastery over any passions that might be present. If I have no anxiety about my future, then my mind can truly be at peace, and so I can rightly say that I am happy; while the miserable man will always be consumed by worry, the blessed man can now face his hardships with confidence.
The critic, doubting the influence of our judgments, will protest that it is impossible to remove fear from our lives, and that an absence of fear could therefore only be a symptom of ignorance, recklessness, or insanity. As someone who still regularly struggles with dread, I am quite sympathetic to such objections, wondering whether the Stoics have crossed the line into dismissing the essential place of our emotions.
It is commonly said that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to conquer fear. Indeed, we are told that every soldier is terrified before he goes into battle, or even that every man has to tremble at the approach of his death, however ordinary. How can it be reasonable to expect a total lack of fear? How could we face any danger without feeling deeply disturbed?
Yet I have heard some veterans speak of the horror leaving them completely upon making a valiant choice, and I have watched people die in a state of absolute acceptance. I will not question their integrity, or attribute this to derangement. To say that perfect serenity might be rare makes it neither unattainable nor undesirable.
Some feelings come to us through the instincts of the body, and we must listen carefully to what they say, while never allowing them to decide for us. Other feelings come to us through the workings of the mind, and we must always be conscious of how our thinking informs the shape of those emotions. Slowly but surely, our feelings become ordered when they are in harmony with our understanding, since our estimation of good or bad is ultimately the measure of our desire or aversion.
No, the Stoic is not asking us to repress our emotions; he is instead suggesting that we take responsibility for them, and to direct them according to our reason. A passion, in the particular Stoic sense of an unhealthy feeling, can always be transformed into a healthy sentiment that supports our nature.
What was once gratification can now be joy. What was once lust can now be good will. What was once fear can now be caution. And there never needs to be any despair, because an attitude of acceptance always allows us to discover the opportunity within our own character.
The critic may be confused about the definitions of benefit and harm, assuming that certain things are evils, when they can actually be occasions for good. Poverty, obscurity, and even death itself are not, in themselves, to be feared. The vices of avarice, vanity, and cowardice are far more pernicious.
—Reflection written in 1/2014
IMAGE: Francois Gerard, Gallic Courage (1832)
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Henry David Thoreau 14
And the cost of a thing, it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.
—from Henry David Thoreau, Journals (6 December, 1845)
Ralph Waldo Emerson 19
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
—from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (20 June, 1831)
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
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