. . . You may say; "What then?
If that man, rich by base means, and that man, lord of many but slave of more,
shall call themselves happy, will their own opinion make them happy?"
It matters not what one says, but what
one feels; also, not how one feels on one particular day, but how one feels at
all times.
There is no reason, however, why you
should fear that this great privilege will fall into unworthy hands; only the
wise man is pleased with his own. Folly is ever troubled with weariness of
itself.
Farewell.
—Seneca
the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius 9,
tr Gummere
We have
too readily relativized happiness, thinking it is whatever we wish it to be. So
we see the vain, the greedy, the deceitful, or the violent insisting that the
things they value and the way they live make them perfectly content. If I say I
am happy, then surely I am happy.
Now the
Stoic can appeal to a universal understanding of the human person, of the order
of Nature, or of the moral purpose of our lives to explain why this is sadly
mistaken. But the Stoic, however profound his thinking, is committed first and
foremost to living. We need only look at the reality of the way people live,
day to day. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
As much
as I may observe this in others, it is best to judge only myself. Not only may
I be prone to deceive both others and myself with false words, I am even more
likely to do so when I am in a state of denial. I will protest too much. The
worse I feel, the more I may try to tell myself that everything is grand. The
words and appearances are irrelevant if they do not reflect the reality.
I may
also confuse the feeling of pleasure, which will come and go, with the state of
happiness, which is about the way I think and act, and is something constant. As
much as I may call something happiness, it is hardly that if it changes with
the circumstances.
However
much I may mouth the words, or however much I may replace it with an imposter,
happiness is never something shallow or fickle. My own experience has always
told me that my happiness or my misery are always in direct proportion to my
virtue or my vice. My contentment, without exception, is tied to the way I
choose to live.
Written 1/2005
Image: Johann Heinrich Lips (1758-1817), An Allegory of Friendship
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