Then for a while she held her peace.
But when her silence, so discreet, made my thoughts to cease from straying, she
thus began to speak:
“If I have thoroughly learned the
causes and the manner of your sickness, your former good fortune has so
affected you that you are being consumed by longing for it. The change in her alone,
this has overturned your peace of mind through your own imagination.
“I understand the varied disguises of
that unnatural state. I know how Fortune is ever most friendly and alluring to
those whom she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond
bearing, by deserting them when least expected. If you recall her nature, her
ways, or her deserts, you will see that you never had in her, nor have lost
with her, anything that was lovely.
“Yet, I think, I shall not need great
labor to recall this to your memory. For then too, when she was at your side
with all her flattery, you were wont to reproach her in strong and manly terms;
and to revile her with the opinions that you had gathered in worship of me with
my favored ones.
“But
no sudden change of outward affairs can ever come without some upheaval in the
mind. Thus has it followed that you, like others, have fallen somewhat away
from your calm peace of mind.
“But it is time now for you to make
trial of some gentle and pleasant draught, which by reaching your inmost parts
shall prepare the way for yet stronger healing draughts.
“Try therefore the assuring influence
of gentle argument that keeps its straight path only when it holds fast to my
instructions. And with this art of orators let my handmaid, the art of song,
lend her aid in chanting light or weighty harmonies as we desire.” . . .
—from
Book 2, Prose 1
Lady
Philosophy here begins to highlight in more detail how we become the causes of
our own misery whenever we measure our lives by good or bad fortune.
Things
may happen to us that appear to bring benefit, and before too long we begin
judging our own value through the value of our circumstances. We may even start
thinking we deserve good luck, or that it is a reward for our own merits. But
as soon as we happen to lose our pleasant situation, we are quite forlorn, and
we long for it to return.
Whenever
I have brought myself into such a mess, I find that I will get caught up in all
sorts of fruitless speculation. I may alternate between being angry at the
world, since it hasn’t given me what I want from it, and being angry with
myself, since I must have deeply offended the world to deserve such pain. What
should rather occur to me is that my only mistake was thinking that fortune was
reliable at all. From Alexander Pope’s
“The Temple of Fame”:
For
good and bad alike are fond of Fame.
Some
she disgraced and some with honours crown’d;
Unlike
successes equal merits found.
Thus
her blind sister, fickle Fortune, reigns,
And,
undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains.
Fortune
is indeed fickle. She will smile at me seductively one moment, and then ignore
me completely the next. Here she will shower me with gifts, and there she will
take every one of them back. Her moods are no more predictable than the weather
in New England.
I once
made the terrible mistake of committing most everything in my life to someone
who was both dishonest and disloyal. I was given every indication of this from
the very beginning, but I was clinging only to the parts that were so
comforting, and hoping the rest of it would just go away. Now who was I to
complain when I finally found myself alone?
The
punishment doesn’t come from the outside, but it comes from the inside. If I
choose to trust in something untrustworthy, I have only chosen to make myself
the victim. There was never anything inherently worthwhile in Fortune to begin with,
precisely because there is nothing constant or committed about her; the only
good or bad that I found was relative to my own dependence.
I also notice
how easy it is to insincerely dismiss Fortune when things seem to be going
right, and effortlessly insist that I obviously don’t need all of these
advantages to be happy. The need only becomes apparent when the advantages
disappear, and then there is weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
There is
a certain double standard here, much like people who scoff at caring for the
sick or poor, until, of course, they themselves become sick or poor.
I should
rightly be concerned about my own integrity when my values change with the
direction of the wind.
Written in 7/2015
IMAGE: Giovanni Bellini, Allegory of Changing Fortune, or Melancholy (c. 1490)
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