It
would be a man's happiest lot to depart from mankind without having had any
taste of lying and hypocrisy and luxury and pride. However, to breathe out
one's life when a man has had enough of these things is the next best voyage,
as the saying is.
Have
you determined to abide with vice, and has not experience yet induced you to
fly from this pestilence? For the destruction of the understanding is a
pestilence, much more, indeed, than any such corruption and change of this
atmosphere that surrounds us.
For
this corruption is a pestilence of animals so far as they are animals; but the
other is a pestilence of men so far as they are men.
—Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.2 (tr Long)
Some
philosophies may see the good to the exclusion of the bad, or the bad to the
exclusion of the good, yet I have always been amazed at how Stoicism will
manage to balance an awareness of both.
Even as all
things that exist are good by their natures, it remains within the power of our
judgments to abuse what is good within us. I may know that all is made to
unfold as it rightly should, though this can hardly make me look away from the
depths of human depravity.
If you had told
me as a child the sorts of profoundly evil things I would experience in my
coming years, I would not have believed you. But sure enough, both in my own
immediate life and in the wider world around me, I have seen too many things
that have made me want to give up hope.
Malice runs
deep. Greed is thick in the air. Lies are heaped upon lies. And at times it
will all feel like enough is enough.
This should
hardly surprise me, because if Providence chooses to include creatures of
reason and choice within its plan, there will always be both the ups and downs
of human freedom. For every wise decision there will be an ignorant decision,
for every act of love there will an act of hate.
The ignorance
and the hatred will not destroy the good in this life, because they will always
give me the chance to transform them into what is good, but they remain a
burden to be borne nonetheless.
It might have
been a much more pleasant life if I never had to face the corruption of vice at
all. Still, I suspect that even what little virtue I have managed to build within
me would never have come to pass, if I had not first been challenged with these
obstacles, both from others and within myself. Confronting malice has helped me
to love. Confronting greed has helped me to give. Confronting lies has helped
to be true.
It may not have
been the smoothest journey, but if I have done all that I can do to live with
Nature, I can be content that it has not been in vain. I will have fulfilled my
part, however small, and I can move on knowing that I have made it through the
storm. I will now rightly be grateful for being relieved from my watch.
The pollution
in the air may clog our lungs and sicken our bodies, while the pollution in our
minds will smother our virtue and stifle our souls. To face that deeper corruption
is a responsibility of life, and to be freed from it is a blessing of life.
Written in 7/2008
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