Epictetus, Discourses 1.24.5

Poor slave, where are your crowns, where your diadem? Your guards avail you naught. Therefore when you come near to one of those great men remember this, that you are meeting a tragic character, no actor, but Oedipus in person. 

 

“No, but such a one is blessed, for he has a great company to walk with him.”

 

I too join the ranks of the multitude and have a large company to walk with. 

 

To sum up: remember that the door is open. 

 

Do not be a greater coward than the children, but do as they do. 

 

Children, when things do not please them, say, “I will not play anymore”; so, when things seem to you to reach that point, just say, “I will not play anymore,” and so depart, instead of staying to make moan. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.24 

 

Yes, people do still wear crowns, though they have taken on different appearances over the years. 

 

In Scent of a Woman, the headmaster has his Jaguar XJ-S. Take note of how the folks up in first class look back in disgust at the peasants in coach. I know an abbot at a two-bit monastery who wears a giant gaudy ring, and he glows when people kiss it. 

 

I try not to get angry anymore, or even to laugh, because they deserve compassion instead of contempt. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. These are precisely the sort of people Sophocles or Dante were warning us about. 

 

Whether or not we travel in the best of circles depends entirely on how we measure the merits of our company. When I get caught up in the thoughtlessness of conformity, I will feel very lonely, and then I remember how I am never truly alone. Nature always provides me with so many opportunities to act in friendship, however grubby or unrefined. 

 

Or do I want the glitz and the glamor? Then it isn’t really friendship, is it? 

 

If my conscience feels nauseous at the thought of cooperating with scoundrels, I can still opt out. This can only be achieved, however, if I have my values in order, for otherwise I will continue to crave the trivialities deep down on the inside. 

 

Astute children have the good sense to pick up their toys and go home when the games turn nasty, and I can do just the same in the grown-up playground. 

 

But let me not confuse such a principle with the malice of dismissing or shunning my fellows; at no point is it necessary to deny the person, only to refuse the vice. If I am completely honest with myself, I know full well when love or hate are intended.

 

I may not agree with the concupiscence and the relativism of a Timothy Leary, yet that old hippie phrase can also be adapted to what Epictetus has to say: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” 

 

Awake from the slumber. Recognize your nature within the whole of Nature. Stop following the script some buffoon has written for you, and then begin to do your own vital work. 

 

Now that is true bravery in the face of difficulties! 

—Reflection written in 3/2001 

IMAGE: Charles Jalabert, Oedipus and Antigone (1842)