“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
No comments:
Post a Comment