The Complete Essays (190 page)

[B] The many get it wrong: you can indeed, using artifice rather than nature, make your journey more easily along the margins, where the edges serve as a limit and a guide, rather than take the wide and unhedged Middle Way; but it is also less noble, less commendable. [C] Greatness of soul consists not so much in striving upwards and forwards as in knowing how to find one’s place and to draw the line. Whatever is adequate it regards as ample; it shows its sublime quality by preferring the moderate to the outstanding. [B] Nothing is so beautiful, so right, as acting as a man should: nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life [C] naturally and [B] well. And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to [C] despise [B] our being.
¹⁶⁶
If anyone desires to set his soul apart so as to free it from contagion, let him have the boldness to do so (if he can) while his body is unwell: otherwise, on the contrary, his soul should assist and applaud the body, not refuse to participate in its
natural pleasures but delight in it as if it were its husband, contributing, if it is wise enough, moderation, lest those pleasures become confounded with pain through want of discernment. [C] Lack of temperance is pleasure’s bane: temperance is not its chastisement but its relish. It was by means of temperance, which in them was outstanding and exemplary, that Eudoxus (who made pleasure his sovereign good) and his companions (who rated it at so high a price) savoured it in its most gracious gentleness.
¹⁶⁷

[B] I so order my soul that it can contemplate both pain and pleasure with eyes equally [C] restrained –
‘eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia quo in dolore contractio’
[for it is as wrong for the soul to dilate with joy as to contract with pain]
¹⁶⁸
– doing so with eyes equally [B] steady, yet looking merrily at one and soberly at the other and, in so far as it can contribute anything itself, being as keen to snuff out the one as to stretch out the other. [C] Look sanely upon the good and it follows that you look sanely upon evils: pain, in its tender beginnings, has some qualities which we cannot avoid: so too pleasure in its final excesses has qualities which we can avoid. Plato couples pain and pleasure together and wants it to be the duty of fortitude to fight the same fight against pain and against the seductive fascinations of immoderate pleasure. They form two springs of water: blessed are they, city, man or beast, that draw what they should, when they should and from the one they should. From the first we should drink more sparingly, as a medicine, as a necessity: from the second to slake our thirst, though not to the point of drunkenness. Pain and pleasure, love and hatred, are the first things a child is aware of: if, after Reason develops, they are guided by her, then that is virtue.
¹⁶⁹

[B] I have a lexicon all to myself: I ‘pass’ the time when tide and time are sticky and unpleasant: when good, I do not want to ‘pass’ time, I [C] savour it and hold on to it.
¹⁷⁰
[B] We must run the gauntlet through the bad and recline on the good. ‘Pastimes’ and ‘to pass the time’ are everyday expressions which correspond to the practice of those clever folk who think that they can use their life most profitably by letting it leak and slip away, by-passing it or avoiding it and (as far as they can manage to
do so) ignoring it and fleeing from it as painful and contemptible. But I know life to be something different: I find it to be both of great account and delightful – even as I grasp it now [C] in its final waning; [B] Nature has given it into our hands garnished with such attributes, such agreeable ones, that if it weighs on us, if it slips uselessly from us, we have but ourselves to blame. [C]
‘Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur.’
[It is the life of the fool which is graceless, fearful and entirely sacrificed to the future.]
¹⁷¹

[B] That is why I so order my ways that I can lose my life without regret, not however because it is troublesome or importunate but because one of its attributes is that it must be lost. [C] Besides, finding it not unpleasant to die can only rightly become those who find life pleasant. [B] To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Others know the delight of happiness and well-being: I know it as they do, but not
en passant
, as it slips by. We must also study it, savour it, muse upon it, so as to render condign thanksgivings to Him who vouchsafes it to us. Other folk enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure of sleep: with no awareness of them. Why, with the purpose of not allowing even sleep to slip insensibly away, There was a time when I found it worthwhile to have my sleep broken into so that I could catch I glimpse of it. I deliberate with my self upon any pleasure. I do not skim it off: I plumb it, and now that my reason has grown chagrin and squeamish I force it to accept it. Do I find myself in a state of calm? Is there some pleasure which thrills me? I do not allow it to be purloined by my senses: I associate my Soul with it, not so that she will [C] bind herself to it
¹⁷²
[B] but take joy in it: not losing herself but finding herself in it; her role is to observe herself as mirrored in that happy state, to weigh that happiness, gauge it and increase it. She measures how much she owes to God for having her conscience and
her warring passions at peace, with her body in its natural [C] state, [B] enjoying ordinately and [C] appropriately [B] those sweet and pleasant functions by which it pleases Him, through His grace, to counterbalance the pains with which His justice in its turn chastises us;
¹⁷³
she gauges how precious it is to her to have reached such a point that, no matter where she casts her gaze, all around her the heavens are serene – no desire, no fear or doubt bring disturbing gales; nor is there any hardship, [C] past, present or future [B] on which her thoughts may not light without anxiety. This meditation gains a great splendour by a comparison of my condition with that of others. And so I [C] pass in review,
¹⁷⁴
[B] from hundreds of aspects, those whom fortune or their own mistakes sweep off into tempestuous seas, as well as those, closer to my own case, who accept their good fortune with such languid unconcern. Those folk really do ‘pass’ their time: they pass beyond the present and the things they have in order to put themselves in bondage to hope and to those shadows and vain ghosts which their imagination holds out to them –

Morte obita quales fama est volit are figuras,
Aut quæ sopitos deludunt somnia sensus

[Like those phantoms which, so it is said, flit about after death or those dreams which delude our slumbering senses]

– the more you chase them, the faster and farther they run away. Just as Alexander said that he worked for work’s sake –

Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum:
[Believing he had not done anything, while anything remained to be done:]

– so too your only purpose in chasing after them, your only gain, lies in the chase.
¹⁷⁵

As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it as it has pleased God to vouchsafe it to us. I do not go yearning that it should be without the need to eat and drink: [C] indeed to wish that need redoubled would not seem to me a less pardonable error:
‘Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus’
[The wise man is the keenest of seekers after the riches of Nature];
¹⁷⁶
nor [B] that we could keep up our strength by merely popping into our mouths a little of that drug by means of which Epimenides
assuaged his appetite and kept alive;
¹⁷⁷
nor that we could, without sensation, produce children by our fingers and our heels [C] but rather, speaking with reverence, that we could also do it voluptuously with our fingers and our heels as well; [B] nor that our body should be without desire or thrills. Such plaints are [C] ungrateful and iniquitous. [B] I accept wholeheartedly [C] and thankfully [B] what Nature has done for me: I delight in that fact and am proud of it. You do wrong to that great and almighty Giver to [C] refuse [B] His gift, to [C] nullify [B] it or disfigure it. [C] Himself entirely Good, he has made all things good:
‘Omnia quae secundum naturam est, aestimatione digna sunt.’
[All things which are in accordance with Nature are worthy of esteem.]
¹⁷⁸

[B] I embrace most willingly those of Philosophy’s opinions which are most solid, that is to say, most human, most ours: my arguments, like my manners, are lowly and modest. [C] To my taste she is acting like a child when she starts crowing out
ergo
, preaching to us that it is a barbarous match to wed the divine to the earthy, the rational to the irrational, the strict to the permissive, the decent to the indecent; that pleasure is a bestial quality, unworthy that a wise man should savour it; that the only enjoyment he gets from lying with his beautiful young wife is the pleasure of being aware that he is performing an ordinate action – like pulling on his boots for a useful ride! May Philosophy’s followers, faced with breaking their wife’s hymen, be no more erect, muscular nor succulent than her arguments are!
¹⁷⁹

That is not what Socrates says – Philosophy’s preceptor as well as ours. He values as he should the body’s pleasure but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, suppleness, variety and dignity. And, according to him, even that pleasure by no means goes alone (he is not given to such fantasies): it merely has primacy. For him temperance is not the enemy of our pleasures: it moderates them.
¹⁸⁰

[B] Nature is a gentle guide but no more gentle than wise and just: [C]
‘Intrandum est in return naturam et penitus quid ea postulet
pervidendum.’
[We must go deeply into the nature of things and find out precisely what Nature wants.] [B] I seek her traces everywhere: we have jumbled them together with the tracks of artifice; [C] and thereby that sovereign good of the Academics and Peripatetics, which is to live according to Nature, becomes for that very reason hard to delimit and portray; so too that of the Stoics which is a neighbour to it, namely, to conform to Nature.
¹⁸¹
[B] Is it not an error to reckon some functions to be less worthy because they are necessities? They will never beat it out of my head anyway that the marriage of Pleasure to Necessity [C] (with whom, according to an ancient, the gods ever conspire) [B] is a most suitable match.
¹⁸²
What are we trying to achieve by taking limbs wrought together into so interlocked and kindly a compact and tearing them asunder in divorce? On the contrary let us tie them together by mutual duties. Let the mind awaken and quicken the heaviness of the body: let the body arrest the lightness of the mind and fix it fast: [C]
‘Qui velut summum honum laudat animae naturam, et tanquam malum naturam carnis accusat, profecto et animam carnaliter appretit et carnem carnaliter fugit, quoniam id vanitate sentit humana, non veritate divina.’
[He who eulogizes the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and who indicts the nature of the flesh as an evil desires the soul with a fleshly desire and flees from the flesh in a fleshly way, since his thought is based on human vanity not on divine truth.]
¹⁸³

[B] There is no part unworthy of our concern in this gift which God has given to us; we must account for it down to each hair. It is not a merely [C] formal [B] commission to Man to guide himself according to Man’s [C] fashioning: it is expressly stated, [B] inborn, [C] most fundamental, [B] and the Creator gave it to us seriously [C] and strictly. Commonplace intellects can be persuaded by authority alone, and it has greater weight in a foreign tongue; so, at this point, let us make another charge at it:
‘Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et
contumaciter facere quae facienda sunt, et alio corpus impellere, alio animum, distrahique inter diversissimos motus?’
[Who would not say that it was really foolish to do in a slothful, contumacious spirit something which has to be done anyway, thrusting the body in one direction and the soul in another where it is torn between totally conflicting emotions?]
¹⁸⁴

[B] Go on then, just to see: get that fellow over there to tell you one of these days what notions and musings he stuffs into his head, for the sake of which he diverts his thoughts from a good meal and regrets the time spent eating it. You will find that no dish on your table tastes as insipid as that beautiful pabulum of his soul (as often as not it would be better if we fell fast asleep rather than stayed awake for what we do it for) and you will find that his arguments and concepts are not worth your rehashed leftovers. Even if they were the raptures of Archimedes, what does it matter?
¹⁸⁵

Here, I am not alluding to – nor am I confounding with the [C] scrapings of the pot [B] that we are, and with the vain longings and ratiocinations which keep us musing – those revered souls which, through ardour of devotion and piety, are raised on high to a constant and scrupulous anticipation of things divine; [C] souls which (enjoying by the power of a quick and rapturous hope a foretaste of that everlasting food which is the ultimate goal, the final destination, that Christians long for) scorn to linger over our insubstantial and ambiguous pleasurable ‘necessities’ and easily assign to the body the bother and use of the temporal food of the senses. [B] That endeavour is a privilege.
¹⁸⁶
[C] Among the likes of us there are two things which have ever appeared to me to chime particularly well together – supercelestial opinions: subterranean morals.