More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
in the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like.
Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, proposed Seneca, hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times.
We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe
bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear.
The idea that a wise person should be able to walk away from all Fortune’s gifts calmly was Stoicism’s most extreme, peculiar claim, given that Fortune grants us not only houses and money but also our friends, our family, even our bodies:
1. It is tempting, when we are hurt, to believe that the thing which hurt us intended to do so.
Seneca collected examples of such feelings of persecution by inanimate objects.
geological flatulence:
the name of my future band
(medicine chests were filled with absurd prescriptions: ‘the urine of a lizard, the droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon, and for those of us with colic paroxysms, triturated rat shit’). Animals also instinctively
i cannot overstate the hilarity of this
We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive.
Misplaced confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy – and, indirectly, also of inadequacy.
if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery we did not have, we stood to find – in Montaigne’s generous, redemptive philosophy – that we were ultimately still adequate in our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way. 2
our bodies have the upper hand over our minds, and that the sphincter is ‘most indiscreet and disorderly’.
Montaigne even heard a tragic case of one behind ‘so stormy and churlish that it has obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and unremittingly for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.’
applying snow-and-vinegar compresses to their overactive testicles.
this is amazing
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudices and the self-division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
‘We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’
Schopenhauer
His closest relationships are now with a succession of poodles,
love
will-to-life (Wille zum Leben) – defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce.
Rather than a sovereign entity, the conscious mind is a partially sighted servant of a dominant, child-obsessed will-to-life:
we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
Love is nothing but the conscious manifestation of the will-to-life’s discovery of an ideal co-parent: The moment when [two people] begin to love each other – to fancy each other, as the very apposite English expression has it – is actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual.
We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break-up was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative verdict formulated by the will-to-life. Their reason may have had an appreciation of our qualities, their will-to-life did not and told them so in a way that brooked no argument – by draining them of sexual interest in us. If they were seduced away by people less intelligent than we
...more
Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence:
There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter. ‘The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,’ knew Schopenhauer.
We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other … you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.
Nietzsche
The philosophy amounted to a curious mixture of extreme faith in human potential (fulfilment is open to us all, as is the writing of great novels) and extreme toughness (we may need to spend a miserable decade on the first book). It was in order to
Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As Nietzsche’s beloved Montaigne had
If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable … people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.
Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfilment: The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
