Avoiding pain is sound advice—I’m all for it—but isn’t it an awfully thin basis for a philosophy? Not if you’re in pain, Epicurus thought. Imagine you’ve fallen from a horse and broken your leg. A doctor is summoned and promptly offers you a bowl of grapes. What’s wrong? The grapes are pleasurable, aren’t they? This absurd situation is the one many of us find ourselves in, Epicurus believed. We scoop trivial pleasures atop a mountain of pain, and wonder why we’re not happy. Some of us suffer the sharp shock of physical pain, others the dull ache of mental pain or the I want-to-die pain of a
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