Our spirits are driven by two things: appetite and Reason.
Appetite is the hunger for pleasures, and Reason is the rational impulse. When Reason does not control the appetite, then the appetite usurps the leadership position of the spirit.
And this is a sure road to ruin.
Appetite leads us around aimlessly by the nose, this way and that, like some kind of insensate farm animal.
One of the questions that I’ve been asked a lot these days is how one’s perceptions change about things as one gets older. A lot of younger guys in their twenties or thirties want to get a glimpse of what lies around the corners of life that they will be approaching soon.
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Here is a sly and amusing story that I came across in Plutarch this weekend. We find it in his Life of Demetrius (Ch. 27). It is short, but effective.
There was an Egyptian pharaoh named Bakenranef, who was known to the Greeks as Bocchoris (names of foreign rulers and notables were often Hellenized by historians). According to the chronicler Manetho, he ruled Lower Egypt as a king of the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty from 725 to 720 B.C. According to tradition, he was famous for his wisdom and prudence.
I was eating today at one of those a kilo places in Rio: one of those places where the food is purchased by the total weight. The greater the quantity of food, the greater the price. It turned out to be an opportunity for reflection on the price not of food, but of achievement.
Where food is concerned, nourishment is measured in quantities, by weight. But so is life, or mortality, in a way.
For the doctors of medicine assure us that one can die just as readily from overeating, as from under-eating. Excess is just as much a danger as dearth. And in the developed world, it is more of a danger. For few of us will be faced with the prospect of starvation in our lives. More likely, our challenges will come from the over-abundance of choices, from the temptations of bounty.
On an airline flight yesterday I was watching a 2014 Mark Wahlberg film called The Gambler. I had not heard of it before. Apparently it didn’t do too well at the box office last year, due to its depressing and nihilistic tone.
Regardless, there was a great speech near the beginning of the movie by Wahlberg, who plays an existentially-troubled English teacher. In the speech to his class, he offers a few words on the whole “Shakespeare controversy”: that is, were Shakespeare’s plays written by him, or by someone else?
You may know that there is an industry built up around the denial that Shakespeare wrote his places. These deniers claim it must have been some aristocrat or some professor who wrote the plays attributed to him.
Current news headlines of populations on the move into Europe have drawn attention to a previous era in European history, one in which mass migrations of foreign peoples played a major role. The Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was faced with these very challenges from the movements of Germanic tribes, as well as Avars, Bulgars, and Huns.
As I looked more into the details of this period of history, I was struck with how resilient and stable the Empire’s organization was. There is vast ignorance of this period of history, even (or especially) among Europeans. While it is often portrayed as an age of continuous decline and decadence, this picture is not the whole truth.
The civil and military organization established by Constantine was wise and enduring, and it deserves to be better known. It stands in stark contrast to the ineptitude and feebleness of the heads of state in modern Europe.
This article is technical in nature, and will be of interest to the few, rather than to the majority. Those comprising the latter group may wish to pass on this post, and spare themselves some heaviness of the eyelids.
There is a scene in the 1979 film classic Apocalypse Now where Willard and the Chef stop their river patrol boat to collect some mangoes in the jungle. They come face to face with a tiger, and this causes the tightly-wound Chef to become unglued.
“Never get out of the boat…never get out of the boat…I got to remember: never get out of the boat,” he repeats over and over.
Sometimes we need to take a break from virtue. All things in moderation, I say, including virtue. Sometimes, we need to look deeply into the abyss. Someone once said that the abyss looks back at you, but it’s more accurate to say something else: it blows out its breath at you, like the open maw of a hungry grizzly bear, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be near his jaws. And then you catch a good whiff of that dank, fetid breath.
Some want to reach a point of victorious finality. They want to enter the end-zone of the football field, slam the ball down, and celebrate. Finally, they say, I have arrived!
I have made it, they bray. I can now coast a little, they assure us. Listen to these asses bray, bray, bray. I can hardly stand it. And then they tell us: I can subsist on this victorious inertia for a while, and see where that takes me.
Oh, if only it were that simple. The end-zone, sorry to say, does not exist. Fortune hates inertia, and will snuff it out quickly.
There is this entire literature of sentimentalizing the soil, and Nature in general. Sentimentalizing the brute labor required to fructify the soil. Think of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau. You know, the whole nineteenth century Romanticism of it all. I never really liked this impulse, as it always smacked to me of idealistic falsity, of insincerity. Those who hate the world find solace in the Stone-Age.
And modernly we have Pearl Buck, with her odes to the Chinese peasant. Never mind, of course, that that same saintly peasant would have stank to high heaven. There may be a Good Earth, but there is also a Bad Earth, too, and Peal Buck never wrote that novel.
Quintus Curtius 
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