Our trusted friend Ibn Muqaffa provides us with the following advice which I have committed to memory:
Thought
On Living Near The Ocean
Although I do not live near the ocean now, I grew up in a small town that was close to it. The spirit of place enters imperceptibly into one’s bloodstream; and one gets used to the tang of rotting seaweed, the early morning salt mist, the relentlessly shifting dunes, and the omnipresent screams of the gulls. I have found that being near the ocean is restorative of health.
The Sword Of Mars
The humanist Poggio Bracciolini wrote a long letter to his friend Niccolo Niccoli in November of 1430. The letter contained the following words:
Continue readingComing Full Circle
As a man hopefully grows in experience and knowledge, he will begin to notice a curious thing. The knowledge that he continues to acquire, and the sights that he continues to see here and there, subtly redirect him back to where he first departed. It is almost as if some grand cosmic joke is at work. Now when I say we return to where we first started, I do not mean that we return as ignorant as when we first left. We have grown, matured, and become more complete; there is no going back to the old ways and old days. And yet, as knowledge grows, we begin to long for the places of our youth: the sights and sounds of our younger days, and the pleasant connections to eras past. Wisdom reduces all things to their essentials.
Whether A Man Can Change, And How He May Change
Can a man change, or are his personality traits so fixed that external circumstances are incapable of adjusting them in any significant way? This is a question that finds enthusiastic advocates for both answers. The cynics–or as they prefer to be called, the “realists”–tell us that personality does not change. Our knowledge contracts and expands, but the core of our being remains immutable. We may become more polished in our presentations, or more adept at concealing our intentions, but in the end it is still the same old “us.” We are here, and we have not changed.
Augustine’s “Misericorditer”: Benevolent Severity In Correcting One’s Enemies
I have recently learned of an interesting doctrine articulated by St. Augustine in one of his letters. The letter in question is Epistula 138, and I should describe briefly its context. One of Augustine’s friends was a pagan senator in Rome named Volusian; his mother happened to be a Christian, but he was not. The sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 A.D. had been a deeply shocking event for everyone in the Roman world, no matter what their religion was. There was very much an atmosphere of despair. People wondered how such a thing could have happened to what seemed the strongest military state in the world.
Preserving Something For Time To Make Better
Before I explore the main subject of this essay, I wanted to relate a tale about Alexander the Great’s leadership acumen. The historian Arrian relates an event that he believes best distills Alexander’s genius for command. It can be found in VI.26 of his History of Alexander. When Alexander and his army were passing through the Gedrosian desert (a part of what is now Baluchistan), they ran low on water and began to be tormented by extreme thirst. Water was almost nowhere to be found, and it would be some time before they could reach a reliable aquifer.
Between Mouth And Morsel
The Roman writer Aulus Gellius relates an anecdote about his discovery of the meaning of an old proverb. He tells us that he read the following line in one of the speeches of Marcus Cato Censorius:
A Man Is Often The Cause Of His Own Misfortune
A reasonable amount of experience in life teaches us that we are often the source of the wrongs that fall upon our shoulders. This is not always true, of course; but even a short period of honest reflection will reveal to us, if we examine the details of things, that we might have handled some situations better than we in fact did. Learning does not take place without honest examination; and the first person who is in need of this honesty is ourselves.
The Man In The Well, And The Path Of Wisdom
In his allegorical work Kalila and Dimna, writer Ibn Muqaffa describes the journey to wisdom of one of his characters, a man named Barzouyeh. Barzouyeh was the man sent by the king of Persia to India for the purpose of acquiring the precious text of Kalila and Dimna, which was reputed to contain a treasure-trove of worldly wisdom. Ibn Muqaffa spends a good deal of time discussing Barzouyeh’s education and path to worldly wisdom; and it will be instructive for us to relate it here.
Quintus Curtius 
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