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.
Plutarch’s lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger can be read as case studies on the contrasting features of moderation and extremism.
The successful, rational leader will know when to compromise and seek settlements; the extremist will not, and thereby brings himself and others to ruin.
Men take their masculinity too lightly. That is, they do not value that which makes them men. They are too eager to minimize its power, to dull its sheen, and to snuff out its distinct phosphorescence.
What one does not value, is not safeguarded from outside attack.
[A reader of Stoic Paradoxes contacted me recently and shared some of his experiences and adventures gained from many years of translating. I told him that his ideas would make for a great guest post here.
His language is expertise is Japanese, a language that I am not proficient in. But it is interesting that translators all face the same challenges, more or less, regardless of the language they are working in.
His comments highlight one of the things I mentioned in a recent article about translating. It is the idea that you sometimes need to set things aside, and come back to them later, with a new and refreshed perspective.
His article appears below.]
I was having a chat with some friends recently about some aspects of life. It gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts on one or two subjects. Let me tell you more about it.
Continue readingHere is a morsel to chew on.
I was reading a bit of Plutarch this morning and came across a passage that is worth sharing. It is from the Life of Timoleon (6):
We take so much for granted today about printed books. The wisdom of the ages can be captured and preserved for costs that are so low as to almost negligible. Save for the surfeit of information that currently exists, the modern man has no excuse not to be reasonably acquainted with his heritage.
It was not always so. Before the advent of the printing press, books circulated in manuscript form. They had to be copied by hand, and this was laborious and costly. In the ancient world, manuscript books were relatively cheap and plentiful; but papyrus became unavailable from Egypt during the Middle Ages, leaving expensive vellum as the only available medium for “mass” writing.
My third book, Stoic Paradoxes, is now available on Amazon.
It is offered in both Kindle edition and in paperback. Click on the cover image above.
I wanted to use this post to explain what the book is about, and why it is an important addition to the literature on Stoicism.
Quintus Curtius 
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