People, says an ancient Greek sentence of Epictetus, are tormented by their points of view about things, not the things themselves. We could find relief for our miserable human condition if we established this as a universal truth. If evils exist only in our perception, then we have the power to reframe and despise them, or even circumvent them for good. If everything is at our mercy, why don’t we escape torment or accommodate it to our advantage?
If what we call evil and torment are only so in our imagination, it is up to us to redefine them. And having the choice, if no one forces us, we are strangely foolish to be disappointed by a party that is excruciatingly boring to us. There is also no reason to give disease, poverty and contempt a sour and bad taste. If we can make these things good, and fortune provides the raw material of life, it is up to us to reshape our world.
If evil is not inherently so, we have the opportunity to give it another flavor and another face, for everything comes back to one thing. So let us see if this wisdom of Epictetus can be maintained. If the original being of these things that we fear had the authority to lodge in us, it would lodge the same and similar in everyone: for we are all of one species, and even though we divide ourselves into greater and lesser, we are equipped with similar tools and instruments for conceiving and judging.
But the diversity of opinions that we have on these matters clearly shows that they only impress by how they are presented. Some may hold these opinions closely, but a thousand others give them a new and contrary shape. We consider death, poverty and pain as our primary torments. Some call death the most horrible human reality. Who does not know someone who calls it the primary port of torment in life? But is it also the sovereign good of nature? The only value that creates our freedom? And perhaps even the common, prompt remedy for all evils? Some await it with fear and trembling, but others bear it more easily than their life. The latter complains about its ease:
Death, I wish you would not be afraid to withdraw from life, But virtue alone would give you. (Lucan)
Let us first highlight he most glorious, courageous souls, such as Theodorus, who responded to Lysimachus when threatening to kill him: “You will be very impressive if you achieve the strength of a firefly.” Most philosophers have been known to have either foreseen or hastened their death on purpose. How many famous people in history have we seen who, led to death, (and often not a simple death, but one mixed with shame, grievances, and torments,) bring their lives to an end with great assurance, whether through obstinacy or natural simplicity? To them, nothing is perceived to change their ordinary state: they go about conducting their domestic affairs, recommending themselves to their friends, singing, preaching and entertaining the people. Some of them, such as Socrates, even mixed in a few words for fun, and drinking, trying to lift the spirits of friends.
And it is not just the famous who face death boldly. One who was being led to the gallows said to the leaders of the procession to please avoid a certain street, because there was a danger that a merchant would recognize him and remember an old debt. Another told the executioner not to touch his throat, for fear of making him laugh out loud, so ticklish was he. The other replied to his confessor, who promised him that he would dine that day with our Lord: You go ahead, I’m fasting. Another, having asked for a drink, and the executioner having drunk first, said he did not want to drink after him, for fear of catching the plague.
Everyone has heard the tale of the Picard. Our justice systems sometime allow the condemned to escape their demise with an arranged marriage. On the scaffold, Picard was presented with a girl. He looked at her a little, noticed that she was limping and replied: “Attache, Attache, she’s a witch!” And it is said that in Denmark a man condemned to be beheaded, being on the scaffold, when he was presented with a similar offer, refused it because the offered bride had sunken cheeks and a nose that was too pointed. A valet in Toulouse, accused of heresy for espousing the beliefs of his master, was imprisoned along with a young schoolboy. He declared to the boy that he would rather die than permit himself to be persuaded that his master could be wrong.
We read of those in the city of Arras, when King Louis the Eleventh captured it. There were many among the people who let themselves be hanged rather than say, “Long live the King.” In the Kingdom of Narsingpur, even today, the wives of their priests are buried alive with their dead husbands. All other women are burned alive, not only constantly, but cheerfully at their husbands’ funerals. And when the body of their deceased King is burned, all his wives and concubines, his favorites and all sorts of officers and servants who make up a people, run so happily to this fire to throw themselves into it when their master does, that they seem to consider it an honor to be companions in death.
And there are the vile souls of jesters who sometimes wish to carry on revelry all the way to death. The one whom the executioner was whipping cried out: “Long live the feast”, his usual refrain. And the other one, who had been laid on the straw mattress along the floor, about to give up the ghost, to whom the doctor asked where the pain was: “Between the bench and the fire,” he replied. And the priest, to give him extreme unction, looking for his feet, which he had contracted and constrained by the illness: “You will find them,” he said, “at the end of my legs.” To the man who exhorted him to commend himself to God: “Who is going there?” he asked; and the other replied: “It will soon be you, yourself, if it pleases him.” “Even if I were there tomorrow evening?” he replied. “Just commend yourselves to him,” the other followed, “you will be there soon enough.” He replied “So it is better, that I commend myself to him.”
During our last wars of Milan, amid so many advances and retreats, the people resolved to die, impatient of such various changes of fortune. So many did so, I heard my father say, that he noticed twenty-five masters of houses who had died by suicide in a week. An incident similar to this happened in the city of the Xantians. Besieged by Brutus, its citizens, men, women and children, were taken with such a furious appetite to die that they did everything to escape their conquerors through death. Brutus could barely save a very small number of survivors.
Any opinion is strong enough to be espoused at the cost of one’s life. The first article of the fine oath that Greece swore and upheld in the Medo-Persian war was that each man would sooner exchange death for life, than the Persian laws for their own. How many people in the war between the Turks and the Greeks were willing to accept a very harsh death rather than be circumcised and baptized? This is an example of what no religion is incapable of.
The horrendous historical treatment of the Jews is a prime example. The Kings of Castile banished Jews from their lands. King John of Portugal sold back their freedom for eight escudos, on condition that they would clear out on a certain day. He promised to provide them with ships bound for Africa. When the day arrived, it was decreed that those who did not obey would remain slaves. The ships were provided, but those who embarked on them were harshly and villainously treated by the other passengers, who, in addition to many other indignities, raped and sodomized them at sea, and then stole their supplies, so they were forced to buy more food from the ship at such an extreme price that after having been stripped of everything, they were sent back on the ship and returned to Portugal.
The news of this inhumanity was brought back to those who were on land, most of whom had already resolved to submit to servitude. Some pretended to change religion. Emmanuel, who had come to the crown, first set them free again. But then he changed his mind, and forced the non-converted out of Portugal, assigning three ports for their passage. He hoped, said Bishop Osorius, the greatest Latin historian of our time, that they would appreciate the favor of freedom he had granted. Yes, he wanted appreciation after they had endured the brutality of those sailors and abandoned a home country where they were accustomed to comfortable wealth, all to throw themselves into an unknown and foreign region, where they were forced to return. Having lived this history, they carefully deliberated on their next steps. But, seeing himself deceived in his hopes, Emmanuel cut out two of the ports he had promised them, so that the length and inconvenience of the journey would discourage some. As for those who did appear for passage, this did little more than pile them all up in one place, for greater convenience in the genocide he intended.
He ordered that all children under the age of fourteen be taken from the hands of their fathers and mothers and transported out of their sight and hearing, to a place where they would be instructed in Christianity. They say that this produced a horrible spectacle: the natural affection between fathers and children and, moreover, the zeal for their ancient beliefs, fighting against this inhumane ordinance. It was amid this scene that father and mothers began taking their own lives and, out of love and compassion for their children, throwing them into wells to escape the law. When the term of “escape” expired, they again became slaves. Some of them became Christians: of whose faith, or of their race, even today a hundred years later, few Portuguese are certain, although custom and the passage of time are much stronger advisers than any other constraint.
How often not only our leaders, but also entire armies, have rushed to certain death. (Cicero)
I saw one of my close friends run forcefully towards death, out of true affection, and rooted in his heart by various faces of discourse, from which I could not dissuade him. His death was crowned with a luster of honor, and he rushed into it casting off all appearance, with a bitter and ardent hunger. In our time, we have several examples of those, even children, who, for fear of some slight inconvenience, have given themselves to death. And on this subject, what shall we fear, said an ancient, if we fear what cowardice itself has chosen as its refuge? To list here a great number of those of all sexes and conditions and of all sects in happier centuries, who have either constantly awaited death, or voluntarily sought it, and sought it not only to flee the evils of this life, but some simply to flee the satiety of living, and others for the hope of a better condition elsewhere, I never would complete my list. And the number is so infinite that, in truth, I would be better off to count those who have feared it.
Only this. Pyrrho the Philosopher, finding himself one day in a boat in a great storm, pointed out to those he saw most frightened around him, and encouraged them by the example of a pig, which was there, completely unconcerned by the storm. Dare we therefore say that this advantage of reason, of which we make so much ado, and for the respect of which we hold ourselves masters and emperors of the rest of creatures, has been put into us for torment? What is the use of knowledge of things, if it robs us of the peace and tranquillity in which we would otherwise hold, and makes us worse off than Pyrrho’s pig? Shall we use the intelligence that has been given to us for our greatest good to our ruin, fighting against the design of nature and the universal order of things, which dictates that each person uses their tools and means for their own convenience? Well, one might say, your rule serves death, but what will you say about poverty?
What else will you say of pain, which Aristippus, Hieronymus and most of the sages considered the ultimate evil; and those who denied it in words, confessed it in effect? Possidonius being extremely tormented by an acute and painful illness, Pompeius went to see him, and excused himself for having taken such an importunate hour to hear him talk about Philosophy: “If it please God,” said Possidonius to him, “may the pain gain so much on me that it prevents me from discussing and speaking about it,” and he threw himself into the same subject of despising pain. But in the meantime it played its part and pressed him incessantly. To which he exclaimed: “You can do what you like, pain, but I will not say that you are bad.”
What does this story that they make so much of have to say for the contempt of pain? It is all about the word, and yet if these big names do not move him, why does he break off his remarks? Why does he think he’s doing so much by not calling it evil? Not everything here consists of imagination. We are of the opinion, moreover, that it is certain science that plays its part here. Our very senses are judges of it,
Unless they are true, all reason is also false. (Lucretius)
Will we make ourselves believe at the risk of our skin that the strokes of the whip tickle? And to our taste, that aloe is the wine of graves? Pyrrho’s pig is our share here. It is quite fearless in death, but if beaten, it cries out and is tormented. Shall we force the general habit of nature, which is seen in all that is living under heaven, to tremble in pain? Even the trees seem to groan at the offenses we inflict on them. Death is only felt through speech, especially since it is the movement of an instant:
Either it was, or it will come, there is nothing present in it, (La Boetie)
And death has less punishment than the delay of death. (Ovid)
A thousand beasts, a thousand men are more likely to die than be threatened. And in truth what we say we fear most in death is pain, its usual harbinger. However, if we are to believe a holy father:
Nothing makes death bad, except what follows death. (St. Augustine)
And I would say even more likely that neither what comes before nor what comes after is part of death. We falsely apologize. And I find from experience that it is rather the impatience of the imagination of death that makes us impatient of pain, and that we feel it doubly grievous that it threatens us with death. But reason accuses us of being too cowardly to fear something so sudden, so inevitable, so insensitive, and we take this other, more excusable pretext. We say that all ailments that have no danger other than the ailment itself are without danger. Whether it is a toothache or gout, however unpleasant, as long as they are not homicidal, who says they are an illness?
Now let us assume that in death we are mainly concerned with pain. Just as poverty has nothing to fear from this, that it throws us into its arms, through the thirst, hunger, cold, heat and vigils that it causes us to suffer. So let us only have to deal with pain. I wish it were the worst accident of our existence, and gladly: for I am the man in the world who wishes her so much harm, and who flees from her so much, for until now not to have had, God help me, much to do with her. But it is in us, if not to annihilate it, at least to diminish it through patience, and even if the body is moved by it, to nevertheless keep the soul and reason in good trim. And if it were not so, who would have honored us with virtue, valor, strength, magnanimity and resolution? Where would they play their part, if there were no more pain in defying:
Virtue is greedy for danger. (Seneca)
If we must sleep rough, endure the heat of midday fully armed, feast on a horse and a donkey, see ourselves cut to pieces, and wrench a bullet from our bones, suffer ourselves to be sewn up, cauterized and probed, where will we gain the advantage we seek over the vulgar? It is far from fleeing from evil and pain, as the Wise Ones say, that actions are equally good, that it is more desirable to do that which involves the most pain:
For not by hilarity, nor by lasciviousness, nor by laughter, nor by the joke accompanying levity, but often even the sad are happy by firmness and constancy. (Cicero)
And for this reason it was impossible to persuade our fathers that conquests made by force, at the risk of war, were not more advantageous than those made safely by means of strategy and maneuvering:
He is happier whenever he finds what is honorable in a great way. (Lucan)
Moreover, this should console us: that naturally, if the pain is violent, it is short; if it is long, it is light,
If heavy, short; if long, light. (Cicero)
You will not feel it for very long, if you feel it too much; it will put an end to itself, or to you: one and the other comes down to one. If you do not bear it, it will carry you away.
Remember that the greatest end in death; the little ones have many intervals of rest; we are masters of the mediocre: so that if they are tolerable, we may bear them; if not, we may leave life, when it does not please us, as if from a theater. (Cicero)
What makes us suffer pain with such impatience is that we are not accustomed to obtaining serenity in our souls. We do not rely enough on it, even though it is the lone, sovereign mistress of our wellbeing and conduct. The body, except for the differences given up to sex, has only one train. While it is variable in all sorts of forms, it denies to itself its own feelings and sensations. We must pay greater heed to how our bodies speak to us. There is no reason, no prescription, no force that can go against our bodily inclinations and choices. It does so in thousands of ways available to us all, perhaps most obviously in how it demands we take our rest and preserve ourselves. And yet, we take great offense at the body and even assign some evils to it.
Our bodies makes use of everything without concern for thought. Both slips of the tongue and dreams give us clues to its material, even as it works to provide us with surety and contentment without intervention. What sharpens pain and pleasure within us is the edge of our mind. The beasts, who keep feelings under control, experience sensations free and naive to their bodies, and therefore the same in almost every species, and so too are their movement similar. If we did not disturb the jurisdiction that belongs to our limbs, we might be better off. Nature has given them a just and moderate temperament towards pleasure and pain. And it cannot fail to be just, being equal and common.
But since we have emancipated ourselves from the rule of nature, abandoning ourselves to the vagabond freedom of our wandering minds, at least let us help to bend our consciousness in the right direction. Plato fears our harsh commitment to pain and pleasure, especially since it binds and ties the soul to the body too much. I believe the opposite, especially since pain makes us lose our senses. Just as the enemy becomes more bitter at our flight, so pain takes pride in seeing us tremble in response to it. We would be much better off responding to it.
It is necessary to oppose and resist pain. By backing down and retreating, we call upon our weakness and attract our threatening ruin. As the body tightens up under threat, so does our souls. But let us come to the examples, which are properly the game of people weak in the knees, like me, where we will find that pain only takes up as much space in us as we give it.
They suffered as much as they inserted themselves into the sufferings. (St. Augustine)
We feel more of a razor cut from the Surgeon than ten sword thrusts in the heat of battle. The pains of childbirth, which are considered great by doctors and even by God, and which we go through with so much ceremony, are nothing to women in many nations. I will leave aside the women of Lacedaemon; but among our foot soldiers in Switzerland, what changes do you find? Except that, trotting after their husbands, you see them today carrying on their necks the child they had in their bellies yesterday. And these counterfeit Egyptian women, picked up from among us, go themselves to wash their newborns, and bathe them in the nearest river. Besides so many women who steal their children every day both in generation and conception, this honest wife of Sabinus, a Roman patrician, for the sake of others bore the labor of giving birth to twins, alone, without assistance, and without a sound or a groan.
A simple boy from Lacedemone, having stolen a fox (for they feared the shame of their folly even more than we fear his pain) and having put it under his cloak, endured rather than revealed himself, for it had gnawed at his stomach. And another, giving incense to a sacrifice, with the coal falling into his sleeve, allowed himself to be burnt to the bone, so as not to disturb the mystery. And a great number were willing to suffer for the sole test of virtue, according to their institution, who suffered at the age of seven to be flogged to death, without altering their countenance. And Cicero saw them fight in droves: with fists, feet and
Custom would never conquer nature: for it is always invincible; but we have infected the mind with shadows, delights, idleness, languor, and sloth; we have softened it, softened by opinions and bad custom. (unknown)
Everyone knows the story of Scevola who, “having slipped into the enemy’s camp to kill their leader and having failed in his attempt, in order to make good his purpose by a still stranger device and free his country, not only confessed his plan to Porsena, the king he wanted to kill, but added that there were in his own camp a great number of Romans, accomplices in the undertaking, just like him.”
And to show what he was like, having a brazier brought to him, he watched and suffered his arm to be grilled and roasted until the enemy himself, horrified, ordered the brazier to be removed. What about the man who didn’t even deign to interrupt his book while they cut into him? And the man who stubbornly mocked and laughed at the pain they inflicted on him: so that the angry cruelty of his executioners and all the inventions of torment they used on top of each other won him over? But he was a philosopher. So what? A gladiator of Caesar endured all this, laughing as they probed and detailed his wounds.
What mediocre gladiator has ever groaned; who has ever changed his countenance? Who has not only stood, but also prostrated himself shamefully? Who, when he had prostrated himself, when ordered to receive the sword, has contracted his neck? (Cicero)
Let’s include women. Who hasn’t heard in Paris of the woman who had herself flayed just to acquire the fresher complexion of a new skin? Some have had their sharp, healthy teeth pulled out to make their voice softer and fatter, or to keep them in better order. How many examples of the disregard of pain do we have of this kind? What can’t they do? What do they fear? as long as there is any hope of beauty:
Whose care is to pluck the white hairs from the stock, And to bring back a new face, having removed the skin. (Tibullus)
I have seen them swallow sand and ashes, and work themselves to the point of ruining their stomachs to acquire the most beautiful colors. What pain do they not suffer to make a well-rounded body, prim and proper, with big notches all over their sides, right down to the living flesh? Yes, sometimes to the point of dying. It is common for many people in our time to hurt themselves on purpose, to prove their word; and our King recites notable examples of what he has seen in Poland and in his own case.
But, in addition to what I know to have been imitated in France by some, I have seen a girl, to testify to the ardor of her promises, and also her constancy, give herself four or five good blows with the punch she wore in her hair on her arm, which made her skin crackle, and bled well on purpose. The Turks give themselves large sores for their ladies; and, so that the mark remains, they suddenly bring fire to the wound and hold it there for an incredible time, to stop the blood and form the scar. People who have seen it have written it down and have sworn it to me. But for every ten rough ones, there is one of them every day who will give himself a very deep gash in the arm or thighs.
I am very pleased that the witnesses are no longer at hand, or that we have more to do with them: for Christianity provides us with enough of them. And, following the example of our holy guide, there have been many who, out of devotion, have wanted to bear the cross. We learn from very worthy testimony that King Saint Louis carried the cross until, in his old age, his confessor exempted him from it, and that, every Friday, he would have his priest beat his shoulders with five iron chains, which he always carried in a box for this purpose. William, our last Duke of Guyenne, father of this Alienor, who passed the Duchy on to the houses of France and England, spent the last ten or twelve years of his life, continuously, wearing a cuirass, under a religious habit, as penance. Foulques, Count of Anjou, went as far as Jerusalem, to be flogged there by two of his servants, with a rope around his neck, in front of the Sepulchre of our Lord.
But do we not still see every year on Good Friday in various places a large number of men and women fighting until they tear their flesh and pierce their bones? I have seen this many times and without enchantment: and, it was said (because they go in disguise) that there were some who, for money, undertook to guarantee the religion of others in this way, through a contempt for pain that was all the greater because the goads of devotion can be more powerful than those of avarice. Quintus Maximus buried his son. Marcus Cato, also his son, who was a designated praetor; and Lucius Paulus buried his two sons in the space of a few days, with a stale face and bearing no sign of mourning.
I used to say of someone in jest, that he had failed divine justice: for the violent death of three grown children had been sent to him in one day for a harsh blow of the rod, as is to be believed: he almost took it as a bonus. And I admit to having lost my sense two or three times with my children, but with regret and personal annoyance. Few accidents touch men more deeply. I see enough other common occasions of affliction, which I would hardly feel if they came to me, and have despised them when they have come to me, of those of which the world makes such an atrocious figure that I would not dare to boast of them to the people without blushing.
From which it is understood that sickness is not in nature, but in opinion.(Cicero)
Opinion is a powerful, bold and unmeasured force. Who ever sought security and rest with such hunger as Alexander and Caesar did unrest and difficulties? Terentius, the father of Sitalces, used to say that when he was not at war, it was his opinion that there was no difference between him and his groom. Caton, consul, to secure himself of certain cities in Spain having only forbidden the inhabitants thereof to bear arms, a great number killed themselves:
A fierce nation, thinking that there is no life without weapons. (Livy)
How many do we know who fled the sweetness of a quiet life, in their homes, among their acquaintances, to follow the horror of uninhabitable deserts; and who threw themselves into abjection, vileness, and contempt of the world, and wallowed in it to the point of affectation? Cardinal Borromeo, who recently died in Milan, in the midst of debauchery, to which he was invited by his nobility, his great wealth, the Italian climate and his youth, maintained such an austere lifestyle that the same robe that he wore in summer he wore in winter. He slept only on straw. And the hours that remained to him from the duties of his office, he spent studying continuously, kneeling on the ground, with a little water and bread beside his book, which was the entire provision for his meals, and all the time he spent on it.
I know some who have deliberately enjoyed adultery, for which the mere name frightens so many people. If sight is not the most necessary of our senses, it is at least the most pleasant; but it seems that the most pleasant and useful of our limbs are those we use to procreate. Nevertheless, enough people have taken their ability to bear children as a mortal hatred, for the sole reason that children were too lovable and too expensive. So much for the opinion of the one who lost out. The most common and healthiest part of men is overjoyed at the abundance of children; for me and some others. But at the same time, a family can be a drawback. And when Thales is asked why he does not marry, he replies that he does not like to leave offspring.
As for our opinion on the matter, they are among the many things in life that we assess based on the cost involved in obtaining and supporting them. We consider them valuable not for what they bring, but for what we bring to them. On which I advise that we are great managers of our investment. Depending on how it weighs, it serves the same purpose as it weighs. Our opinion never lets it run amiss. Purchase gives title to the diamond, and difficulty to virtue, and pain to devotion, and harshness to medicine. Thus, to achieve poverty, he threw his escudos into the same sea that so many others search far and wide to fish for riches. Epicurus said that being rich is not a relief, but a change of affairs. Indeed, it is not scarcity, but rather abundance that produces avarice.
I want to share my experience on this subject. I have lived in three different situations since leaving childhood. The first period, which lasted almost twenty years, I spent with no means other than chance, depending on the providence and help of others, without any certainty or rules. My spending was all the more cheerful and carefree because it was all in the temerity of fortune. I was never better. I never found the purse of my friends closed: I was enjoined beyond all other necessity the necessity of not failing to meet the deadline I had set for myself. Which they have extended to me a thousand times over, seeing the effort I made to satisfy them: in such a way that I rendered a domestic loyalty and not in the least a slavish one. I naturally feel a certain pleasure in paying, as if I were relieving my shoulders of an annoying burden and this image of servitude; also that there is a certain satisfaction that tickles me in doing a just action and pleasing others.
I make an exception for payments where it is necessary to haggle and talk, because if I can’t find someone to take on the task, I will shamefully and abusively avoid them for as long as I can, for fear of this altercation, to which both my mood and my way of speaking are completely incompatible. There is nothing I hate more than haggling. It is a pure trade in trickery and impudence: after an hour of debate and bickering, both parties abandon their word and their oaths for a five-cent compromise.
And so I borrowed with disadvantage: for not having the heart to request in person, I referred the matter to the paper, which makes little effort and lends a hand in the refusal. I turned from the conduct of my need more cheerfully to the stars, and more freely, than I have since done to my providence and my sense. Most of my courtiers think it horrible to live in such uncertainty, and do not realize that most of the world lives like that. How many honest men have abandoned all they had and do so every day to seek favor with kings and fortune? Caesar went into debt by a million gold pieces on top of his army to become Caesar. And how many merchants start their business by selling their farm, which they send to the Indies
Are so many people struggling through impotence? (Catullus)
In such a great drought of devotion, we have thousands and thousands of colleges that pass it comfortably, waiting every day for the liberality of the sky to provide what they need for their dinner. Secondly, they do not realize that this certainty on which they rely is not much less uncertain and risky than chance itself. I see misery so close, beyond two thousand escudos of income, as if it were right up against me. For, besides the fact that fate has enough to open a hundred breaches for poverty through our wealth, there is often no middle ground between supreme and infinitesimal fortune:
Everyone is the architect of their own fortune. (Publilius Syrus)
and to send all our defenses and defenses to the wall, I find that for various reasons, indigence is just as commonly found among those who have property as among those who have none: and that, by chance, it is no less inconvenient when it is alone than when it is found in the company of riches. They come more from the order than from the receipt:
Everyone is the architect of their own fortune. (Sallust)
And it seems to me more miserable to be a rich man who is uncomfortable, needy, busy, than one who is simply poor.
Poor in wealth, which is the most serious kind of poverty.(Seneca)
The greatest and richest princes are usually driven to extreme necessity by poverty and famine. For is there anything more extreme than to become tyrants and unjust usurpers of the property of their subjects?
The second phase of my economic history was to have money. Having acquired some, I soon made considerable reserves according to my condition: considering that it was having, if not as much as one possesses in addition to one’s ordinary expenses. In this state I surmised that no one can rely on wealth that is still in the hope of receipt, however clear it may be. For what, I told myself, if I were surprised by such and such an accident? And, following these vain and vicious imaginings, I would go acquiring, pretending to be ingenious by providing this superfluous reserve for every conceivable inconvenience. And when someone alleged that my number of potential contingencies were infinite, I declared that if money was not for all, it was for some and many.
This new stance not happen without painful solicitude. I made a secret of it: and I, who dare to say so much about myself, lied about my wealth, as many do. We call ourselves poor when rich, right when poor and spare our consciences from ever testifying sincerely to what they have. It’s a ridiculous and shameful prudence. Whenever I traveled, it never seemed like I carried enough with me. And the more money I had on hand, the more fear I brought with it. Sometimes that fear was about the safety of the roads, sometimes about the fidelity of those who were carrying my luggage. About my money, I could never feel confident about its whereabouts unless I saw it with my own eyes. When I left my money at home, how many suspicions and thorny thoughts appeared. And, what is worse, incommunicable thoughts. I always had them in mind.
All in all, it is more trouble to keep money than to acquire it. If I didn’t make as much as I said, at least it would cost me something to stop me doing it. I got little or no convenience out of it. Having adequate wealth didn’t make it any less painful for me to spend it. For, as Bion said, it’s just as annoying for the hairy as for the bald when you pull their hair out: and once you’ve got used to it and focused your imagination on a certain pile, it’s no longer at your service: you wouldn’t dare to threaten it. It is a building that, as it seems to you, will collapse completely if you touch it. You have to be driven to it by necessity. And before, I pawned my clothes and sold a horse with much less constraint and less envy than when I did not interfere in this favorite pursuit, which I kept separate.But the danger was that it is difficult to establish certain limits to this desire. It is difficult to find in things that we believe to be good and to set a limit to savings. One will always be increasing this pile and adding one number to another, until one cruelly deprives oneself of the enjoyment of one’s own possessions, and puts them all in safekeeping, and does not make use of them at all.
According to this kind of custom, it is the richest people in the city who are in charge of guarding the gates and walls of a good city. Any man with money is greedy in my opinion. Plato thus disdains material or human goods: health, beauty, strength, wealth. And wealth, he says, is not blind, but very far-sighted, when it is illuminated by prudence. Dionysius the son, had good grace on this matter. He was told that one of his Syracusans had hidden a treasure in the ground. He asked him to bring it to him, which he did, keeping some of it for himself, with which he went to another city, where, having lost his desire to hoard, he began to live more freely. On hearing this, Dionysius made him hand over the rest of his treasure, saying that now he had learned how to use it, he was happy to return it to him.
I spent a few years in this state. I do not know how a useful demon helped me escape it, like the Siracusan, and sent me all this abandoned wealth, the pleasure of a certain journey of great expense, having put an end to this foolish imagination.
Whereupon I fell back into a third kind of life, which I still embody. I am certainly much more pleasant and more orderly now. That is, I let my expenses and my income run; sometimes one outstrips the other, sometimes the other outstrips the one: but they rarely abandon each other. I live from day to day, and am content to have enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provisions in the world would not suffice. And it is folly to expect that fortune will ever sufficiently arm us against itself. It is with our arms that we must fight. Fortuitous events will betray us in the end. I only accumulate in the hope of some future use: not to buy land that I have no use for, but to buy pleasure.
Not to be greedy is money, not to be stingy is a tax. (Cicero)
I am hardly afraid that I will ever have enough, nor do I desire for it to increase:
The fruit of riches is in abundance, and satiety declares abundance. (Cicero)
And it gratifies me singularly that this correction has come to me at an age naturally inclined to avarice, and that I see myself freed from this disease so common to the old, and the most ridiculous of all human follies. Feraulez, who had experienced both fortunes and found that the increase in wealth was not matched by an increase in the appetite for drinking, eating, sleeping and kissing his wife; and who, on the other hand, was weighed down by the burden of thrift, as it does me: decided to please a poor young man, his faithful friend, and presented him with all his own wealth, great and excessive. This included everything he was still accumulating every day through the generosity of Cyrus his good master, and throughout the war. He did this on one condition: that this friend took on the responsibility of maintaining and feeding him honorably as his host. They lived happily ever after, and were equally happy with the change in their circumstances.
Now there’s a trick I would imitate with great courage. And I greatly praise the fortune of an old prelate, whom I see to have so purely parted with his purse, his receipt, and his stake, sometimes to one chosen servant, sometimes to another. Many years have passed since he adopted this style. He is as ignorant of his household business as a stranger. Trusting in the goodness of others is a strong testimony to one’s own goodness and God willingly favors it. And, as far as I can see, I see no household order that is conducted with the worth and consistency of his. Happy is he who has so rightly regulated his needs that his wealth can suffice without his care and effort, and without their distribution or combination interrupting other pursuits that he follows, which are more suitable, more peaceful, and according to his heart. Wealth and poverty depend on the opinion of each individual; and neither wealth, nor glory, nor health, have as much beauty and pleasure as the person who possesses them lends them.
Each person is good or bad according to their circumstances. Not he who is believed, but he who believes in himself, is content. And in this alone, belief is given essence and truth. Fortune does us neither good nor harm, it offers us only the material and the seed, which our more powerful soul turns and applies as it pleases, becoming the lone cause and master of our fortunate or unfortunate condition. External influences take on the flavor and color of the internal constitution, just as our clothes warm us, not with their own heat, but with ours. Whoever would shelter a cold item would derive the same benefit from its coldness: thus snow and ice are preserved.
Certainly, in the same way that study is a torment to a slacker, abstinence from wine is to a drunkard; frugality is torture to the spendthrift, and exercise pains a delicate and idle man, so it is with everything. Things are not so painful, nor difficult in themselves: but our weakness and laxity make them so. To judge great and lofty things, one needs a similar spirit, otherwise we transfer our vices to them. A straight oar seems curved in the water.
It is not only important that we see the thing, but how we see it. Now, why so much talk, which variously persuades men to despise death, and to bear pain, do we not find someone to do it for us? And of so many kinds of imaginations, which have persuaded it to others, does not each apply one to themselves according to their mood? If he cannot digest the strong and cleansing drug, to uproot the evil, at least let him take a laxative to relieve it.
Opinion is a kind of effeminate and frivolous thing, no more so in pain than in pleasure: when we melt and flow with softness, we cannot bear the sting of a bee without a cry. (Cicero)
It’s all in the way you command. Moreover, there is no escaping philosophy, to emphasize the harshness of pain and human weakness. For it is forced to resort to these invincible rejoinders: if it is bad to live in need, at least to live in need, there is no need. No one is badly off except through his own fault.
What can one do to the person who has neither the heart to suffer nor the will to live or die, who neither wants to resist nor flee?