“The Wise, Too, Shed Tears”

I How close to the world can one be? How far from the world should one be? Those questions represent two mentalities, two doctrines — the aspiration to nearness, the suspicion of nearness; engagement as a form of strength, engagement as a form of weakness; the hunger for reality, the horror of reality; the nobility of belonging, the nobility of alienation. We begin with the world and we end with it, and we spend our mortal interval ascertaining what to do about the relation, and how to get it right. There are some who draw close because they seek pleasure, or because they seek pain; there are some who fear pain, or fear pleasure, and pull away. Charity, and moral action, demands proximity, but proximity also narrows and deceives and corrupts — and immoral action requires it, too. Beauty enchants, and absorbs, and overwhelms, but it is not obvious that the dissolution of the self is its highest fulfillment, or that sublimity is our best level. And love — does anything imperil the heart more? Love, the commonplace miracle, is the cradle of anxiety; its fragility casts a shadow over the very happiness that it confers. The truly happy man, it would seem, is the man who lives only in the present and alone, which is to say, the man who is without a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, a lover or a spouse or a friend, which is to say, almost no man, really. A man with a memory is hardly alone. Even solitariness is a kind of social relation, which may be refined into solitude. The world comes with terms. One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. Like the late Tolstoy, they get into your head. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject for philosophy. Nobody in the West ever pondered more rigorously the actualities of pain. The integrity of their ideal — tranquility of mind achieved by the stilling of strong feelings — is incontrovertible. Who lives too serenely? And incontrovertible, too, is their portrait of the assault of the world upon the soul, and of the soul’s consequent dispersal by stimulations and attachments. Experience is the enemy of composure; poise must be wrested from circumstance; we are taught by being troubled. When I encounter equanimity, then, I feel envy. And yet I have always believed that the price of Stoic equanimity may be too high. The virtue that it recommends is achieved by an ordeal of paring down and stripping away and pulling back that looks to me like a process of dehumanization. What is the self-sufficient self, if not the self that exaggerates its own resources? Where is the line between self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction? This is why the inconsistencies of the Stoics delight me, why I even gloat in their failures. And this is why the literature of Stoicism — and of Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism — is riddled, when read closely, with exceptions to the lofty rule of wise retirement. Stilpo was a philosopher in Megara in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C.E. and the teacher of Zeno, the Cypriot thinker who founded Stoicism. Seneca relates that “Stilpo’s homeland fell to invaders; his children were lost, his wife was lost, and he alone survived the destruction of his people. Yet he emerged happy; and when Demetrius, who was called Poliorcetes, or City-Sacker, asked him whether he lost anything, he replied: ‘All my goods are with me.’” Seneca extols him for thinking that “nothing is good which can be taken away.” He “conquered even his enemy’s conquest. ‘I have lost nothing’, he said. How amazing is this man, who escaped fire, sword, and devastation, not only without injury but even without loss!” Nothing is good that can be taken away: was this man a saint of indifference or a monster of indifference? There are other testimonies, other ancient exempla, equally stirring or shocking, in praise of imperturbability. The father of this tradition of virtuous passivity was Pyrrho, who

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