Vatican wisdom

LISTEN. We're scheduled to finish The Art of  Happiness today, concluding with a selection of the Vatican Collection of Aphorisms (named for its discovery in the Vatican Library in 1888). They have, a note proclaims, "less importance" than other works. There must be sound scholarly reasons for that judgment, but I find them every bit as interestingly provocative. It's not really Vatican wisdom, of course, it just resided there in undeserved neglect. I find it important enough to ponder.

"All pain is readily discounted..." Spock said "there is no pain" in an early episode of the original Star Trek. He was very clearly experiencing crippling, incapacitating pain, only the superhuman will of a Vulcan could "discount" it. But the suggestion that our experience of pain is in fact subject to volitional control has been useful to me ever since. I'm quite sure my own pain threshold is higher than average, because of my lifelong habit of discounting (by which I really mean re-framing): that's not a pain, it's a distraction...

"We are born once. We cannot be born a second time... Life is ruined by procrastination..." We get just a few-score trips around the sun, if we're lucky; but  we live most of our lives, most of us, as though we had nothing but time to burn. It must be a defense mechanism against despair. If we allowed ourselves to hear each second of life ticking into lost eternity we'd go mad. But timely regular reminders of our mortality are crucial to a life well-lived. Carpe, carpe..., as Mr. Keating said. (And Robert Herrick.) Gather the harvest today, tomorrow may never come.

 "...when it comes to death, all of us human beings live in a city without walls." Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey and the techno-optimistic transhumanists don't accept this, but if we ever did build those walls the city would soon be miserably overcrowded with inhabitants whose indefinitely-extended time would suddenly be devalued. Remember death, Montaigne advised after falling from his steed, but don't worry about it.

"...we are protected by pleasure but destroyed by pain." But pain is "readily discounted" by those who choose not to surrender to it but rather resist and re-frame. The pursuit of pleasure though, while it lasts, postpones our demise.

"The person who says that everything happens necessarily cannot criticize the person who says [the opposite]..." Because that too was necessitated. Better to avoid necessity altogether, admit the contingencies of life and circumstance, and just try to make good choices (and learn from our mistakes).

"We must laugh and philosophize and manage our households..." Or as David Hume said, be a philosopher but be still a (hu)man. 

"We must try to make the latter part of the journey better than the first... when we reach the end, we must keep an even keel and remain cheerful." The nectar, as John McDermott said, is in the journey. Enjoy it all, don't regret its end but recall it with gratitude. Appreciate and celebrate the whole trip.

"We must get out of the prison house of routine duties and politics." And politics. Everyone living and paying attention in 2019 must understand this. Routine duties are not intrinsically imprisoning, except when we allow them to prevent us from doing more meaningful things. That, by the way, is why I get up at 5 in the morning. (Like Trollope, among other famously early-rising writers... b'kings)

"...the false belief about the belly's having unlimited capacity." I only fall prey to that false belief when faced with a buffet spread like they had after the funeral the other day. And then its falsity soon is all too evident. Remember, next time: one or two bites of each of half a dozen desserts really ought to suffice, and might not exceed capacity. (A most practical bit of Epicurean wisdom, this!)

"Every man departs this life as though he had just been born." Time to leave already? But I just got here! (But then there are those who really expect to enter pearly gates and think they can't wait... or who've not managed to discount pain and can think of nothing but its cessation.)

"Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little." Like the best cliches, this familiar one is too true.

"The most important consequence of self-sufficiency is freedom." Freedom from dependency is probably over-rated, since we can't help depending on one another. But we're all wired, it seems, to crave the feeling of strength and confidence that comes of self-reliance. Better to aim at self-sufficiency while acknowledging the help of others along the way that makes it possible at all.

And before we close this book, let's remind ourselves one more time of the core principle of Epicurean happiness, Leading Doctrine #2: "Death means nothing to us, because that which has been broken down into atoms has no sensation and that which has no sensation is no concern of ours." But let's also recall the flip-side, implied throughout the Epicurean catalog: life is for the living.