Success comes to the common man, and even to commonplace ability; but to triumph over the calamities and terrors of mortal life is the part of a great man only.  Truly, to be always happy and to pass through life without a mental pang is to be ignorant of one half of nature.  You are a great man; but how do I know it if Fortune gives you no opportunity of showing your worth?

Seneca, De Providentia

[P]leasure is nether the cause not the reward of virtue, but its by-product, and we do not accept virtue because she delights us, but if we accept her, she also delights us.  The highest good lies in the very choice in it, and the very attitude of a mind made perfect, and when the mind has completed its course and fortified itself within its own bounds, the highest good has now been perfected, and nothing further is desired; for there can no more be anything outside of the whole than there can be some point beyond the end.  Therefore you blunder when you ask what it is that makes me seek virtue; you are looking for something beyond the supreme.  Do you ask what it is that I seek in virtue?  Only herself.  For she offers nothing better—she herself is her own reward.  Or does this seem to you too small a thing?  When I say to you ‘The highest good is the inflexibility of an unyielding mind, its foresight, its sublimity, its soundness, its freedom, its harmony, its beauty,’ do you require of me something still greater to which these blessings may be ascribed?

Seneca, De Vita Beata

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

[W]e are not trying to find cures for new evils—but this first of all: namely, to see clearly for yourself what is necessary and what is superfluous.  What is necessary will meet you everywhere; what is superfluous has always to be hunted out—and with great endeavour.

Seneca, Epistulae, CX

Your greatest difficulty is with yourself; for you are your own stumbling-block.

Seneca, Epistulae, XXI

Letter for Gilgamesh

This is a poem I wrote in 2001 for a good friend whose mother passed away earlier that year.  There is a reason I chose Gilgamesh as the trope for the poem, but I won’t go into those personal details here.  Essentially it is a poem about undergoing a time of inconsolable grief. 

~ ~ ~

LETTER FOR GILGAMESH 

For DGB

          The ghost of Enkidu issued from the darkness like a dream.
          They tried to embrace, to kiss one another.
          They traded words, groaning at one another.
          ~ The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XII, column 3
 

my friend
I was once a wild body
I left you the earth to drift over
ghostlike with parched lips 
Enkidu

I gave you new eyes to search
for stillborn truths in exotic places
brought you new feet already used up
cracked and weary of dust
a new tongue that could ask only
questions without answers
I gave you new hands good for nothing

across this strange distance
I would like to console you
with a futile embrace
tell you there is more than this
homelessness of death 
you who have already become homeless

I would have furious heart wrestle
with furious heart shake you alive again
and again with laughter 
I would return you your own bright eyes
your feet and hands and uproot your tongue
from this song that has transformed you
into an insatiable demi-god
that you might make more
modest demands of the earth
oblivious to its sorry limits

and this wisdom I would carve
onto a stone tablet to hurl from my sleep
back to you languishing
in your useless city 
I would write you this letter
old friend I would

                          Iosue Stoicus, 2001

Have your own say

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Gratias vobis,
Iosue Stoicus

No definitive days

One is never happy once and for all and never unhappy once and for all.  As long as one lives, there is no fixity.  We know no definitive days.  Melancholy has no more than a partial basis in reality, and the same is true of joy.

Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

There is no such thing as good or bad fortune for the individual; we live in common.  And no one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of how own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. 

Seneca, Epistulae, XLVIII

Never can virtue be extinguished so entirely as not to leave any trace.

Seneca, De Beneficiis, book VII

Since, then, our infelicities are so numerous, what should be our view but, with an unavoidable perception of misfortune, and a tranquil acquiescence under it, to keep ourselves from the most ignominious degradation of humanity—a lazy importunity of petition to the gods that this or the other event may not befall us—a conduct not less irrational than if an unsheltered traveler in the rain should pray to escape every single drop which was falling on him!

Dio Chrysostom, Orations

Sunday poem: Conrad Aiken

We do not know we do not remember
we shall not know we shall not remember
a single flower
you will not remember the shape of a single mouth

this that first touched you
                         and with a heaven of light
this that last touched you
                         when touch was no longer known
this that you first touched
                         broken flower bruised mouth
this that you last touched
                         the all-symbolizing wall

you do not know do not remember
you shall not know shall not remember
a single leaf
you will not remember the shape of a single word.

                             Conrad Aiken, Poem LXV,
                             from Time in the Rock