Topical Guide 94
Mark Dorset
Misery; Happiness; Author as God or Puppeteer
Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and, vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity. No one is so happy that he would not want to change his lot if he gives in to impatience. Such is the bittersweetness of human happiness. To him that enjoys it, it may seem full of delight, but he cannot prevent it slipping away when it will. It is evident, therefore, how miserable the happiness of human life is.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, (translated by V. E. Watts)
Now suppose someone could look down on the life of a man from a great height, . . . how many disasters would he see in store for it! Man’s birth is painful and sordid, his upbringing wearisome, his childhood fraught with dangers, and his youth hard-won with toil. Old age is a burden and death a harsh necessity; armies of disease close their ranks around him, misfortunes lie in wait, ill luck is always ready to attack. There’s nothing without its tinge of acute bitterness, quite apart from all the evil things man does to man, such as the infliction of poverty, imprisonment, slander, dishonor, torture, treachery, betrayal, insult, litigation, and fraud. . . . However, I am here, and with a mixture of ignorance and thoughtlessness, often with forgetfulness when things are bad, or sometimes hope of better things, with a sprinkling too of honeyed pleasures, I bring help in miseries like these. And I do so with such effect that men are reluctant to leave life even when their thread of destiny has run out and life has long been leaving them.
Folly, in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Praise of Folly (1509), translated by Betty Radice
The storm in the soul of Augusto ended in a terrible calm: he had resolved to kill himself. He wanted to put an end to that self which had been the cause of all his misery. But before carrying out his plan it occurred to him, like a drowning sailor who grasps at a straw, to come and talk it over with me, the author of this whole story.
[more to come on Wednesday, September 22, 2021]
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