A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (30 page)

As a consumer, I seem to have crossed some kind of great divide. It seems unlikely that, having crossed it, I will ever be able to return to the mindless consumerism that I once found to be so entertaining.

L
ET ME NOW DESCRIBE
a surprising side effect of the practice of Stoicism. As a Stoic, you will constantly be preparing yourself for hardship by, for example, engaging in negative visualization or voluntarily causing yourself discomfort. If hardship doesn’t follow, it is possible for a curious kind of disappointment to set in. You might find yourself wishing that your Stoicism would be put to the test so you can see whether you in fact possess the skills at hardship management that you have worked to acquire. You are, in other words, like a firefighter who has
practiced his firefighting skills for years but has never been called on to put out an actual fire or like a football player who, despite diligently practicing all season long, has never been put in a game.

Along these lines, the historian Paul Veyne has commented that if we attempt to practice Stoicism, “a calm life is actually disquieting because we are unaware of whether we would remain strong in the case of a tempest.”
⁷
Likewise, according to Seneca, when someone attempts to harm a wise man, he might actually welcome the attempt, since the injuries can’t hurt him but can help him: “So far … is he from shrinking from the buffetings of circumstances or of men, that he counts even injury profitable, for through it he finds a means of putting himself to the proof and makes trial of his virtue.”
⁸
Seneca also suggests that a Stoic might welcome death, inasmuch as it represents the ultimate test of his Stoicism.
⁹

Although I have not been practicing Stoicism for very long, I have discovered in myself a desire to have my Stoicism tested. I already mentioned my desire to be insulted: I want to see whether I will respond to insults in a Stoically appropriate manner. I have likewise gone out of my way to put myself into situations that test my courage and willpower, in part to see whether I can pass such tests. And while I was writing this book, an incident took place that gave me a deeper understanding of the Stoics’ desire to have their Stoicism tested.

The incident in question began when I noticed flashes of light along the periphery of my visual field whenever I blinked my eyes in a dark room. I went to my eye doctor and was informed that I had a torn retina and that, to prevent my retina
from detaching, I should undergo laser surgery. The nurse who prepared me for the surgery explained that the doctor would repeatedly zap my retina with a high-powered laser beam. She asked whether I had ever seen a light show and said that what I was about to witness was a spectacle far more splendid than that. The doctor then entered the room and started zapping me. The first pops of light were indeed intense and beautiful, but then something unexpected happened: I stopped seeing the bursts of light. I could still hear the laser popping but saw nothing. Indeed, when the laser was finally turned off, all I could see through the eye that had been operated on was a purple blob that covered my entire visual field. It occurred to me that something might have gone wrong during the surgery—perhaps the laser had malfunctioned—and that I might as a result now be blind in one eye.

This thought was unsettling, to be sure, but after having it, I detected in myself another, wholly unexpected thought: I found myself reflecting on how I would respond to being blind in one eye. In particular, would I be able to deal with it in proper Stoic fashion? I was, in other words, responding to the possible loss of sight in an eye by sizing up the Stoic test potential of such a loss! This response probably seems strange to you; it seemed and still seems strange to me as well. Nevertheless, this was my response, and in responding this way, I was apparently experiencing a predictable (and some would say perverse) side effect of the practice of Stoicism.

I informed the nurse that I could not see in the eye that had been operated on. She told me—at last! why didn’t she tell me before?—that this was normal and that my vision would come
back within an hour. It did, and as a result I was deprived—thankfully, I think—of this opportunity to have my Stoicism tested.

U
NLESS AN UNTIMELY DEATH
prevents it, I will, in about a decade, be confronted with a major test of my Stoicism. I will be in my mid-sixties; I will, in other words, be on the threshold of old age.

Throughout my life, I have sought role models, people who were in the next stage of life and who, I thought, were handling that stage successfully. On reaching my fifties, I started examining the seventy- and eighty-year-olds I knew in an attempt to find a role model. It was easy, I discovered, to find people in that age group who could serve as
negative
role models; my goal, I thought, should be to
avoid
ending up like them. Positive role models, however, proved to be in short supply.

When I went to the seventy- and eighty-year-olds I knew and asked for advice on dealing with the onset of old age, they had an annoying tendency to offer the same nugget of wisdom: “Don’t get old!” Barring the discovery of a “fountain of youth” drug, though, the only way I can act on this advice is to commit suicide. (It has subsequently occurred to me that this is precisely what they were advising me to do, albeit in an oblique manner. It has also occurred to me that their advice not to get old echoes Musonius’s observation that “he is blessed who dies not late but well.”)

It is possible that when I am in my seventies or eighties I will conclude, as the elderly people I know seem to have concluded, that nonexistence is preferable to old age. It is also possible, though, that many of those who find old age to be so burdensome have themselves to blame for their predicament:
They neglected, while young, to prepare for old age. Had they taken the time to properly prepare themselves—had they, in particular, started practicing Stoicism—it is conceivable that they would not have found old age to be burdensome; instead, they might have found it to be, as Seneca claimed, one of the most delightful stages of life, a stage that is “full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.”
¹⁰

W
HILE
I
WAS WRITING
this book, my eighty-eight-year-old mother had a stroke and was banished (by me, as it so happens) to a nursing home. The stroke so weakened the left side of her body that she was no longer able to get out of bed by herself. Not only that, but her ability to swallow was compromised, making it dangerous for her to eat regular foods and drink regular liquids, which might go down her windpipe and trigger a potentially fatal bout of pneumonia. The foods she was served had to be pureed, and the liquids she was given had to be thickened. (There is, I discovered, a whole line of thickened beverages that have been created for people with swallowing problems.)

Quite understandably, my mother was unhappy with the turn her life had taken, and I did my best to encourage her. Were I devoutly religious, I might have attempted to cheer her up by praying with her or for her, or by telling her that I had arranged for tens or even hundreds of people to pray on her behalf. As it was, though, I found that the best words of encouragement I had to offer had a distinctly Stoical ring to them. She would, for example, tell me how difficult her situation was, and I would quote Marcus: “Yes, they say that life is more like wrestling than like dancing.”

“That’s very true,” she would murmur in reply.

She would ask me what she had to do to be able to walk again. I thought it was unlikely that she would ever walk again but did not say as much. Instead, I encouraged her (without giving a lecture on Stoicism) to internalize her goals with respect to walking: “What you need to concentrate on is doing your very best when they give you physical therapy.”

She would complain about having lost most of the function of her left arm, and I would encourage her to engage in negative visualization: “At least you have the ability to speak,” I would remind her. “In the first days after the stroke, you could only mumble. Back then, you couldn’t even move your right arm and consequently couldn’t feed yourself, but now you can. Really, you have lots to be thankful for.”

She would listen to my reaction and, after a moment of reflection, she would usually respond affirmatively: “I suppose I do.” The exercise in negative visualization seemed to take the edge off her distress, if only temporarily.

Time after time during this period, I was struck by how natural and appropriate it is to invoke Stoic principles to help someone cope with the challenges of old age and ill health.

I
MENTIONED ABOVE
that the stroke made it dangerous for my mother to drink regular, unthickened water. Being denied water made her, quite naturally, start to crave it. She would ask me in a pleading voice for a glass of water, “not thick but from the sink.” I would refuse the request and explain why, but as soon as I finished my explanation, she would ask again, “Just
a glass of water. Please!” I found myself in the position of a loving son who was continually denying his elderly mother’s request for a simple glass of water.

After enduring my mother’s pleas for a time, I asked the nurse what to do. “Give her ice cubes to suck on,” she said. “The water in the ice will be released slowly, so there is little danger that she will aspirate it.”

As a result of this advice, I became my mother’s personal ice man, bringing a cup on each visit. (“The ice man cometh!” I would call out on arriving at her room.) I would pop a cube into her mouth, and she would, while sucking it, tell me how wonderful the ice was. My mother, who in her prime had been a connoisseur of fine food and drink, had now become a connoisseur of ice cubes. Something she had taken for granted her entire life—for her, an ice cube had merely been the thing you use to cool a beverage worth drinking—was now giving her intense pleasure. She clearly enjoyed this ice more than a gourmet would enjoy vintage champagne.

Watching her suck appreciatively on ice cubes, I felt a tinge of envy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to be able to derive this much pleasure from a simple ice cube? It is, I decided, unlikely that negative visualization alone would enable me to appreciate ice cubes as intensely as my mother does; unfortunately, it would probably take a stroke like hers to do the trick. Nevertheless, watching her suck on ice cubes has been quite instructive. It has made me cognizant of yet another thing that I take utterly for granted: my ability to gulp down a big glass of cold water on a hot summer day.

D
URING ONE VISIT
to my mother, I encountered the Ghost of Christmas Future. I was walking down the hall of the nursing home toward my mother’s room. Ahead of me was an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by an attendant. When I got close, the attendant got my attention and said, pointing to her charge, “This man is a professor, too.” (My mother, it turns out, had been telling everyone about me.)

I stopped and said hello to this fellow academic, who, it turned out, had retired some time before. We chatted for a while, but during our conversation I was haunted by the thought that in a few decades’ time I might have this conversation again, only then it would be me in the wheelchair and it would be some younger professor standing in front of me, taking a few moments out of his busy day to talk to an academic relic.

My time is coming, I told myself, and I must do what I can to prepare for it.

T
HE GOAL OF
S
TOICISM
, as we have seen, is the attainment of tranquility. Readers will naturally want to know whether my own practice of Stoicism has helped me attain this goal. It has not, alas, allowed me to attain perfect tranquility. It has, however, resulted in my being substantially more tranquil than was formerly the case.

In particular, I have made considerable progress in taming my negative emotions. I am less prone to anger than I used to be, and when I find myself venting my anger at others I am much more willing to apologize than was formerly the case. I am not only more tolerant of put-downs than I used to be
but have developed a near-complete immunity to garden-variety insults. I am also less anxious than I once was about the disasters that might befall me and in particular about my own death—although the real test for this, as Seneca says, will be when I am about to take my last breath.

Having said this, I should add that although I may have tamed my negative emotions, I have not eradicated them; nor is it likely that I ever will. I am nevertheless delighted to have deprived these emotions of some of the power they used to have over me.

One significant psychological change that has taken place since I started practicing Stoicism is that I experience far less dissatisfaction than I used to. Apparently as the result of practicing negative visualization, I have become quite appreciative of what I’ve got. There remains, to be sure, the question of whether I would continue to be appreciative if my circumstances changed dramatically; perhaps, without realizing it, I have come to cling to the things I appreciate, in which case I would be devastated to lose those things. I won’t know the answer to this question, of course, until my Stoicism is put to the test.

One other discovery I have made in my practice of Stoicism concerns joy. The joy the Stoics were interested in can best be described as a kind of objectless enjoyment—an enjoyment not of any particular thing but of
all this
. It is a delight in simply being able to participate in life. It is a profound realization that even though all this didn’t have to be possible, it
is
possible—wonderfully, magnificently possible.

For the record, my practice of Stoicism has not enabled me to experience unbroken joy; far from it. Nor have I experienced
the higher kind of joy that a Stoic sage might experience, a joy at the realization that his joy cannot be disrupted by external events. But my practice of Stoicism does seem to have made me susceptible to periodic outbursts of delight in
all this
.