Join the Authorial Rabbit in considering wise words from all species.
To kick off — which is an important gesture in lepus circles, literal circles too — consider the AR’s epigraphic allusion on his home page, his burrow door:
λάθε βιώσας
This is the ancient Greek of Epicurus’ admonition to “Live in obscurity.” The philosopher was born in 341 B.C. on the island of Samos of Athenian parents.
The AR lives contentedly in obscurity. Epicurus held that striving for fame and success is not conducive to happiness. Finding the way to happiness was his goal and he advocated a simple life of appreciating sensual pleasures in moderation and avoiding actions that caused pain, including becoming a politician at the expense of one’s principles. Trying to escape the fact of death was another needless cause of pain.
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Not to be upset when one’s merits are ignored: is this not the mark of a gentleman?
(Confucious, from The Analects of Confucious, as translated by Simon Leys)
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For a long time I had to fight against a feeling of aversion for my country; now I am beginning to accustom myself to all the horrors that make up the human condition… Fortunately, there is one salvation: morality, the world of the arts, poetry and human relations. There, nobody bothers me, policeman or town councilor. I am alone. Outside the wind howls, outside all is mud and cold; I am here, I play Beethoven and shed tears of tenderness; or I read the Iliad, or I create my own men and women and live with them, covering sheets of paper…
(Leo Tolstoy)
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This brings me back to moral goodness. It may be held to fall into three subdivisions. The first is the ability to distinguish the truth from falsity, and to understand the relationships between one phenomenon and another and the causes and consequences of each one. The second category is the ability to restrain the passions (pathe in Greek) and to make the appetites (hormai) amenable to reason. The third, which is relevant here, is the capacity to behave considerately and understandingly in our associations with other people. By doing so we secure their cooperation; and that is how we shall guarantee ourselves a generous sufficiency of all our natural wants. The adoption of this cooperative attitude will also make it possible for us to ward off any danger that may impend . . . .
(Cicero in On Duties II, translated by Michael Grant)
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Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
(E. M. Forster in Howards End)
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This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can’t help hoping . . . .
(Forster, Howards End)
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Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in his 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses: “The Fascist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: the reason of unreason.”
(I thank Times-Colonist columnist Geoff Johnson for this quotation)
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More to come
J. B. Thompson 