Non-fiction Book of the Month: Travels with Epicurus
Read the first chapter of Daniel Klein‘s Travels with Epicurus – our non-fiction favourite for September.
Samos, 4th September 2009, by Pe-sa – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Epicurus grew up on another Aegean island, Samos, two hundred miles east of here, nearer to Anatolia, or Asia Minor. He was born in 341 BCE, only eighty years after Plato, but was little influenced by him. What Epicurus mainly had on his mind was the question of how to live the best possible life, especially considering that we only have one of them—Epicurus did not believe in an afterlife. This seems like the most fundamental philosophical question, the question of all questions. But students of the history of Western philosophy are often disheartened to find that as the centuries went on that question began to take a backseat to philosophical questions that were considered more pressing, like Martin Heidegger’s mind-blower that used to make me laugh out loud with incomprehension, “Why are there things that are rather than nothing?” and the epistemological problem, “How do we know what is real?” Epicurus certainly speculated about the nature of reality, but he did so fundamentally in service of his ultimate question, “How does one make the most of one’s life?” Not a bad question.
Epicurus’s answer, after many years of deep thought, was that the best possible life one could live is a happy one, a life filled with pleasure.
Epicurus’s answer, after many years of deep thought, was that the best possible life one could live is a happy one, a life filled with pleasure. At first look, this conclusion seems like a no-brainer, the sort of wisdom found in a horoscope. But Epicurus knew this was only a starting point because it raised the more troublesome and perplexing questions of what constitutes a happy life, which pleasures are truly gratifying and enduring, and which are fleeting and lead to pain, plus the monumental questions of why and how we often thwart ourselves from attaining happiness.
I have to admit that I experienced a pang of disillusionment when I first realized that Epicurus was not an epicurean, at least not in the way we currently use that term—that is, to mean a supreme sensualist with gourmet appetites. Let me put it this way: Epicurus preferred a bowl of plain boiled lentils to a plate of roasted pheasant infused with mastiha (a reduction painstakingly made from the sap of a nut tree), a delicacy slaves prepared for noblemen in ancient Greece. This was not the result of any democratic inclination but rather of Epicurus’s hankering for personal comfort, which clearly included comfort foods. The pheasant dish titillated the taste buds, but Epicurus was not a sensualist in that sense: he was not looking for dazzling sensory excitement. No, bring on those boiled lentils! For one thing, he took great pleasure in food he had grown himself—that was part of the gratification of eating the lentils. For another, he had a Zen-like attitude about his senses: if he fully engaged in tasting the lentils, he would experience all the subtle delights of their flavor, delights that rival those of more extravagantly spiced fare. And another of this dish’s virtues was that it was a snap to prepare. Epicurus was not into tedious, mindless work like, say, dripping mastiha onto a slow-roasting pheasant.
Some Athenians saw Epicurus and his ideas as a threat to social stability. A philosophy that set personal pleasure as life’s highest goal and that openly advocated self-interest could dissolve the glue they believed held the republic together: altruism. Epicurus’s brand of self-centeredness, they argued, did not make for good citizenship. But Epicurus and his followers could not have cared less what these detractors thought. For starters, Epicureans had little interest in the political process. Indeed they believed that to enjoy a truly gratifying life one should withdraw completely from the public sphere; society would function remarkably well if everyone simply adopted a live-and-let-live policy, with each man seeking his own happiness. This followed naturally from one of Epicurus’s basic tenets: “It is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.”
Epicurus was a man who lived his philosophy, and this entailed forming a protocommune, the Garden, on the outskirts of Athens, where he and a small and devoted group of friends lived simply, grew vegetables and fruit, ate together, and talked endlessly—mostly, of course, about Epicureanism. Anyone who wished to join them was welcome, as evidenced by the words inscribed on the Garden’s gate: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of that abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water also in abundance, with these words: ‘Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it.’”
Not exactly a gourmet menu, but the price was right and the company intriguing.
Remarkably, contrary to the prevailing mores of Greece in Epicurus’s era, women were well received in the Garden, where they were treated as equals in philosophical discussions. Even prostitutes were occasionally present at the table, feeding Athenian gossip that Epicurus and his followers were wanton hedonists. But this was clearly not the case: Epicureans much preferred tranquil pleasures to wild ones. The simple truth was that, unlike the other Hellenistic philosophies of that period, Epicureanism espoused and practiced a radical egalitarianism of both gender and social class.
Although most of Epicurus’s original manuscripts have now been lost or destroyed (it is believed that he wrote over three hundred books, yet only three letters and a few sets of aphorisms survive intact), his philosophy spread throughout Greece in his own time and later took Italy by storm, particularly when the Roman poet Lucretius set down the basic Epicurean principles in his magnum opus, The Nature of Things. In no small part, the perpetuation of Epicurus’s philosophy was due to his own foresight and pocketbook: in his last will he endowed a school to carry on his teachings.
On Old Age as the Pinnacle of Life
The idea of being an old man safe in the harbor buoys me up as I sit under Dimitri’s awning, pondering the best way to spend this stage of my life. It is the notion of being free from vacillating beliefs that gets to me. My understanding from Epicurus’s other teachings is that he also is referring to the young man’s vacillating pursuits, the ones that follow from his vacillating beliefs. Epicurus is pointing to what the Zen Buddhists call the emptiness of “striving,” and in our culture striving is the hallmark of someone still in his prime.
The same goes for those of us who embrace the “forever young” credo: we don’t give up setting ever new goals for ourselves, new ambitions to fulfill while we still can. Many forever youngsters are driven by the frustration of not having fully achieved the goals they dreamed of attaining when they were younger; they see their final years as a last chance to grab some elusive brass ring.
I became particularly aware of this phenomenon recently when the fiftieth-anniversary report of my university class arrived in the mail. One classmate, a highly successful lawyer and part-time theater and culture reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote: “Every day I think about what I haven’t done and get anxious. That I remain in relatively good health is a great blessing, but it’s also part of why I’m not sufficiently driven to finish the novels, plays, and nonfiction stewing in my head. . . . But there’s time, I hope. We all hope, don’t we?”
This man drew inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Morituri Salutamus,” the poem he wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of the class of 1825 of his alma mater, Bowdoin College. In the poem Longfellow urges his elderly classmates to keep busy, very busy.
Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his “Characters of Men.”
That “nothing is too late” refrain certainly is tempting. We septuagenarians just might be at the top of our game, our creative juices overflowing. Would Epicurus have us dam them up? Would he have sacrificed the classical masterpiece Oedipus Rex just so Sophocles could sit happily in the harbor? That sounds like a terrible waste.
Still, there is no rest for the striver. Just beyond the completion of each goal on our life-achievement “bucket list” looms another goal, and then another. Meanwhile, of course, the clock is ticking—quite loudly, in fact. We become breathless. And we have no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of our twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends or listening to music or musing about the story of our lives. And we will never get another chance for that.
It is not an easy decision.
On Freeing Ourselves from the Prison of Everyday Affairs
For me, it is Epicurus’s overall assessment of the qualities of a truly satisfying life that sheds the brightest sunshine on what a good old age might be. High on his list of the ways we thwart happiness is by binding ourselves to the constraints of the “commercial world.” Epicurus may have predated Harrods by a few millennia, but he already detected the commercial world’s uncanny ability to make us think we need stuff we don’t—and, as the world of commerce keeps chugging along, to need ever newer stuff. But when shopping for the latest thing—usually something we do not really need—Epicurus’s all-important life of tranquil pleasure is nowhere to be found. One of my favorite of Epicurus’s aphorisms is: “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
In Epicurus’s view, true happiness is a bargain, like, say, boiled lentils—or a yogurt dip.
In a serene old age, who really feels deprived if he can’t feast on slow-roasted pheasant or, for that matter, the poached salmon with truffles my wife and I dined on just before my departure for Greece? Go with the simple pleasures, Epicurus says. They are not only less expensive, they are less taxing on an old body.
In Epicurus’s view, true happiness is a bargain, like, say, boiled lentils—or a yogurt dip.Yet when Epicurus writes, “We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics,” he has more on his mind than just freeing ourselves from the endless acquisition of unnecessary stuff. It is the business of dedicating our lives to business that he is warning us against, starting with the obvious restraints of having a boss who tells us what to do, how to do it, and what is wrong with the way we are currently doing it. Even if one is the boss, as many of my “forever young” friends are, one’s freedom remains constrained by the politics of having to deal with other people; one still has to tell them what to do, to negotiate with and motivate them. One is still imprisoned. And freedom—Epicurus’s brand of radical existential freedom—is absolutely necessary for a happy life.
Forsaking the world of commerce—that is, giving up one’s day job—may have been all well and good in the Garden in 380 BCE (and I do have to wonder if a frequent guest at Epicurus’s table, the financier Idomeneus, didn’t pitch in to purchase the goods that couldn’t be grown in their communal vegetable patch, like the barrels of wine they were said to have consumed daily), but it feels like a tougher choice nowadays. In today’s terms, Epicurus would advocate a kind of sixties, getting-by-on-nothing lifestyle—one that, for better or for worse, few of us were willing to fully embrace to attain perfect freedom when we were younger.
Heaven knows, I tried. Back in the late sixties when the mantra of my former professor Timothy Leary, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” reverberated in the zeitgeist, I quit my job writing for television shows in New York and came for the first time to this very place, Hydra. Living on money I had saved, I did nothing for an entire year but sit in tavernas with locals and other dropouts, drink ouzo, chase after women, and stare off into the middle distance.
One morning, during this idyll, I was idling in the port when, astonishingly, a Harvard classmate suddenly appeared in front of me; he had just stepped off a yacht on a vacation cruise. I was deeply tanned, I had not had a haircut since my arrival on the island half a year earlier, and I was wearing well-worn clothes. The classmate was startled to find me in this place and in that condition and wanted to know what the hell I was doing here. “I’m taking my retirement early while I can still enjoy it,” I replied. It was meant to be wit but belied more defensiveness than I had realized I felt.
That long-ago year on Hydra was supremely enjoyable—I have no regrets about it—but truth to tell, I gradually became bored with myself. I yearned to get busy. I wanted to be engaged in the world. I wanted to make something of myself. And so I returned to the world of commerce, although my attraction to the Epicurean life never completely left me.
Now, sitting at Dimitri’s, I see that it is Tasso’s turn to skip a hand of prefa. He stands, cane in hand, and ambles to the seaward edge of the terrace, where he watches the ferry from Ermioni appear from behind Dokos, a stark, uninhabited, whale-shaped island that lies between here and the Peloponnese. This ferry is one of the last of the slow-moving vessels sailing here; for decades now the most popular boat has been a hydrofoil from Piraeus—a hermetic sardine can of a conveyance for getting hurriedly to a place where time slows to a standstill.
The creeping ferry from Ermioni reminds me of the two trains that circumnavigate the Peloponnese, one in each direction; these also move at a pace not much faster than a middle-aged jogger. At times these trains rattle on so leisurely that one could easily pick oranges from track-side trees through the windows. No doubt this speaks to the not-up-to-snuffness of rural Greek technology, but it also speaks wonderfully to the Greek predilection for focusing on the pleasures of the journey, rather than on the destination.
On one of my many returns to Greece, I rode these trains around the perimeter of the Peloponnese, with my wife and daughter. It was the year 2000, and Greece, after failing to qualify for entry into the euro as currency in 1999, was trying again. My wife, who is from Holland, surveyed the scene outside our window with a sardonic eye, spotting “inefficiencies” everywhere. “Look at them!” she would howl as we passed a group of five Greeks leisurely unloading a cartload of eggplants bucket-brigade style, several with cigarettes dangling from their lips. “These people aren’t serious about the euro!” Although she was smiling, she was at least half-serious; Holland, of course, is the world capital of Calvinism. My daughter and I soon assigned her the nickname “the euro inspector.”
One morning, after a magical few days in the northern Peloponnesian village of Diakofto, we made our way to the railway station to catch the train to Corinth. My rudimentary Greek qualified me as our tour leader; I bought the tickets and found us seats on the departing train, where I immediately spread out my limbs and drifted into a pleasant snooze. Minutes later I was awakened by my wife—we were going in the wrong direction! We had gotten on the train circling the Peloponnesian peninsula counterclockwise instead of the one circling it clockwise. My wife realized this when our train passed a bench holding the same three old men we had passed when we’d come from the other direction a few days before. “It’s as if they never moved,” she said. My whimsical daughter chimed in that we must be on a time-traveling train and were rolling back into the past. Indeed.
Was I from New York? Possibly Queens? Astoria? Oh, from Massachusetts? Did I know the Manikis family in Boston?
Clearly it was my responsibility to rectify the situation. I found the conductor seated at the front of our car, where he was drinking coffee from an espresso-size ceramic cup—I learned later that when he wanted more coffee he simply exchanged this cup for a full one proffered through the window by waiters from various railway station cafés along the way. I wished the conductor a good morning, and he immediately urged me to sit down across from him, begging my pardon for not being able to offer me some coffee. I told him about my train mix-up. He laughed and said in English, “It happens all the time. You only had a fifty-fifty chance of getting on the right one.”
But for the next few minutes that subject had to wait for more significant matters: Was I from New York? Possibly Queens? Astoria? Oh, from Massachusetts? Did I know the Manikis family in Boston? They came from the same village as his wife. During this genial schmooze, I kept my eyes averted from my wife’s urgent stare. After the conductor and I finally came to a satisfactory resolution of our round of Greek American demography—I did know George Genaris in Lenox, Massachusetts, whose grand-father hailed from Patras—the conductor picked up a radiotelephone the size of a wooden shoe, pressed some buttons, and spoke a few words in rapid dialect that I suspect would have been as unintelligible to a native Athenian as it was to me. Smiling, he then instructed me to get my family and luggage prepared to disembark. We did as told.
Several minutes later, our train came to a gentle stop beside an apricot grove. We now saw that the train coming from the opposite direction had also stopped here. The passengers from that train had stepped outside and were lounging among the apricot trees. Someone among them had produced a jug of a yogurt drink that was being passed around, some were smoking cigarettes, a few had picked ripe apricots and were munching on them, and all were chatting amiably. Our conductor saluted his counterpart, gestured toward us, and bade us a warm farewell.
And then we realized what had just happened: hearing of our plight, the engineer of the oncoming train had brought it to a halt, and his passengers, apparently without complaint—indeed seeming to take pleasure in this unexpected intermission—had disembarked to wait for us. Personal schedules, if there had been any, evaporated. This train was definitely not going to be running on time. Talk about inefficiency! This would never happen in Holland.
My daughter and I turned to the “euro inspector” and laughed so hard we could barely walk across the tracks.
Recalling this episode now, I am convinced I have come to the right part of the world to meditate on the best way to live my old age.
Epicureanism as a Living Philosophy Today
Unsurprisingly, Epicurus’s laid-back legacy survives more thoroughly in Greece’s rural areas than in its cities. Aegean islanders like to tell a joke about a prosperous Greek American who visits one of the islands on vacation. Out on a walk, the affluent Greek American comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old man who the trees belong to.
“They’re mine,” the Greek replies.
“Don’t you gather the olives?” the American asks.
“I just pick one when I want one,” the old man says. “But don’t you realize that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? In America everybody is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a damned good price for it.”
“What would I do with the money?” the old Greek asks.
“Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you.”
“And then what would I do?”
“You could do anything you want!”
“You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?”
On the Trickle-Down Effect of Philosophical Ideas
Would it be naive to imagine that a philosopher from the third century BCE inspired a random group of contemporary Greeks to uncomplainingly accept—even enjoy—an unscheduled interlude in an apricot grove? I don’t think so.
To begin with, back in Epicurus’s time, and the periods immediately before and after it, the ideas of philosophers, poets, and playwrights reached far beyond the Garden’s dining table or the steps of the Acropolis or the Theater of Dionysus and into ordinary Athenians’ everyday conversations. By all accounts, this was a civilization that liked to talk and made the time to do so. Later forms of communication, like the frequently one-way media of our era, did not yet offer competition to daily dialogue. Attending a performance at the Dionysus amphitheater was often an all-day affair in which the audience was cast in the role of a jury that deliberated on which character’s actions and viewpoint was most worthy. After-theater discussions about justice, proper conduct, and human frailties could get hot and heady. These people were talking about ideas.
The Athenian populace also talked about philosophers’ ideas. And because Epicurus welcomed men and women of all social classes—even slaves—at his ongoing symposia, his ideas flowed freely into the general public. This flow was undoubtedly assisted by the fact that, like all talky societies, ancient Athens thrived on gossip; the Athenians even had a goddess of rumor and gossip, Ossa. Epicurus’s garden, what with its prostitutes and washerwomen at the table, was often a subject of general gossip, and whatever its indignities, gossip can be a powerful vehicle for new and interesting ideas.
Epicurus’s ideas about the best way to live resonated for many Athenians. These ideas offered them new ways to see themselves and their personal options: “Hmm, if that fellow Epicurus is right, and the ultimate purpose of life is to maximize life’s pleasures and not, say, to earn enough money to commission a statue of myself so I will be immortalized in marble, then maybe I should cut back on my job painting maidens on vases and spend more time just hanging out and appreciating life.” All right, maybe I got a little carried away with my vase-painter fantasy, but something very much like it appears to have happened all around old Athens.
Ultimately, his ideas became a living, conscious philosophy of life that has endured through the ages along with the Greeks’ naturally evolved predispositions.
Of course, this does not tell us if Epicurus’s philosophy has actually endured in Greek culture over the millennia. The relatively new discipline of sociobiology would argue that Greek DNA is the root cause for the sunniness of those Peloponnesians unexpectedly and happily detained in that apricot grove. Expanding on Darwinian theory, sociobiology contends that, in addition to physical characteristics, psychological and social characteristics evolve through natural selection in a particular geographical environment and climate. A frequently cited example of how sociobiology functions in the animal kingdom is the “altruism” practiced by specific members of various species, including the leaf-cutter ant and the vampire bat. These particular members behave in ways that benefit others in their extended families while not directly benefiting the individuals who make the generous sacrifices themselves. In the end, the entire species is better able to survive as a result of this behavior; thus the “altruistic” genes get passed down through the generations.
Furthermore, similar species that do not have altruistic members sometimes die out because of their absence.
A sociobiologist, then, might hypothesize that in Greece’s rocky terrain, and under its hot sun, early Greeks who became extremely anxious due to an unanticipated turn of events were more likely to die from stress-related illnesses before they could reproduce than more carefree Greeks; therefore the more carefree, stress-resistant Greeks—and their DNA—were naturally selected. I suppose that hypothesis is within the realm of possibility. In any event, sociobiologists basically would say it is more likely that those Peloponnesian travelers happily accepted their unexpected interlude in that apricot grove as a result of genetics than because of some philosophical tradition that was handed down to them through hundreds of generations.
But perhaps both explanations are true: maybe a disposition toward a carefree outlook and day-to-day gratefulness naturally evolved in Greek DNA and Epicurus analyzed that natural disposition and rendered it in discrete and coherent ideas. Ultimately, his ideas became a living, conscious philosophy of life that has endured through the ages along with the Greeks’ naturally evolved predispositions. And one thing about a conscious philosophy is that it allows people to consciously deliberate about their options: “I suppose I could complain to the engineer that this unscheduled stop in the apricot grove will make me late for dinner, but wouldn’t it better reflect my true values if I simply enjoyed to the fullest this surprising little respite?”
This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it. That is what I am up to, sitting here with my book on Epicurean philosophy in front of me: deliberating about my options for a good old age. There is nothing I can do about my DNA, but perhaps Epicurus and other philosophers can help me sort out the choices I need to make.
On Choosing an Epicurean Life in Old Age
Opting for Epicurean freedom in old age makes terrific sense to me. The timing is perfect because this kind of freedom is available to many of us past the age of sixty-five without our having to pitch a lean-to in the woods or take up residence in a commune—although, come to think of it, living on a commune as an old person might be just the ticket. In any event, Epicurean freedom in old age might be an excellent choice for people debating the “forever young” option; by and large we are people with retirement resources, even if those funds may be insufficient for gourmet meals or even, possibly, for the homes in which we have lived during our productive years. Epicurus would have us scale down and taste the sweetness of this freedom.
Freed from “the prison of everyday affairs and politics,” an old man needs only to answer to himself. He does not need to stick to a strict schedule or compromise his whims to sustain his life. He can, for example, sit for hours on end in the company of his friends, occasionally pausing to sniff the fragrance of a sprig of wild lavender.
On the Pleasures of Companionship in Old Age
Perhaps without fully realizing it, a good portion of the pleasure Tasso finds at his table at Dimitri’s is that he is enjoying his companions without wanting anything from them. His tablemates are a retired fisherman, a retired teacher, and a retired waiter—all born and raised on the island—while Tasso is a former Athenian judge, who as a young man studied law in Thessaloníki and London. But this has little, if any, bearing on his relationship with his three friends.
Wanting nothing from one’s friends is fundamentally different from the orientation of a person who is still immersed in professional life and its relationships. An individual in commerce, whatever that commerce may be, is in service of a goal that has little or nothing to do with genuine friendship. A boss gives instructions because she wants results, and an employee follows her instructions for the same reason, one of those desired results being his paycheck. No matter how many management manuals propose treating employees and colleagues as genuine individuals, the underlying fact remains that a commercial situation is always inherently political. On the job, our colleagues are first and foremost means to an end, and so are we. So it always was. Epicurus understood this when he cautioned us about the perils of commerce and politics.
In Kantian ethics, we are specifically advised never to treat another human being as a means but always as an end in himself. In his monumental Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant concluded that an abstract and absolute principle for all ethical behavior was required as the touchstone for all particular moral choices. The principle he deduced was his Golden Rule– like supreme categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Thus Kant believed that in following this imperative no man would choose to treat another man as a means to an end; he could not rationally will that such behavior become universal law, in large part because then he too would be treated as a means by others.
Treating someone as an end rather than as a means turns out to be as much a treat for us as for the person to whom we are relating. Tasso does not want anything from his friend the fisherman except his company. He does not want him to tighten up his summary of a case before the court, as he frequently desired a lawyer to do during his days on the bench. Tasso feels no need to manipulate, exploit, or in any way maneuver his fisherman-companion to do anything. No, Tasso simply wants his friend to be with him. He wants him to share conversation, laughter, a hand of prefa, and, perhaps most important, to share the silence when they both gaze out at the sea. Epicureans consider communal silence a hallmark of true friendship.
For old people with the world of “everyday affairs and politics” behind them, this kind of camaraderie is the greatest gift. It is a gift that rarely, if ever, is fully available to the forever youngsters still immersed in their careers.
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Companionship was at the top of Epicurus’s list of life’s pleasures. He wrote, “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
It may come as a shock to the well-heeled members of the New England Epicurean Society, an exclusive dining club that favors caviar and oysters at its black-tie dinners, but Epicurus believed that choosing with whom one eats dinner is far more significant than choosing what the menu should be. “Before you eat or drink anything, carefully consider with whom you eat or drink rather than what you eat or drink, because eating without a friend is the life of the lion or the wolf.”
By the joys of friendship, Epicurus meant a full range of human interactions ranging from intimate and often philosophical discussions with his dearest companions— the kind he enjoyed at the long dining table in the Garden—to impromptu exchanges with people, known and unknown, in the street. The education or social status of those with whom he conversed mattered not a whit; in fact the height of true friendship was to be accepted and loved for who one was, not what station in life one had achieved. Loving and being loved affirmed one’s sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane.
If this prescription for happiness sounds like the drivel of popular songs (in my youth, Nat King Cole’s hit-parade rendition of “Nature Boy” concluded, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”), so be it. It may still happen to be true. The philosopher from Samos was certainly convinced it was true. And there is no doubting friendship’s unique availability in the years when politics and commerce are behind us.
My lifelong friend and frequent cowriter, Tom Cathcart, and I have always gotten a big kick out of striking up conversations with strangers we meet on trains and planes, in bookstores, on neighboring park benches. Tom has a particular talent for drawing personal stories from these people, and we both love hearing them. But far more valuable to us than the entertainment of the stories is the connection made with another human being. It is a comfort like no other. It is the comfort of personal communion. Now that Tom and I are old men and look it—we are both balding, with gray beards—we find that making these impromptu connections happens more easily. It took us a while to figure out why this was so, and when we did, we had a good laugh: old guys are unthreatening. We don’t look like we are up to no good, for the simple reason that we don’t look like we are capable of inflicting any no-goodness—well, other than being seriously boring. It was a bittersweet moment when we realized that none of the women with whom we initiated conversations suspected for a minute that we were coming on to them. Heartbreaking to admit, but they were right.
On the Comfort of Commiseration in Old Age
At Tasso’s table, the retired teacher has asked to skip the next hand of cards. He needs to pee, the third time in the past hour. It’s his damned prostate gland, he moans. His companions tease him. The fisherman says his friend’s prostate is so big he could use it for bait to catch a shark. The teacher stalks off to the toilet, grumbling, and I am reminded of Montaigne’s recommendation to vigorously gripe about illnesses.
Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist, was well acquainted with Epicurus’s ideas. Recapping the Greek philosopher’s pleasure calculus, he wrote, “And with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.” Like Epicurus, Montaigne was convinced that friendship, and the good conversation that comes with it, was the greatest pleasure available to us. In his essay “Of Vanity,” the French philosopher wrote: “I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other.”
Montaigne wrote at length about old age and, in one piece, he suggests that complaining to friends about the infirmities of old age is the best medicine: “If the body find itself relieved by complaining, let it complain; if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will.”
Thus Montaigne insists that if we don’t let it all hang out in front of our friends, we are cheating ourselves out of one of an old person’s best palliatives—all in the name of some kind of dumb propriety. These days, in some circles of old folks, this recapitulation of complaints is known as “the organ recital,” and, God knows, it does “divert (the) torments,” at least for a bit.
On Facing Death Blissfully
The sun has begun its descent, appearing to enlarge as it nears the horizon and to dim as its rays gradually become eclipsed by our planet. Its refracted beams cast a pale, rose-colored glow onto the water, and all four men at Tasso’s table suspend their conversation to watch daylight’s finale.
Epicurus was not afraid of death. He famously said, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. The absence of life is not evil; death is no more alarming than the nothingness before birth.”
Later philosophers, especially Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, took exception to Epicurus’s dictum, finding it simplistic. After all “when we are” we are still conscious of the fact that in the future we will no longer be, and that makes one hell of a difference. In fact, according to Kierkegaard, it is enough to strike someone, young or old, with “fear and trembling.”
Although all the men at Tasso’s table are at least nominally Greek Orthodox Christians, a religion that promises a beatific afterlife to the godly, my guess is that, like most mortals, they are not entirely immune to this terror. Nonetheless they would recognize the comfort in Epicurus’s dying words to his friend Idomeneus: “On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury (bladder spasms) and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.”
Taken from Travels with Epicurus, by Daniel Klein
