The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [23]
How about taking what is yours in the sense of things, power, and accolades? If you are born wealthy, the Buddha advises that you walk away from the money, just as Jesus advised that you give the money away. Both think you will be much better off without it. Most philosophers don’t agree. Most philosophers instead propose that your role is to learn how to take up the ideal version of the role—in this case, the role of a wealthy life: to help others, but also to enjoy your wealth with elegance and grace. Ecclesiastes says there is no reason to envy the rich, because the troubles equal the benefits, but that if you are rich, delight in its pleasures. Marcus Aurelius wrote that this is the task: “With all your soul to do justice and to say the truth. What remains except to enjoy life by joining one good thing to another so as not to leave even the smallest intervals between?”1 Isn’t that great? The first part gives us our complete list of responsibilities in life. As long as you are doing that, be as happy as you can, even if that is very, very happy. Constant happiness cannot be achieved; he knew it as we all know it, but he did not argue against trying. According to Aurelius, if you find yourself in a position to join one good thing to another, you do not have to purposefully allow intervals of sadness, nor feel guilt, nor imagine some balancing portent of doom.
Aurelius says that one reason it doesn’t matter how long you live is that this is not theater, that the whole is not the thing. Each moment is the thing. “The soul obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as…in a play…where the whole action is incomplete if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it may be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, ‘I have what is my own.’”2 There is important “forget death” stuff in this, but I am here highlighting the connected idea of allowing yourself to live. Let the length of life be of less concern, and look to being able to say, “in every part” of the life you have led, “I have what is my own.” By the way, we think of Stafford as dying pitifully young, and Aurelius as living to a ripe old age (the white-haired Richard Harris played him in the 2000 film Gladiator), but in fact Aurelius died younger than she, on a military campaign. She was sixty-three, he fifty-nine. The low numbers remind us of the benefits of caution, but note also the ideals that they promoted in their lives. The last chapter of the Meditations begins thus: “All those things at which you wish to arrive by a circuitous road, you can have now, if you do not refuse them to yourself.”
What if we take what is not ours? Consider that model of ancient heroic grandeur Alcibiades. The general was so handsome, charming, and cunning that he was forgiven for betrayal of his nation more than once, conned several kings out of empires, and talked whole armies into submission. His army once tried to sack a town but came too early, before his reinforcement armies were ready. When his unlucky group broke into the town’s gates, the town’s army had been forewarned, and encircled them with the intent to slaughter. Alcibiades shouted to them to lay down their weapons for they had been conquered by the Greek army. Surprised but impressed, they accepted his claim, or in any case put off killing him so long that reinforcements eventually arrived.3 He did all this with sheer personal authority and, everyone says, a riveting handsomeness.
So