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By Root 1097 0

how an abyss yawns on either side of this tiny life, and these abysses make our stretch of life so tiny that the difference of years or decades loses all meaning. That’s not how Shaw wants it. Not a “brief candle,” he protests, but a splendid torch! We’ll leave them comparing candles; it is a game even good men take to when they are scared of the dark. What’s so bad about the threat of the dark, though? Neither Shaw nor Shakespeare must have ever been to high school or to a faculty meeting. They must never have tried to get home in the rain or had morning sickness. How could they have missed how slow life is? To those dogged by a nagging fear of death, it is like you are at a carnival with four lousy rides and a three-gag funhouse, playing rigged midway games, occasionally winning something and henceforth having to carry it around—and meanwhile, you spend a lot of time staring at the exit sign and worrying over eventually having to go home. Jeez, closing time is the least of your troubles.

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote this section, and really this whole book, as a way to develop an answer to Montaigne’s challenge to wisdom. What I have come to believe might best be explained by a porcine romp through history. We follow the pig. In 334 B.C.E., Pyrrho of Elis joined the court of Alexander the Great. (Aristotle had finished his eight years as Alexander’s teacher about a year earlier.) Pyrrho traveled with Alexander to India, where he studied with philosophers and ascetics. While at Alexander’s court Pyrrho also came in contact with various Greek philosophers. When he came back, he became the founder of a new and powerful school of thought, Skepticism. In his hands, the gist of it was that every argument has a counterargument and that our senses and our reason frequently lie to us. Others would make more epistemological arguments based on Pyrrho’s idea, but for him the point was that we should find Eastern calm in the realization that truth cannot be known. Once, when Pyrrho was at sea, a terrible storm tossed his ship around, and the passengers panicked and screamed. Pointing to a pig that was munching away on deck and looking at the waves without fear, Pyrrho told his fellow humans that the pig had the right idea. They all survived, and so did the story. Listen to Montaigne, almost two thousand years later:

But even if knowledge would actually do what they say, blunt and lessen the keenness of the misfortunes that pursue us, what does it do but what ignorance does much more purely and more evidently? The philosopher Pyrrho, incurring the peril of a great storm at sea, offered those who were with him nothing better to imitate than the assurance of a pig that was traveling with them, and that was looking at this tempest without fear. Philosophy, at the end of her precepts, sends us back to the examples of an athlete or a muleteer, in whom we ordinarily see much less feeling of death, pain, and other discomforts, and more firmness than knowledge ever supplied to any man who had not been born and prepared for it on his own by natural habit.6

Knowledge might be forgiven this failing if it were easy to acquire, but it demands supreme effort, over long periods of time, all the while promising consolation even as we can see, with our own eyes, that philosophers sometimes jump out of high windows, just like everybody else. They have meaningless weeping jags. We have heard of those who are rude to waiters, toady up to horrific political leaders, shove a chattering but innocent neighbor down the stairs, cultivate personal wretchedness, starve themselves to death, and allow their children to suffer deprivation and death. Some mock the poor and the worker, some have been racist, some have kept slaves, and most have been so vicious about women’s minds and abilities as to constitute a gross inner failure in themselves.7 Even the Buddha didn’t give women full access to fairyland. With Montaigne, I have to say, “Wisdom, my friend, I am not impressed.” Yet, the next thought must always be, “Ignorance, I am even less impressed; indeed,