“Eline Vere” by Louis Couperus (translated by Ina Rilke)

This novel, written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, details the milieu of aristocratic fin-de-siecle life in The Hague. The eponymous heroine is a tragic figure, but the story only barely revolves around her, as Couperus offers detailed tangential vignettes of various characters within her social circle. “Eline’s languorous, lymphatic disposition entailed the need of tender reassurance and warm affection, and her nerves, delicate as the petals of a flower, often suffered despite the plush comfort of her surroundings.” The days and nights of her youth were spent wiling away the hours on baubles and entertainments. “True to her dreamy and idealistic nature, Eline had a passion for the opera, not only because it gave her the opportunity to display her languorous elegance, not only because of the music and the chance to hear some celebrated chanteuse sing a particular aria, but also because of the exciting, highly romantic intrigues and melodramatic scenes of hatred and love and revenge. She did not mind the plots being predictable, nor did she aspire to find any truth in them.” Imperceptibly at first, her life would be transformed when her cousin Vincent returned to The Hague from years chasing his fortune abroad. “Once the money ran out, which would be soon, he would see his way to obtaining some more one way or another, and what was wrong with that? Notions of good and evil had no relevance in the real world, things just happened to be the way they were, as the inevitable result of a sequence of causes and effects, everything that was had a right to be; no one could alter that which was, or was to be; no one had free will.” Eline’s sister, Betsy, had married practically and was more rooted to mundane reality than her more sentimental sibling. “Betsy was renowned for her elegant little dinner parties, with never fewer than ten guests and never more than a dozen, and always served with the most munificent refinement. They belonged to a coterie whose members were frequently in company with one another on terms of close familiarity, a state of affairs that caused them considerable satisfaction.” Following the natural course of life, Eline was soon engaged to be married to a stable, if boring, man from her tight-knit circle. “Her Otto! Thinking of him she felt no need whatsoever to conjure up some idealised image of him; she thought of him as he was, manly and strong in his good-natured simplicity, with one single thought governing his mind: the thought of her. His love was so rich, so full, so all-encompassing. And hers was growing by the day she believed.” However, fate would intervene into her idyllic paradise. “Life was so full of sham and make-believe! She had always been someone who pretended, to herself as well as to everybody else, and she was still doing it—she could not do otherwise, so ingrained a habit had it become.” During a tete-a-tete, her uncle’s bohemian young wife, Eliza, would comment to Eline, “I dare say you have some dramatic story to tell, but then who hasn’t? A romantic story, perhaps? If so, I pity you, because you obviously made some foolish mistake…. You’re too sensitive. Altogether too emotional. What you need in life’s struggle is a good dose of indifference. You see, we have little choice: we happen to be among the living, and we must live our lives as best we can.”

“Man and Crisis” by Jose Ortega y Gasset (translated by Mildred Adams).

Gasset writes about the nature of man in the age of modernity and how he can never free himself from the chains of history. He begins, “Man cannot take a single step without anticipating more or less clearly his entire future, what he is going to be; that is, what he has decided to be throughout his life. But this means that man, who is always obliged to do something in the circumstances that surround him, has in deciding what he is going to do no other course than to pose to himself the problem of his own individual being…. For when each one of us asks himself what he is going to be, and therefore what his life is going to be, he has no choice but to face the problem of man’s being, of what it is that man in general can be and what is it that he must be.” Man cannot help but be embedded within the particular milieu in which he happens to be born. “Life is not solely man, that is to say, the subject which lives. It is also the drama which arises when the subject finds himself obliged to fling his arms about, to swim shipwrecked in that sea which is the world. History, then, is not primarily the psychology of man, but the refashioning of the structure of that drama which flares between man and the world.”

History is lived subjectively by each individual, but it is also experienced simultaneously and similarly by each age cohort within society. “Contemporaries are not coevals. In history it is important to distinguish between that which is contemporary and that which is coeval…. This is what I usually call the essential anachronism of history. Thanks to the internal disequilibrium, it moves, changes, wheels, and flows.” It matters if one experiences an historic event when a man is a baby, in the prime of his years, or in his dotage. Coevals live the same factual events in a more similar reality. Man cannot escape his age. “At any given moment man lives in a world of convictions, the greater part of which are the convictions common to all men who dwell together in their era. This spirit of the times we have called the world “in force,” the ruling world, in order to show that it has not only the reality which our conviction lends to it, but also that it imposes itself upon us, whether we like it or not, as the most important ingredient in our surroundings. Just as man finds himself encased within the body which has fallen to him by chance and must live in it and with it, so he finds himself with the ideas of his time, and in them and with them—even though it be in the peculiar fashion of contending against them—must he live.”

Gasset begins to tackle the problems embedded within the twin concepts of modernity and scientific knowledge. “Only theology and philosophy are creators of faith on their own account…. Life is different from the perspective of science. During the modern age, the two have been confused: this very confusion is the modern age. In it man makes science, pure reason, serve as a basis for the system of his convictions. He lives on science…. To confuse the perspective of science with the perspective of life has its inconveniences, that it creates a false perspective, just as did the acceptance of the religious, the theological, perspective as the vital perspective. We will see that life does not tolerate being supplanted either by revealed faith or by pure reason.” In modernity, man is seen through the lens of a scientific species, not as a living individual. “Human life is not more nor less real, it does not cease to have its own exclusive character merely because it happens to be illustrious or mediocre.”

Gasset contends that we have reached the epoch where modernity is gripped in crisis. “An historical crisis occurs when the world change which is produced consists in this: the world, the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation, gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions, and therefore without a world. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to do, for the reason that he returns to a state of actually not knowing what to think about the world…. One does not know what new thing to think—one only knows, or thinks he knows, that the traditional norms and ideas are false and inadmissible. One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is that there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones…. During periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common. Entire generations falsify themselves to themselves; that is to say, they wrap themselves up in artistic styles, in doctrines, in political movements which are insincere and which fill the lack of genuine convictions.” Man lives outside himself. “We have abandoned ourselves to other people and we live in a state of otherness, constantly deceiving and defrauding ourselves. We are afraid of our own life, which is synonymous with solitude, and we flee from it, from its genuine reality, from the effort it demands; we hide our own selves behind the selves of other people, we disguise ourselves behind society…. Culture is only the interpretation which man gives to his life, the series of more or less satisfactory solutions which he invents in order to handle his problems and the needs of his life.”

Modern man is lost in a sea of technical knowledge. He is so smart that he knows nothing. “The man who knows many things, the cultivated man, runs the risk of losing himself in the jungle of his own knowledge; and he ends up by not knowing what his own genuine knowledge is. We do not have to look very far; this is what happens to the modern average man. He has received so many thoughts that he does not know which of them are those that he actually thinks, those he believes; and he becomes used to living on pseudo-beliefs, on commonplaces which at times are most ingenious and most intellectual, but which falsify his own existence.” Crisis breeds this homogenization. “It is strange that all historical crises produce at the start an age of uniformity, in which everything has in it a little bit of everything, and nothing is boldly and solely something specific and definite.” Society sinks to the lowest common denominator. “The man who despairs of culture turns against it and declares its laws and its norms to be worn out and abolished. The mass man who in these days takes on the directing of life feels himself deeply flattered by this declaration, because culture which is, after all, an authentic imperative, weighs on him too heavily; and in that abolition of culture he sees a permit to kick up his heels, get out himself, and give himself over to a life of licentiousness.”

Man in crisis is always prone to conversion. “Given this mode of life characterized by instability, extremism, controversy, the sudden and complete shifts which are called conversion will be very frequent. Conversion is man’s change not from one idea to another, but from one definite point of view to its exact opposite: life suddenly seems to us turned upside down and inside out. That which yesterday we were burning at the stake we adore today…. Deny what you were up to this very moment and affirm your truth, recognize that you are lost. Out of this negation comes the new man who is to be constructed…. Metanoia, or conversion and repentance, is therefore none other than what I call ensimismamiento—withdrawal into one’s self, return to oneself.”

However, man can never escape from history, even modern man, despite his best attempts. “Man is never original man, the first to arrive on the scene, but always a successor, an inheritor, a son of the human past.” History, and therefore man, moves forward and back again in fits and starts. “The historic reality, the human destiny, advances dialectically, although that basic dialectic of life is not, as Hegel believed, a conceptual dialectic composed of pure reason, but the dialectic of a reason much broader, deeper, and richer than pure reason—the dialectic of life, of living reason.” This is not what modern man wishes to hear. “The modern believes that he can suppress realities and build the world to his liking in the name of an idea.”

“The Glance of Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Jozefina Komporaly)

This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”

Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”

Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”

In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”

Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”

“Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad” by Alice Oswald

This is a retelling of the Iliad cut to the bone by Oswald. She explains, “This translation presents the whole poem as a kind of cemetery.” Her poem begins, “The first to die was PROTESILAUS/ A focused man who hurried to darkness/ With forty black ships leaving the land behind/ Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs/ Where the grass gives growth to everything/ Pyrasus    Iton    Pteleus    Antron/ He died in mid-air jumping to be the first ashore… He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years” Throughout the poem, Oswald never sugarcoats the brutality of war. “Meanwhile Diomedes/ Seeing through everything to its inner emptiness/ Killed ECHEMMON killed CHROMIUS/ Tin-opened them out of their armour/ And took for himself their high-stepping horses” Frequently interspersed throughout the death roll, Oswald makes use of repetition through pastoral lyric. “Like an oak struck by lightening/ Throws up its arms and burns/ Terrifying for a man out walking/ To smell that sulfur smell/ And see the fields flickering ahead of him/ Lit up blue by the strangeness of god” A single line often conveys mood through simile. “With weapons cleaned and layed down like cutlery” At points, she abstracts from the particular deaths to pontificate on the nature of war. “Grief is black it is made of earth/ It gets into the cracks in the eyes/ It lodges its lump in the throat/ When a man sees his brother on the ground/ He goes mad he comes running out of nowhere” All the scenes depicting the battlefield of Ilium cast it as a cursed spot. “But this is it now this is the mud of Troy/ This is black wings coming down every evening/ Bird’s feathers on your face/ Unmaking you mouthful by mouthful/ Eating your eyes your open eyes/ Which your mother should have closed” In the constant refrain of death, the soldiers all are eventually cut down to size. “DOLOPS the strongest of Lampus/ Not believing he could die/ Even when his spear hit solid metal/ And banged back again/ Even when a man hacked off his helmet/ And he saw his own eye-holes/ Staring up at him from the ground/ It was not until the beak of death/ Pushed out through his own chest/ That he recognized the wings of darkness”

“Ethics” by Baruch Spinoza (translated by Samuel Shirley)

Spinoza’s treatise builds up a system of ethics from the most basic foundations. His method is to posit definitions, axioms, and propositions, and then validate them through proofs, scholiums, and corollaries. Spinoza begins with Part I, “Concerning God.” First, some definitions: “By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself…. By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence…. That thing is said to be free [liber] which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone.” Proposition 8 states: “Every substance is necessarily infinite.” Scholium 2 of that proposition expounds, in part: “Those who do not know the true causes of things confuse things…. So too, those who confuse the divine nature with human nature easily ascribe to God human emotions…. But if men were to attend to the nature of substance, they would not doubt at all the truth of Proposition 7…. For by substance they would understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the knowledge of which does not require the knowledge of any other thing.” Spinoza’s proofs are very detailed and build brick by brick from the ground up. The treatise also gets a little tedious at the start. Later, Spinoza states, “All things depend on the power of God. For things to be able to be otherwise than as they are, God’s will, too, would necessarily have to be different. But God’s will cannot be different (as we have just shown most clearly from the consideration of God’s perfection). Therefore, neither can things be different.” Proven.

Part II concerns “Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind.” Here Spinoza delves a bit into the nature of the will and its freedom. “If by intellect is meant clear and distinct ideas only, I grant that the will extends more widely than the intellect, but I deny that the will extends more widely than perceptions, that is, the faculty of conceiving…. Suspension of judgment is really a perception, not free will…. I grant that the imaginings of the mind, considered in themselves, involve no error (see Sch. Pr. 17, II). But I deny that a man makes no affirmation insofar as he has a perception…. The will is a universal term predicated of all ideas and signifying only what is common to all ideas, namely, affirmation, the adequate essence of which, insofar as it is thus conceived as an abstract term, must be in every single idea, and the same in all in this respect only…. There is nothing in ideas that constitutes the form of falsity…. It is important to note here how easily we are deceived when we confuse universals with particulars, and mental constructs [entia rationis] and abstract terms with real.” He concludes Part II by dealing with virtue, fortune, and contingency. “We clearly understand how far astray from the true estimation of virtue are those who, failing to understand that virtue itself and the service of God are happiness itself and utmost freedom, expect God to bestow on them highest rewards in return for their virtue and meritorious actions as if in return for the basest slavery…. [Virtue] teaches us what attitude we should adopt regarding fortune, or the things that are not in our power, that is, the things that do not follow from our nature; namely, to expect and to endure with patience both faces of fortune.”

Part III is titled “Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” Spinoza believes that the only three basic emotions are pleasure, pain, and desire. All the other emotions derive from these three. He begins with a definition, “By emotion [affectus] I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections.” He believes that the conatus, the tendency toward self-preservation and activity, is the most basic purpose of man. “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” For man, desire precedes the good. “We do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire it.” He states, “Pleasure is man’s transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection…. Pain is man’s transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection…. I say “transition,” for pleasure is not perfection itself. If a man were to be born with the perfection to which he passes, he would be in possession of it without the emotion of pleasure.”

Part IV deals with the topic, “Of Human Bondage, Or the Strength of the Emotions.” We are beginning to delve into Spinoza’s system of ethics proper. He feels that there is a tug between the reason of the mind and the base emotions. “I assign the term “bondage” to man’s lack of power to control and check the emotions. For a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but is subject to fortune, in whose power he so lies that he is often compelled, although he sees the better course, to pursue the worse.” Spinoza continues, “Desire is the very essence of man…. Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it therefore demands that every man should love himself, should seek his own advantage (I mean his real advantage), should aim at whatever really leads a man toward greater perfection, and, to sum it all up, that each man, as far as in him lies, should endeavor to preserve his own being…. Since virtue (Def. 8, IV) is nothing other than to act from the laws of one’s own nature, and since nobody endeavors to preserve his own being (Pr. 7, III) except from the laws of his own nature, it follows firstly that the basis of virtue is the very conatus to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in a man’s being able to preserve his own being. Secondly, it follows that virtue should be sought for its own sake, and that there is nothing preferable to it or more to our advantage, for the sake of which it should be sought.”

Next, Spinoza seeks to spell out the advantages of civil society between men. “Nothing is more advantageous to man than man. Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving their own being than that they should all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one mind and one body, and that all together should endeavor as best they can to preserve their own being, and that all together they should aim at the common advantage of all…. It follows that men are governed by reason, that is, men who aim at their own advantage under the guidance of reason, seek nothing for themselves that they would not desire for the rest of mankind; and so are just, faithful, and honorable…. Knowledge of good and evil is (Pr. 8, IV) the emotion of pleasure or pain insofar as we are conscious of it, and therefore every man (Pr, 28, III) necessarily seeks what he judges to be good and avoids what he judges to be evil. But this appetite is nothing other than man’s very essence or nature.”

Spinoza also deals with the concepts of natural rights and their diminution in society. “Every man exists by the sovereign natural right, and consequently by the sovereign natural right every man does what follows from the necessity of his nature…. In order that men may live in harmony and help one another, it is necessary for them to give up their natural right and to create a feeling of mutual confidence that they will refrain from any action that may be harmful to another…. Society can be established, provided that it claims for itself the right that every man has of avenging himself and deciding what is good and what is evil; and furthermore if it has the power to prescribe common rules of behavior and to pass laws to enforce them, not by reason, which is incapable of checking the emotions (Sch. Pr. 17, IV), but by threats…. Wrongdoing is therefore nothing other than disobedience, which is therefore punishable only by the right of the State…. In a state of nature nothing can be said to be just or unjust; this is so only in a civil state…. Justice and injustice, wrongdoing and merit, are extrinsic notions, not attributes that explicate the nature of the mind.”

Spinoza, nonetheless, next posits on right conduct, obeying proper reason. “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life.” He has a practical concept of dealing with the masses of the ignorant. “The free man who lives among ignorant people tries as far as he can to avoid receiving favors from them…. Every man judges what is good according to his own way of thinking (Sch. Pr. 39, III). Thus the ignorant man who has conferred a favor on someone will value it according to his own way of thinking…. To avoid both the hatred of the ignorant and the need to comply with their expectations, and so as to make reason his sole ruler, he will endeavor as far as he can to avoid their favors.” Spinoza is also practical in the application of courage. “For a free man timely retreat is as much a mark of courage as is fighting, the free man chooses flight by the same courage or spiritedness as he chooses battle.”

Finally, Spinoza returns to the idea of external fortune, contingency, and fate. “Human power is very limited and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes, and so we do not have absolute power to adapt to our purposes things external to us. However, we shall patiently bear whatever happens to us that is contrary to what is required by consideration of our own advantage, if we are conscious that we have done our duty and that our power was not extensive enough for us to have avoided the said things, and that we are a part of the whole of Nature whose order we follow…. We can desire nothing but that which must be, nor, in an absolute sense, can we find contentment in anything but truth.”

The final Part V of Spinoza’s treatise is titled, “Of the Power of the Intellect, Or of Human Freedom.” He advises following fixed rules in governing one’s day to day affairs. “The best course we can adopt, as long as we do not have perfect knowledge of our emotions, is to conceive a right method of living, or fixed rules of life, and to commit them to memory and continually apply them to particular situations that are frequently encountered in life, so that our casual thinking is thoroughly permeated by them and they are always ready to hand.” He ends with a last bit of healthy advice and an exultation, “If the road I have pointed out as leading to this goal seems very difficult, yet it can be found. Indeed, what is so rarely discovered is bound to be hard. For if salvation were ready to hand and could be discovered without great toil, how could it be that it is almost universally neglected? All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”