Bravery Even to Live
An old man sits among boys at philosophy lectures and dares anyone to mock it. Keep learning how to live as long as you live. Next door the theatre is packed to argue who is a good flute-player. The school that asks what a good man is has almost no one. Reason is the human distinction; virtue is reason completed. Wealth, strength, beauty, honours live as easily in a bad man as in a good one. They are not goods. They take the colour of the hand that holds them. The fool calls every blow sudden. The wise man has already walked the chain, the exile, the wound, the death. He says: I knew it.
Key Insight
Adversity finds the untrained mind as a surprise and the trained mind as a scene it has already visited. You do not need to love the blow. You need to have spent some unthreatened hours on the question the theatre will not ask. Age is not a waiver. It is the last excuse for skipping the school.
“What is more foolish than refusing to learn, simply because one has not been learning for a long time?”Explore full theme analysis
