This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.
Paul Desmond (1924-1977), quoted in Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…
Not inspirational, for a change, but simply delicious word-play. To quote the passage in Pinker’s fascinating book, it is “the musician Paul Desmond’s comment on women who marry for money rather than romance.”
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Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari (4th or 5th century AD)
Obviously, this is a horribly pertinent hindsight for the UK and western Europe right now, but it’s also very relevant for we sovereign professionals. If you want a peaceful life and career, you need to make preparation for hard times and adversity: savings, of course, but also mental resilience, tenacity, a warm network of contacts, alternative – if less lucrative – sources of income.
Para bellum.
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If you can bear to…
…watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
Rudyard Kipling, If— (1910)
This is another quote that comes via the Daily Stoic newsletter. We all recognise the opening lines of Kipling’s famous verse: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” but I don’t think I’d ever paid attention to these lines from the second verse.
Resilience, grit and small-s stoicism.
The full poem is worth revisiting here. A bit Victorian perhaps, but none the worse for that.
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For a long time, I have told my discouraged patients and have repeated to myself, “Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.”
Paul Dubois, Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, pp. 235-236 (1909)
I came across this is an excellent, recent essay by Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Tin-Can Monster.
Image: http://www.neuro-bern.ch/cms/index.php?id=238&L=0, PD-alt-100, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5710620
Firstly, a huge hat-tip to Rob Firchau at The Hammock Papers for this delicious rabbit hole.
Rob quotes part of a letter from Chekhov to his older, artist (and dissolute) brother in which he upbraids him on his behaviour. It includes the Latin, veritas magis amicitiae, from which my pitiful command of the language extracted “truth” and “friend(ship?)” and maybe possibly “magic” … which seemed unlikely.
Therefore, from the first chamber of the burrow, I can report the phrase comes from “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas” which, attributed to Aristotle, literally means, “Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater/better friend.” Effectively, truth is greater, or more important, than friendship.
Deeper down the rabbit hole (over at The Marginalian, which I hadn’t visited in ages), I find a fuller rendering of Chekhov’s letter where he lists the eight qualities of “cultured” or decent people. Check them out in full, well worth reading, but in summary:
Signing off, Chekhov tells his brother, “You must drop your vanity, you are not a child.”
Simplicity in planning fosters energy in execution. Strong determination in carrying through a simple idea is the surest route to success.
Attributed to General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
I’m disappointed to learn that, like so many elegantly formed aphorisms, there is no record of von Clausewitz actually saying this. The nearest I can find is from his classic text, On War (Book 1, chapter 7):
“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War, Suppose now a traveller, who towards evening expects to accomplish the two stages at the end of his day’s journey, four or five leagues, with post-horses, on the high road—it is nothing. He arrives now at the last station but one, finds no horses, or very bad ones; then a hilly country, bad roads; it is a dark night, and he is glad when, after a great deal of trouble, he reaches the next station, and finds there some miserable accommodation. So in War, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark. A powerful iron will overcomes this friction; it crushes the obstacles, but certainly the machine along with them. We shall often meet with this result. Like an obelisk towards which the principal streets of a town converge, the strong will of a proud spirit stands prominent and commanding in the middle of the Art of War.”
Image: By Wilhelm Wach – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=695673
I declare that Athens is the school of Greece. Moreover, I declare that each and every one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of his life, can be truly called the rightful lord of his own person and to act in this way, moreover, with unsurpassed quality and grace.
It comes from Rex Warner’s translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars.
When I think about what “sovereign professional” really means, it’s this: being and acting as the rightful lord of our own person. Yes, that’s about freelancers and independents of all flavours, but it’s also about every individual however employed.
It’s a powerful and informative post, but it also draws on an older post from Steven that covers the oration in greater detail, here.
Both are worth reading and also, if you didn’t know, Steven has written extensively on the war between Athens and Sparta (as well as on Alexander the Great). If you only know his War of Art, you should definitely check out his historical novels. Gates of Fire, about the battle of Thermopylae, is required reading at West Point and Annapolis and for all officers in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Image: By Copy after Kresilas – Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2497199
“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”
Gustave Flaubert, letter to Madame Roger des Genettes, from The Letters 1830-1880
Such an evocative sentence.
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“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Attributed to W. Edwards Deming (but incorrectly, it would seem).
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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, letter to Marcus Terentius Varro
Varro, I learn, was Rome’s leading expert on gardens and agriculture at the time and the literal translation is ““If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete.”
Photo by Lucas Calloch on Unsplash