The Wheel of Fortune
One morning in the year 523 A.D., there was a knock at Boethius’s front gate. The forty-year-old Boethius was a successful, celebrated, if somewhat over-confident intellectual. Born into an aristocratic family, he had received the best education. Under King Theodoric he occupied the highest offices in Rome. He had the perfect marriage and wonderful children. And he could dedicate himself day in, day out to his greatest passion, translating books from Greek into Latin (in those days hardly anybody could still read the Greek classics in the original). Boethius’s wealth, reputation, social status and creative energies were at their peak when the aforementioned knock came at his door, and Boethius was promptly arrested. Accused of having supported a conspiracy against Theodoric, he had been sentenced to death in his absence. His assets, his money, his library, his houses, his pictures and his beautiful clothes—all were confiscated. He wrote his final book, The Consolation of Philosophy, in jail. One year after his arrest he was executed—by the sword, as was the custom. Today Boethius’s grave can be visited at the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia (about thirty miles southwest of Milan).
The Consolation of Philosophy became one of the most-read books of the Middle Ages, although unlike nearly all successful medieval books it has nothing to do with the Christian faith. What’s the book about? As Boethius sits in jail—fearful, desperate, awaiting execution—a striking, somewhat older female figure appears: “Philosophy.” She explains the world to him, providing him with some mental tools (in this regard it’s not dissimilar to the aspirations of this book) to help him cope with his new, inescapable situation. The following is a summary of Philosophy’s recommendations, which are of course Boethius’s.
First: accept the existence of fate. In Boethius’s day, people liked to personify fate as Fortuna, a goddess who turned the Wheel of Fortune, in which highs and lows were endlessly rotated. Those who played along, hoping to catch the wheel as it rose, had to accept that eventually they would come down once more. So don’t be too concerned about whether you’re ascending or descending. It could all be turned on its head.
Second: everything you own, value and love is ephemeral—your health, your partner, your children, your friends, your house, your money, your homeland, your reputation, your status. Don’t set your heart on those things. Relax, be glad if fate grants them to you, but always be aware that they are fleeting, fragile and temporary. The best attitude to have is that all of them are on loan to you, and may be taken away at any time. By death, if nothing else.
Third: if you, like Boethius, have lost many things or even everything, remember that the positive has outweighed the negative in your life (or you wouldn’t be complaining) and that all sweet things are tinged with bitterness. Whining is misplaced.
Four: what can’t be taken from you are your thoughts, your mental tools, the way you interpret bad luck, loss and setbacks. You can call this space your mental fortress—a piece of freedom that can never be assailed.
I’m sure you’ve read and heard all this before, and even for Boethius they weren’t new ideas. They are the fundamental principles of Stoicism, an ancient, highly practical philosophy of life that originated in the fourth century B.C., i.e., a millennium before Boethius, in Athens. In the first two centuries A.D., it underwent a revival in Rome. Famous Stoics include Seneca (a multimillionaire), Epictetus (a slave), and Marcus Aurelius (a Roman emperor). Remarkably, Stoicism is still the only branch of philosophy that offers practical answers to life’s everyday questions. The other twigs and branches are intellectually stimulating, but offer little help dealing with life.
Boethius was one of the last Stoics, before Christianity thoroughly befogged the European mind and delegated responsibility for one’s own life to a fiction (God). Not for another thousand years did the fog lift. Yet even after the glorious sunrise of the Enlightenment, Stoicism was sorely neglected—and remains essentially insider’s knowledge even today. Flashes of Stoic thinking have emerged here and there, as when the Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote: “the last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude to things”—perfectly describing the mental fortress. If you read Primo Levi, you’ll be amazed how stoically he recounts his experiences in the concentration camp. And in Chapter 27 we met fighter pilot and Stoic James Stockdale, who spent seven years as a prisoner of war, four of them in solitary confinement. On the whole, however, the Stoics’ ideas are alien to us these days. If you use the word “fate,” you probably mean a systemic failure rather than the Wheel of Fortune. Unemployment, hunger, war, sickness, even death itself—we blame the system for everything. We assume we’ve fallen through the cracks.
But that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. Precisely because fate strikes more rarely—in our neck of the woods, at least—it hits us harder emotionally. Moreover, the more complex and interconnected the world becomes, the greater the likelihood of radically new and totally unexpected blows of fate. In short, it’s more worthwhile than ever to invest in an intellectual toolkit that emotionally prepares you for loss.
You don’t have to be Boethius, Jews under the Third Reich or ordinary people caught up in the Syrian civil war to be struck by fate. An internet shitstorm can wipe you out. A global financial crisis can decimate your savings. Your partner falls in love with a Facebook friend and throws you out of the house. All of that’s bad, but none of it’s deadly. The greatest trials of fate you’ve already overcome. Think of the improbability of your conception, of the thousands of agonizing births your mother, your two grandmothers, your grandmothers’ grandmothers and so forth had to endure (some of them bleeding to death) just to bring you into the world. And now you’re moaning about your stock portfolio halving in value?
Simply put, the world is full of unrest and chance, and every so often your life will be upturned. You won’t find happiness in status, in expensive cars, in your bank account or in social success. All of it could be taken from you in a split second—as it was with Boethius. Happiness can be found only in your mental fortress. So invest in that, not in a Porsche collection.