15 May 20XX+1
My Dear Lucilius:
I was chatting away with Young Xerxes as I was laying out the garden
on the ground today. I found him a little angry today as I spoke
with him. This is atypical of our discussions, so I probed a bit
further.
I am fond of the boy Lucilius, fond of him and thus of Stateira more
than I had anticipated finding myself. It has been such a long time
since I have had younger family around that I had almost forgotten
what interacting with them was like. Probably a hazard of old
bachelors and old widowers I suspect: we become so used to being
alone as the younger generation lives their lives. Part of it is
natural: for better or worse, we want to leave them to themselves to
live their own lives out untrammeled by our mistakes. Perhaps
unfortunately in our haste to leave them on their own, we
occasionally forget we have wisdom to bring to bear as well.
He was unwilling to precisely identify the source of his anger – at
least to me – and I have learned through a lifetime of listening
and giving advice that probing the source of the anger can sometimes
shut down all avenues of conversation entirely. I ascertained it was
not at Stateira (and by extension, not at Pompeia Paulina) and not at
his own living situation (which, to be fair, he has been surprisingly
vague about in our acquaintance). It was just...something.
Something about life, and perhaps the way that it has turned out.
The anger of young men.
Something you and I may be more familiar with than we care to admit.
In response – after the stream of words had dwindled to a trickle –
I hesitantly suggested a different view, based on my own namesake,
Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
You will recall (Will you recall? I tended to just spit these things
out randomly in conversations; I have no idea what stuck) that the
original Seneca wrote a three part essay on anger. It figured
largely into the Stoic frame of thinking which is itself interesting
to me: I suppose dwelling in a time of mass democracy where the
crowd could just as easily turn against you or being subject to the
rule of dictators and tyrants can do that to a person.
Seneca
starts by comparing the fact that wild beasts can exhibit rage, but
only man has been granted wisdom, foresight, diligence and reflection
(so why not use them, of course). He addresses the fact that anger
can inspire things like bravery or courage, but that it can just as
easily go awry and like any weapon, becomes indiscriminate in harming
all around us, friends and foe alike: “Again, anger embodies
nothing useful, nor does it kindle the mind to warlike deeds; for
virtue, being self-sufficient, never needs the help of vice”.
Standing against wrong: “And so the man who does wrong ought to be
set right both by admonition and force, by measures gentle and harsh,
and we should try to make him a better man for his own sake as well
as for the sake of others, stinting, not our reproof, but our anger.”
“Anger”, he says, “has this great fault – it refuses to be
ruled. It is enraged against truth itself if this is shown to be
contrary to its desire” and “Anger aims at nothing splendid or
beautiful”. The result: “But sorrow is the companion of anger,
and all anger comes round to this as the result of either remorse or
defeat”.
Seneca has an accurate view of human society, one that is
frighteningly accurate to the way things were:
“But why recount all the different types? Whenever you see the
forum with its thronging multitude, and the polling-places filled
with all the gathered concourse, and the great Circus where the
largest part of the populace displays itself, you may be sure that
just as many vices are gathered there as there are men. Among those
whom you see in civilian garb there is no peace; for a slight reward
any one of them can be led to compass the destruction of another; no
one makes gain save by another’s loss; the prosperous they hate,
the unprosperous they despise; superiors they loathe, and to
inferiors are loathsome; they are goaded on by opposite desires; the
desire for the sake of some little pleasure or plunder to see the
whole world lost. They live as though they were in a gladiatorial
school – those with whom they eat, they likewise fight. It is a
community of wild beasts, only that beasts are gentle toward each
other and refrain from tearing their own kind, while men glut
themselves with rending one another. They differ from dumb the dumb
animals in this alone – that animals grow gentle towards those who
feed them, while men in their madness prey upon the very persons by
whom they are nurtured.”
To be fair, I had to dig out my Seneca to read this section; Young
Xerxes just sat in silence.
The cure, suggests Seneca? To not be angry by realizing the state of
man: “The wise man will not have anger towards sinners. Do you
ask why? Because he knows that no one is born wise but becomes so,
knows that only the fewest of every age turn out wise, because he has
fully grasped the conditions of human life, and no sensible man
becomes angry with nature”. Anger, he suggests, comes from an
impression of injury – remove the impression of injury and we
remove the source of anger, not only of great events, but of
“trifling and paltry incidents” (and who among us was not angry
at the order that was missing pickles on our hamburger or the coffee
that was incorrect at one time?). And often our anger comes not from
things we expect, but from things we failed to anticipate – so
accept everything and nothing becomes unexpected.
How? Refrain
from anger, delay the onset of reacting to our
anger, ignore or at least feign ignorance to those acts which could
make us angry. Avoid people that make you angry, if you are able –
“It will, therefore, be a man’s duty to avoid all those who he
knows will provoke his anger”. Fight back with the unexpected
reaction: “Does a man get angry? Do you on the contrary challenge
him with kindness”.
Seneca closes out his third book on the subject – written largely
of historical examples – with the following:
“Let us be freed from this evil, let us clear it from our minds and
tear it up by the roots, for if there should linger the smallest
traces, it will grow again; and let us not try to regulate our anger,
but be rid of it altogether – for what regulation can there be of
any evil thing? Moreover, we can do it, if only we shall make the
effort”.
Young Xerxes listened to me ramble on, mostly in silence – the sort
of response that philosophers and old men are used to at some point,
the response of an
audience which is either confused, uncaring, or processing the
information. It becomes hard to parse at some point. We talked a
bit more in general about Seneca and his life, and then he headed off
to his next destination. He may have looked thoughtful, although I
have learned to assume nothing.
I
carried on with my garden planning on the soil and on paper until the
afternoon, when Pompeia Paulina appeared with a thermos of tea and –
of all things – shortbread cookies, the sort you cannot get
anymore. She insisted I take a break, and who would argue with such
cookies and company available?
This
was, apparently, her way of saying thank you. Whatever the issue
was, he had left my house and gone to theirs, where he and Stateira
had a long conversation (of apparently unknown subject matter); when
they returned, she commented that he seemed at peace in a way she had
not seen in some time. He mentioned that he and I had talked about
anger.
I
have no idea what the initial nature of the issue was and I suppose
at this point it remains unknown and perhaps unknowable, except by a
random chance. What does matter – what hopefully will matter –
is that the next time Young Xerxes is confronted by anger, he has a
tool kit to deal with it.
So
much wisdom in the ancients, Lucilius. How much we have forgotten to
our detriment.
Your
Obedient Servant, Seneca
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