You are called to beating drums. You are marked with the warrior’s cull. Headwinds are of no importance, tides change. The moon is in its apogee. Rocks break down slower than people. Life switches from age to age. Loss precipitates quickly. We all get weathered; As pouring currents leave indication in strata, As the penultimate phase of your stigmata, As the edge of living for strife, To live for love, love as goodwill. It is time to lay down the legionnaire’s shield, To start a quiet farm, live a simple life.
The Stoic
What About Everyone Else?
Maybe it an indication of my limited understanding of the history, but I am not entirely sure how the every-man Roman lived. I wonder how did they live? Was it ethical? Did they wonder like the philosophers did? Did they watch plays and wonder how it related to themselves? Did the gods care enough to notice, they thought as they stared into the heavens.
To think of others in a different time as wildly different from us disregards the interconnectivity of humanity. After all, what most of us ever want is a happy simple life. Surely that is one of the Stoic pillars, living in accordance with nature. In this sense, were the daily citizen trying their best just to be good people?
Not everyone needs Stoicism to try and be good. For many others, living in accordance with nature comes, well, naturally. The next pillar is reasoned thought. This is the utility of Stoicism. It provides a theoretical basis to live by. It is philosophy as a tool, an avenue. A person finds Stoicism as a way to attune to what come naturally, which brings up the next point
What Do Men Live By?
It must be for a sense of community. It must come from a place of love. A good life has to come from doing good things. It must be things done with the intent of goodwill to all, and making a peaceable situation out of whatever comes your way.
Leo Tolstoy wrote “What Men Live By” in 1885. It reads as a Christian parable where people are more symbols in how they act. People in a short story can only have one face. Changes and development in character are limited by necessity. This requires a critical eye, only keeping what is completely necessary.
The same can be said about life. It is imperative to not necessarily reduce every factor of your life to the bare minimum, but to avoid relying on and betting on the excesses to be happy. A philanthropic disposition is what Tolstoy’s story was about.
Good stories end with something to say. A great way to have the books you read and the life you experience to matter to you is to reflect upon it. Do not only think about what it means to yourself. That is too narrow. Consider the larger picture, greater truth, and the overarching theme. Instead of nodding to yourself as an indication of understanding, go beyond that. What can I take from this small slice of real and apply it today?
What can you take away from your reading of this post, or his story, or anything else? You cannot just be given the lessons. You have to dig for yourself. Not everyone will have a scorned angel come down with the mission of finding the meaning of life. I am sorry to disappoint you, but the chances of that happening to you are slim, never zero, but slim.
For Tolstoy, the most important was the answer: Love, of course, a love for mankind. But it is more than that. What does that love look like?
What of the Rest of the World?
In my poem above there are references to geological natural sciences in contrast to the human experience. You don’t need this page to remind you of the speck that human history is on the face of universal time. But in there is the metaphor that all things have a shelf life, everything is tending towards entropy. So what is your responsibility in this downward spiral? A shrug honestly. That is all you can do. You have agency to your close connections, that’s it. Take your time and care into that. That alone should be enough purpose.
The Poetic
Utility of Stanzas
A group of lines in a poem make up a stanza. It is the basic makeup of poetry, which makes it different from other writing. They are usually all right aligned. Sentences are chopped and arranged by choice. It isn’t always a wild hacking away in order to make some lines look like a poem. It should have more intent than that.
Above I have chosen a single stanza as a metaphor for a life. There is a loose rhyme scheme to indicate the poem is connected as one thing.
Two lines stand out as and don’t conform to the rest:
You are called to beating drums. and We all get weathered.
These lines stand out because they are unavoidable truths of life. We don’t have control in our call into this world and we can’t help that we age and eventually die. The rest is up to us to make rhyme, or in other words, to make mean something. Is that too much looking into the words? Well, welcome to poetry: where we don’t say much but pretend that we do.
Thank You.
If you stayed around and read the whole thing, thank you. Please consider liking, commenting, sharing and subscribing. I am not a master poet yet, but I think I could work towards that.