- On Longevity
And what difference does it make how soon you depart from a place which you must depart from sooner or later? We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly; for to achieve long life you have need of Fate only, but for right living you need the soul.
A life is really long if it is a full life; but fulness is not attained until the soul has rendered to itself its proper Good, that is, until it has assumed control over itself. What benefit does this older man derive from the eighty years he has spent in idleness?
A person like him has not lived; he has merely tarried awhile in life. Nor has he died late in life; he has simply been a long time dying. He has lived eighty years, has he? That depends upon the date from which you reckon his death! Your other friend, however, departed in the bloom of his manhood. But he had fulfilled all the duties of a good citizen, a good friend, a good son; in no respect had he fallen short. His age may have been incomplete, but his life was complete. The other man has lived eighty years, has he?
Nay, he has existed eighty years, unless perchance you mean by “he has lived” what we mean when we say that a tree “lives.”And yet I would not on that account decline for myself a few additional years; although, if my life’s space be shortened, I shall not say that I have lacked aught that is essential to a happy life. For I have not planned to live up to the very last day that my greedy hopes had promised me; nay, I have looked upon every day as if it were my last.
Age ranks among the external things. How long I am to exist is not mine to decide, but how long I shall go on existing in my present way is in my own control. This is the only thing you have the right to require of me,—that I shall cease to measure out an inglorious age as it were in darkness, and devote myself to living instead of being carried along past life.~ Seneca, Letter 93
- Moebius (2013)
South Korean smut horror drama? This is the weirdest movie I’ve ever seen. A mother discovers her husband cheating and unsuccessfully tries to cut off his dick. After that, she ends up cutting off her son’s penis. The father then gives his son an implant, but the son can’t get an erection anymore. So, the father teaches him how to achieve orgasm by rubbing a stone very hard against his skin. And from there, the story continues.
Most striking about this film, besides the bonkers plot, is that there isn’t a single line of dialogue. The entire plot is conveyed through expression and other non-verbal gestures. 6/10.
- The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics
It’s a fine book, though personally I wasn’t a fan of it. Don’t expect a cohesive, woven narrative—the book is more of a collection of papers on various facets of Stoic life. As such, it can go very in-depth, sometimes explicitly taking stances on published academic papers on these subjects and kind of “duking it out.” Knowing some Greek is probably helpful, or at least being familiar with Stoic terminology, as it’s extensively used and sometimes left untranslated. The chapter on logic is especially involved, and I would say not particularly relevant nowadays, since their systems have been largely subsumed into what we now call propositional logic. If you’re interested in Stoic logic, I’d actually recommend reading something focused specifically on that, as it’s a more developed take on the original ideas. Chapters like “Stoicism and Medicine,” “The Stoic Contribution to Traditional Grammar,” and “The Stoics and Astronomical Sciences” are a bit meme-like—interesting from a historical point of view, but not that strong philosophically (even though the authors would probably disagree). It also becomes clear that this is a collection of papers—for example, in the chapter “Stoicism, Naturalism, and Its Critics,” the author goes in-depth about the conflict between the theologian Butler and the Stoics, only for Butler to be introduced for the first time in the subsequent chapter, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition.”
In summary, if you’re really into Stoicism and want to know everything about it, this book is probably for you. But if you’re just looking for a general overview, this one likely goes into too much depth.
Short snippet to illustrate the book’s style:
What is the opposite of ‘something’? The obvious answer seems to be ’nothing at all’. However, the Stoics are standardly credited with entertaining the queer notion of ’not-something’ (outina), supposed to describe an ontological status of universal concepts. On the basis of a small number of controversial texts, the Stoics are thought to identify the Platonic Forms with concepts, while denying that concepts are ‘something’, thus placing them outside their supreme genus and granting them the status of ’not-something’. They say that concepts are neither something nor qualified
(mete tina einai mete poia), but quasi-something and quasi-qualified (hosanei de tina kai hosanei de poia), mere phantasms of the soul. — Stoic Metaethics
- Erster Mai
Today ist Erster Mai! - Pickpocket (1959)
French black and white flick about a pickpocketer. Fine Movie. 6.5/10.
“Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Yes…in God…for 3 minutes.”