The strategy of idleness – that it to say, the unshakable desire to escape the violation of our time by all kinds of predatory, futile activities-consist in putting off the point where those activities have to be done, spacing them so that they can be picked off one by one, as in the story of Horatii and Curiatti. The other form of idleness is impatience; it is finishing before we have started- which is a way of coming out free on the other side. Expectare, diluere, suspendere humanum est…
…I have to write to people I do not know, and have no wish to…and I think, considering the motives and the immoderate, incidental impulses for undertaking such a vain and exhausting effort of dealing with the unconscious simulation of figurative pain, that man is an exaggerated being and he brings a pathetic exaggeration to the world. Just what objective suffering results from this ought to be assessed-the pain of those things which suffer, if not from existing, then certainly, at least from the fact that we exist. This is why Stoic teaching culminates not so much in the avoidance of human suffering as of the suffering inflicted on the world by our exaggerated and superfluous presence. Surely there it is much more emotional pollution of the world then any other we are made to know off. One wonders what will become of it if all this was to be exposed.
