… the two things must be mingled and varied, solitude and joining a crowd: the one will make us long for people and the other for ourselves, and each will be a remedy for the other; solitude will cure our distaste for a crowd, and a crowd will cure our boredom with solitude.
What can happen to one can happen to all.
(The words of Publilius)
I am harried not by a tempest but by sea-sickness. Whatever my ailment, then, root it out and come to the help of one who is struggling in sight of land.
(The words of Serenus)
… she bore simultaneously the burdens of grief and fear and, though shipwrecked, she rode out the storms and brought his body ashore. O how many noble deeds of women are lost in obscurity! If she had chanced to live in the days of old when people frankly admired heroism, how men of genius would have competed to sing the praises of a wife who … ignored the sea which even the bravest must fear, and risked her life to give her husband burial.
We do not need to scour every ocean, or to load our bellies with the slaughter of animals, or to pluck shellfish from the unknown shores of the furthest sea. May gods and goddesses destroy those whose luxury passes the bounds of an empire that already awakens envy.
Honours, monuments, whatever the ambitious have ordered by decrees or raised in public buildings are soon destroyed: there is nothing that the passage of time does not demolish and remove. But it cannot damage the works which philosophy has consecrated: no age will wipe them out, no age will diminish them.
Do you call that man leisured who … sits at a wrestling ring (for shame on us! We suffer from vices which are not even Roman), keenly following the bouts between boys? … Theirs is not leisure but indolent occupation.
None of it [life] is frittered away, none of it scattered here and there, none of it commited to fortune, none of it lost through carelessness, none of it wasted in largesse, none of it superfluous; the whole of it, so to speak, is well invested. So, however short, it is fully sufficient, and therefore whenever his last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to meet death with a firm step.
Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless universe, his principal task is to get one up on the universe and to conquer nature… [as] the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present—that is, of really living.
Magical mycology is practical metaphysics.
