Roads

You read, think, and write. The sky remains blue and the air temperate as it has each day for many weeks. You know these are the best days of your life even though you live them almost entirely alone. You’ve always lived a silent life alone in your idiosyncratic way. You don’t mind.

You started your week by reading Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Originality of Machiavelli”. It put you in mind of a different way of life. You recall the ancient books of the Greeks and Romans you once read. Philosophy is a way of life. Before the discourse, there is the way of life.

There is no a priori philosophy that disposes a person to a gloomy life. Happiness might be a psychological state or it might be Aristotle’s a life well lived or it might be a yearning for god, but there is nothing a priori that should infect you with gloom. The great fortune and joy of blue skies each day is as real as a long succession of rainy days.

You have not come so far as you think in your philosophy. Machiavelli may have as much to say about politics this year as he did about the politics of his time. Christian virtues may ultimately be in conflict with secular classical virtues, but metaphors, the way you and others think, are shared and have been around for a long time. The idea of the new and modern is always tainted by forgetfulness and illusion.

You have imagination despite all that. You create new metaphors and new ways to apply them in your life. So, there is a never ending building upon the old to create the new via the imagination and metaphor. It is difficult to draw the line between the old and the new. You must discover metaphors to know. And you must create metaphors to live.

You feel a turn toward both a forgotten way of life and a new way of life.

It makes you happy to think so.