Dear Cicero

Two days with no sun. Winter is here, and without a smile I face the short days and long nights with you on my mind always. I have been listening to your works On good and evil, and On duties as well as On old age. When my personal life scatters into unrecognisable shapes, when even music is another kind of silence, I dwell on the quandary of Stoic vs Epicurean morality. I find no consolation for for my ailments. Not yet, I will keep listening, keep reading. Perhaps you have the wisdom to bring back the sun from the greedy throat of Phobos.

Someone asked me a question months ago that I have yet to find anything like the semblance of an answer to.

Which is better? To endure in peace a cowardly oppression, or to struggle in war for the just cause of liberty?

There are questions inside this question. It expresses a discourse that is utterly foreign to me, the values of a person who would even ask that question seem strange.

You claim that you, “prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.” Which seems reasonable, but when has reasonable thinking ever had any connection with war?

Thucidides, always a man with strong convictions counters with this:

“War is an evil thing; but to submit to the dictation of other states is worse.... Freedom, if we hold fast to it, will ultimately restore our losses, but submission will mean permanent loss of all that we value.... To you who call yourselves men of peace, I say: You are not safe unless you have men of action on your side.”

                                                          Thucydides

War War War....why am I going on about war?

Two days with no sun. Did the Sibylline books ever speak of an eclipse so devastating?

The plants begin to shrivel, expecting the worst.

What is the highest good? What value can we really place on pleasure? You seem to rip shreds off Epicurus and his pleasure centred morality, disassembling his ideas with a surgeon's understanding. You retort that honour, duty and friendship are the fountain heads of moral right. You declare our conscience to be the seat of God, the part of us that is divine. Though we be mortal, part of us is still godly.

Why then, does the sun hide from me?

*

Another day. The sun came out a little, a whisper of light crept from the edges of the eclipsing moon. I sit in the morning to write to you. I should be at work, but writing always seems more important. I was pleased to find you make reference to Socrates today. A phrase I have used for many years, turns out to have come from him: Hunger is the best spice. We talk about memes a lot today as if they are a modern invention, but snippets of wisdom like this have floated downstream through centuries to find us here almost unchanged from their original form. Socrates said, “For food, hunger is the best sauce, for drink, thirst.” I like to think that my version of the phrase had passed through the middle east, changing sauce to spice. But no matter, the wisdom is the same.

                                                              Socrates

What we want, we strive for. What we get, we no longer want. Satiety is the antithesis of ambition. It was true in your day as it is true in mine. Man is never satisfied with what he gains, and always wants more, regardless of his achievements. Satisfaction is difficult to experience. The stillness in the centre of present minded peace is fleeting. I wonder what you would have thought of Buddhism? Modern writers often describe your sense of charity and humanity as an early form of Christian philosophy, which I will not disagree with. I wonder though, what use you might have made of meditation, or the philosophy of chakras, or yoga. The idea of karma is certainly not foreign to you, though you did not have that name for it. The ancient world seemed to have a natural understanding that people tend to create their own fate through the consequences of their actions. What goes around comes around so to speak.

Today I can find no strength. No reason to work, or to strive. If the sun cannot reach me, what use are my efforts? The weeds will grow and the leaves will fall and I will live and die, though to what end I cannot say. I write every day. I read, I try to better myself, to manifest whatever potential resides in me and to see my light shine into the world, but without the sun, my own light is dim, for I am but a reflection of that love. My strength is derived from that strength. My light from that light.

*

And then, sunset, running through the woods, leaping over stones and the debris of old ruins. My children all around me laughing and running with me. Afterwards I stand winded on the rocky hillside, watching as a flock of grey and pink birds swoop through the trees along the creek leading to the lake. Time stops. A little more sunlight leaks into the world, the moon slips its grip.

I know I'm being obscure. I'm not really talking about suns and eclipses. You can see that can't you? It's the only way I know to speak on it and I hope that it make sense to you. If not, then at least perhaps the poetry and imagery of my writing are of some value as a diversion from your stoic ideals.

But enough about me.

“I have fastened upon this study with the greed of a man trying to satisfy a long endured thirst”.

Those are your words, (from On Old Age) but they express exactly the sentiment I feel regarding my own study. I thirst, of that there is not doubt. I thirst for knowledge, for understanding, for mastery of myself, for comprehension and composition of music. I hunger for comradeship with my shadow. It is this study I am fastened upon.

I spoke with an uncle of mine recently, a very portly man of ill health and ill temper. He told me that he had stopped reading books. Though I did not say, I thought that he must already be dead.

“You, Cicero, also said: Old people remember what interests them”.

My uncle is a man whose lifelong interest in ships has faded, even his interest in food and wine seems shrunken. I never understood ennui until I saw his face. Not long for this world, I thought.Socrates learned how to play the Lyre in his old age and he died in his seventy first year. The gaining of new knowledge, and of new interests is not the exclusive dominion of youth, for in our old age we have more time than ever to devote to learning new things, and to pursuing what interests us. My uncle seemed to have lost his interest in life.

“An old man is well advised to favour the society of promising young people”, you say. Not just promising young people, but, I would add promising young ideas. It is this activity of engaging with new learning and exposure to challenges that keeps us young. For all my adult years I have challenged myself with the problems of new learning, keeping myself young by always feeling what young people feel; that is the excitement and daunting grandeur of embarking upon an unknown journey, and the struggles that come from early study.

This year it is my study of ancient literature. I continue all my previous studies, primarily music, but also writing, painting and drawing, as well as the subtle arts of being a family man. I had to laugh when I read your words, “It is difficult to be a husband and a philosopher at the same time”. First World Problems, we would say today, laughing and grimacing at the same time. It is good to laugh at one's problems, whatever they might be. My nation is well known for our laughter in the face of terrible fate, at least we were known for that in times of war and struggle. Now there are too many of us with bodies soft as couches and minds just as padded. Hmm. I should not descend to insults. They are a poor substitute for evidence and a cruel alternative to actual debate. I have no real criticism of Australian culture, we are no more stupid or courageous than any other people I suppose.

As a consequence of my study, I have begun to view all political and social events on a timeline stretching back a long way, and so the meaning and context of each modern event is transformed by an awareness of the recurrent nature of human society. The peaks and troughs of human achievement level out somehow, and the long story of our species is an observable one. We are human. We are animals and yet we are not animals. We create and we destroy, we consume and we renew. We are dynamic within a set of fluctuating, evolving boundaries, capable of self determination as well as subservient co-operation, we group ourselves intensely and compete as all animals compete, for resources, for position. We organise, make patterns, use science, music, art, writing. We can see through the walls of the world and what do we find? The very atoms that Lucretius wrote of fifty years before the birth of Christ in his book On the Nature of the Universe.

And Lucretius was translating from Greek texts written two hundred hundred years before him.

                                                        Lucretius

I know that this letter has been a bit jumbled, a melancholy gloom and confusion overshadowing my usual expansive thinking. I am sorry for that. The eclipse has passed, and the winter sun sings to my skin again. The plants lift their leaves upright and breathe deep with me as I relax into another day.

I will leave you with one last quote from Caecilius Statius, from his play 'Comrades in youth'

“He plants trees for the use of another age.”

You, Cicero are the planter of trees. I collect their seeds to plant again.

Thank you Cicero, for everything.

Morgan.