Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • Epicurus’s Zenlike lesson does hit home for me, in fact more now than it did when I first read it. Although generally I do not drift away from the present by desiring more, frequently I do drift away from the present by fantasizing about what’s coming up next. I now realize that I have spent much of my life thinking about “What’s next?” While eating dinner, I will start thinking about what book I am going to read or what movie I am going to watch after dinner. Meantime, I am not focusing on my lovely mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  • In fact, “What’s next?” has been the leitmotif of my life. As a child, I constantly thought about what my life would be when I grew up; later, about what life I would lead when I graduated from college. On and on. Thus have I diluted my life. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” A fundamental tenet of many of the world’s major religions is that life on Earth is but a trifling stage on the way to Real Life, the life in the eternal hereafter. Our mission here is to prepare for that heavenly life, mostly to make sure we qualify for it. Other than that, our mundane lives do not mean a whole lot. So what we have here is a life of perpetual “What’s next?” Every moment of our earthly lives is focused on the next life. Modern evangelists hit this point repeatedly in their sermons and homilies. Preaches Pastor Rick Warren: “Life on earth is just the dress rehearsal before the real production. You will spend far more time on the other side of death—eternity—than you will here. Earth is the staging area, the preschool, the try-out of your life in eternity. It is the practice workout before the actual game; the warm-up lap before the race begins. This life is preparation for the next.” My personal “What’s next?” compulsion is far less comprehensive than the one Pastor Warren advertises, and it definitely lacks the Great Hereafter payoff he promises. And without this payoff, my habit makes no sense at all. But I don’t want to brood about that now: Spending time regretting anything is another sure way of missing what is right in front of me. Furthermore, at my age and with my nonotherworldly worldview, I’m pretty sure I know what’s next.

  • Another way Aristippus managed to make over his immediate environment was by shopping. Evidently, the man adored luxury. He was an early advocate of the “he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins” school of hedonism. The way Aristippus could afford his self-indulgences was by charging his philosophy students tuition, a practice that both Socrates and Plato, early proponents of free access to information, abhorred. Epicurus would have strongly disapproved, too, starting with his precept that striving to achieve absolutely anything, even if it is only toys, is a sure way to miss out on an angst-free life. And for Epicurus, an angst-free life was the only truly happy one.

  • When I was in my late twenties living on the Greek island of Hydra, I witnessed another anxiety that Aristippus’s anything-goes hedonism can stir up. During that time, I often hung out with another expatriate, Habib, a wealthy Iranian who had been brought up in Paris. Habib was what was known as a fils a pappa—a wayward young man who is such an embarrassment to his wealthy father that he is supplied with a tidy sum to just go away. Habib had the time and money, not to mention the good looks, to do pretty much anything he wanted. Furthermore, Habib was not in the least inhibited by conventional norms of acceptable behavior. In short, he had the potential to enjoy Aristippus’s perfect life. But Habib was overwhelmed by all his options. Why spend the night with Sophia when spending the night with Katrina might be even more sensational? Why smoke some opium when getting drunk on ouzo might be more fun? Or what about both? Time and again, I would find him on the terrace of Loulou’s taverna in a paralyzing dither. Often, I had to suppress a chuckle over his befuddling embarrassment of riches, but for Habib it was no laughing matter. Hedonism made him anxious.

  • One time in the 1960s when my friend Tom Cathcart and I were experimenting with LSD, Tom suddenly stopped gazing around rapturously and announced soberly, “Geez, you can always get higher, can’t you?” The answer, sadly, is yes, we can always get higher. The reason we can always get higher is that we can only possess one consciousness at a time, and whatever that consciousness happens to be can always be transcended. Somewhere deep inside we all know this, but people who have gone on psychedelic trips are keenly aware of it. They have watched themselves jump from one level of consciousness—and the euphoric feelings connected to that consciousness—to another. They have even watched themselves watching themselves jump from one level of consciousness to another, which is a particularly dizzying quality of consciousness unto itself. As it happens, the limited size of our brains stops us in our transcendental tracks before we get within hailing distance of the end of this hall of mirrors. The critical point is that knowing we can always get higher can be a real downer. It informs us that we are never going to reach the ultimate point of happiness because there is no ultimate point of happiness. There is always a higher mountain thataway. For someone seeking ultimate bliss, this is a sobering thought. It all starts to feel futile. But not to worry: Soon enough the mountain on which we are currently sitting becomes our new normal consciousness and our level of happiness feels more or less the way it always has. Experimental psychologists refer to this as our “happiness set point.” Their research suggests that inducing happy feelings cannot have lasting effects on our sense of well-being. Their “hedonic treadmill” thesis says that we constantly habituate ourselves to acquired levels of happiness and so we simply return to our original baseline level of feeling.

  • When Camus wrote in The Stranger, “You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,” he was suggesting this same point from a different angle. The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create. And by contemplating suicide, we can be fully present at our own creation.

  • Nietzsche agreed that we create our own lives, but he maintained that not all chosen meanings of life are created equal. Some meanings are inherently better than others—better by a critical order of magnitude.

  • Before reading Nietzsche, I had been thinking that all things considered, I would probably be happiest with an easygoing life. No high drama, just the simple pleasures—a kind of low-key American variation of Epicureanism. So maybe I should design my life along the lines of that nice fellow, Frank Busby, in my old hometown. Busby is happy, generous, a splendid father and husband, has a steady job he enjoys, and is a member in good standing of the volunteer fire department. Sounded like a good life to me. And, after all, I do get to create any life I want, right? Not so fast, spake Nietzsche. Some of us have the capacity to live in a way that goes far beyond the ordinary, and it is incumbent upon us to reach for such a life, to fully engage in what he calls “life affirmation.” Maybe Busby is content to live a simple and comfortable life following the accepted rules and mores of religion and society, but Nietzsche calls Busby a weakling for choosing to live that way. Actually, Nietzsche says, Busby didn’t choose his life at all; he just accepted the script society gave him and lives accordingly. He cannot shake off his “herd instinct” because, to begin with, he has no real consciousness of the fact that he is part of the herd. Busby cannot honestly face up to who he is and what he deeply feels. As a result, he is never fully alive—he never truly lives. So do I really want to live out my days like Busby?

  • Timothy Leary, a pioneer in psychedelic drugs and the leading guru of this period, exhorted us to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” His message had a decidedly Nietzschean motif, as in these words in his guided meditation “How to Operate Your Brain”: “Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities—the political, the religious, the educational authorities—who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing—forming in our minds—their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.” Many of us determined that our “true selves” had been stifled by our conformist society. We quit our jobs and schools and took to the road. We discovered that what we really wanted deep down was to be free spirits, answerable to no one. We followed every impulse, even if it was mad, immoral, outrageous, or criminal. Some of us carried around tattered paperback editions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in our jeans’ pockets.

  • I have to admit that in the past few decades, I don’t seem to have much interest in ferreting out my deepest self. After a while, that pursuit began to feel futile. There always seemed to be another self hiding beneath the one I had just found—selves all the way down. Or, as a friend of mine once quipped, “We turned out to be superficial to the core.” I know that Nietzsche would admonish me to deal with it, to keep wrestling with this endless regression of internal contradictions, but these days I would rather spend my time making peace with who, for better and for worse, I have become. In the end, instead of aspiring to be an ubermensch, I simply aspire to be a mensch. I opt for the tranquil hedonism of Epicurus’s Garden. Which is to say, I am probably a lot like Frank Busby.

  • AS MUCH AS I CHERISH THE JOYS OF GENUINE COMPANIONSHIP, I do love the glory of solitude. This is a pleasure that has deepened for me with age. Often, solitude can fill me with peacefulness and a simple gratitude for being alive. Sitting alone in the back of our little house on a summer’s day, a field of long grass and wildflowers before me, I revel in the mere act of breathing in and breathing out. On her trips to the vegetable garden, my wife sometimes offers me an amused smile as she passes by. Once, a few years ago, she asked me if I was thinking deep thoughts out there in my chair. I happily confessed the truth: I didn’t have a single thought in my head, deep or shallow. That was a substantial part of what made it so delightful. Indulging in solitude is certainly selfish, but I do not think it is egotistical. I don’t sit there congratulating myself on being me. If I congratulate myself about anything, it is on just being. It is a treat to be able to appreciate simply being alive and usually that treat is not available when I am in the company of others. It tends to get lost in the crowd. Nonetheless, I am not so sold on solitude as was Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher who spent months on end alone on Walden Pond. He, apparently, did have deep thoughts deep in the woods. Wrote Thoreau: “I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.” No, I value my time with good friends too much to go that far. But Thoreau does get me thinking about an activity that lies between solitude and time spent with a truly companionable friend, and that is time spent with people when intimacy is not an option. There is a lot of that in our lives—for example, a party, the kind where people flit from group to group and shmooze amiably, often entertainingly, but not really personally. At such gatherings, it is nearly impossible to feel even an intimation of intimacy. I prefer solitude to that. This may well be an old man thing that comes from a sense of time running out and not wanting to waste a moment of it. I would rather spend my remaining time breathing in and out in my chair behind the house than spend it being the life of a party.

  • I experienced bouts of existential despair for a good part of my twenties. Looking back on that period now, I can see that some of that feeling was mixed up with my gloom over my inability to find a satisfying vocation and my failed love affairs. But even now I am not convinced that my personal problems were all there was to my despairing view of life. Indeed, my view of life had contributed to my inability to find any kind of meaningful occupation and the breakdown of my love affairs. It went both ways.

  • I can picture my distant young self sitting alone on a park bench, the collar of my coat turned up, an unfiltered cigarette dangling from my lips, my eyes squinted as I took in the dreary predictability of everything I saw. I grimaced as I beheld the false bonhomie of middle-aged couples chatting. And I shuddered as I watched young lovers locked in an embrace, totally unaware that their affair would inevitably turn into mutual contempt or worse, boredom. It was not pretty. But at those times in my life when I felt this existential ennui, it was very real. It made me wonder why I should bother to do anything, like get out of bed in the morning. If I felt and acted that way today, someone would trot me off to a shrink where I would be promptly diagnosed with Recurrent Depressive Disorder (Code 296.32 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and medicated with Prozac. One thing about living in a psychological era is that few people give credence or value to a philosophical perspective. In our period, despairing of finding any meaning in life is rarely considered a sincerely held worldview; no, it is a sickness that needs to be cured. If I said to a psychiatrist that by treating existential ennui as a disease he is making the gratuitous assumption that the correct way to live is cheerfully and hopefully, he would look at me as if I was, well, sick in the head. Most shrinks presuppose that the goal of life is to become positive and to have a sense of well-being and that it is not healthy to feel or think otherwise. But what if, after philosophical contemplation, a person finds life empty? What if he cannot find any meaning in life, either rationally or in the depths of his being? Does that simply mean it’s Prozac time?

  • I will never forget the time my wife, Freke, and I spent a few days in Corfu on our way from Italy to mainland Greece. Freke has always had a fondness for viewing out-of-the-way historical sites and this time she wanted to see the tomb of a ninth-century AD potentate who had once ruled all of Asia Minor. We took a public bus to somewhere deep in the island’s interior where the driver let us off beside a copse of ancient olive trees, pointing toward a long, rocky road. We trekked for almost an hour and then we finally saw it: a small, toppling cairn bearing a sign in Greek and English with the name of this man who had once been emperor of what was then a sizeable chunk of the civilized world. There were a couple of bottles of Hillas beer lying beside it. That was it. So much for immortality via memorabilia. I found the ultimate smallness of the great king’s life both sad and wryly comical, but mostly deeply humbling.

  • The Swedish masterpiece Fanny and Alexander suggests that we can take great comfort in acknowledging how small and unimportant our individual lives are because each little life can be seen as a cosmos unto itself. We are all meaningful players in the Little World.