The wisdom around us

I was just in London and visited Westminster Abbey with my son, where I found great inspiration carved in the epitaphs of the luminaries interred there. Space is limited, and the graven words chosen to capture a life are concise phrases that reach across the centuries. Philip Larkin’s inscription reads,

Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love. 

Lord Byron is memorialized with the phrase, 

But there is that within me which shall tire/Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire.

My son attended primary school at Grace Church in New York City. The church itself is a Gothic revival jewel and a National Historic Landmark where I have spent many hours in quiet reflection. I often meditate at the memorial to Edith Corse Evans, a single female passenger on the Titanic who offered her seat on a lifeboat to a mother of four children. Her cenotaph reads,

Love is strong as death. 

In Norfolk, Connecticut, near our family farm, I visit the Colonial part of the cemetery to pay my respects at the historic headstone and a modern commemorative marker for James Mars. He was born in 1790, and was enslaved from birth by a minister from a neighbouring town. He escaped his bonds and moved to Norfolk, but his parents were still enslaved, so a negotiation for their freedom ensued.  Eventually James Mars agreed to return to slavery in exchange for his parent’s manumission.  He was eventually able to regain his freedom and was inspired to write an autobiography titled Life of James Mars, A Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut. His act of bravery and compassion to exchange his life for his parents’ inspired other owners to free their enslaved people. 

I also visit the burial site for a young man who died more recently in a motorcycle accident. His bereft father wrote on his son’s headstone, “Lay low and tend to your own fires.” These powerful words are written on my heart.

In the solemnity of my neighbourhood church, in a World Heritage Site containing over a thousand years of history, and a bucolic cemetery, I have found guidance on how to live from the headstones of the dead. Epictetus asks, 

Should I announce this to the entire world? No, because we need to make allowances for the uneducated. - Discourses 1.29 

His words are an ancient version of “Lay low and tend to your own fires.” When we embrace a philosophy, we are enraptured by its wisdom and enthralled with the insight and vigour it lends our lives. We feel pushed to evangelize and sermonize. Should we declare and debate our new ideas and prescribe them for everyone around us? Or should we lay low, and live our principles, rather than announce them?

In Westminster Abbey, C.S. Lewis’s memorial epitaph reads, 

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I can see it but because by it I can see everything else.

Let your philosophy and beliefs shine

Let your philosophy and beliefs illuminate your life; others will see it. You don’t need to announce to the world your judgments and views. Live them.

Avoid the temptation to preach, - Epictetus, Discourses, 1.29

This admonition of Epictetus is a little rich coming from a guy who founded a whole school to share his thoughts. Seriously, though, he knew that people had to seek Stoicism of their own accord, as his pupils had. You can’t force wisdom on others. 

If we’re to inspire by example, we must live our lives in an exemplary way. Seneca advises Lucilus to 

Observe yourself, then, and see whether your dress and your house are inconsistent, whether you treat yourself lavishly and your family meanly…such discordance is a fault, and it indicates a wavering mind which cannot yet keep its balance. - Moral Letters, 20. 

No one can live up to their own principles perfectly all the time, but it is in striving to do so that we illuminate them for non-Stoics.

One of my favourite hymns proclaims, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” 

Similarly, they will know we are Stoics by how we live. The words of the ancient Stoics, as Byron put it, still breathe long after the thinkers have expired. For myself, I hope that it is my actions and example that live on, in the inspiring tradition of Edith Corse Evans, James Mars, and so many others.

Karen Duffy is a producer, actress, and former MTV VJ. Her latest book on Stoicism. Wise Up (https:// amzn.to/3PpLv5D) is published by Seal Press.

---