Ward Farnsworth, The Practicing Stoic

carved branches & distributed verbs

“They said a number of the best things that anyone ever has.”

You suddenly find yourself going over life’s waterfall — you’ve lost your job; your doctor has ordered up another scan; you’ve glimpsed with what feels like abiding clarity the fundamental rottenness and hopelessness of things. And because you’ve heard that Buddhists have thought deeply about all that is grim (life is suffering, the body is a sack of decaying meat), that’s the branch you reach out for — maybe you order a book by Pema Chodron, or maybe by someone not-quite-Buddhist-but-Buddhist-inflected, like Eckhart Tolle.

But within a few generously spaced pages you realize that you aren’t clutching a branch at all; you’re clutching a handful of mist. This is not because Buddhism is false or shallow or useless. I believe that Buddhism and its near-relations are, in fact, among the products that humanity should be proudest of — if I could patch any one belief-system into my daughter’s psyche so that it would be there for her when life’s habitual prickliness asserts itself (the beloved college says no; the trusted robots rebel), that would be the one.

Buddhism’s ineffectiveness as a rescue branch has to do, rather, with its slowness, its scale, with the years or even decades that its benefits take to manifest. It is a river-rerouting, dam-constructing sort of a practice. By the time you’re screaming and soaked with waterfall spray, it’s too late to begin.

Which is where — for me, anyway — Stoicism comes in. It is perhaps less attractive as a branch (its bark is rough, a fraternity has carved its name into the wood), but it is strong and sturdy and it will hold you firmly in place until the Lorazepam kicks in.

There are whole shelves full of books that set out to make Stoicism accessible to the modern sufferer. Most of them are, to my tastes, either too stiffly classical (here, to help you on your way, is a brief introduction to Greek phonology) or too M.B.A. glib (now in convenient page-a-day calendar format). The best one I’ve found — the one I’ve worn a hand-print into with all my clutching — is Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic.

Farnsworth is a lawyer and academic of impeccable seriousness (his back catalog includes The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law) who just happens to have a fascination with practical philosophy and a genius for anthologizing. The Practicing Stoic is organized, with a cookbook-ish utility, by subject (Death, Wealth and Pleasure, What Others Think) and consists almost entirely of quotes, with occasional brief bits of explanation or clarification by Farnsworth.

The paragraphs that you’ll find yourself underlining are all, naturally, by other people.

Seneca:

Who can you show me that places any value on their time, who knows the worth of each day, who understands that they are dying daily? For we are mistaken when we see death ahead of us; the greater part of it has happened already. Whatever of our life is behind us is in death’s hands.

Montaigne (Farnsworth doesn’t care whether his Stoics wear Greek robes or ruffled collars):

It is commonly said that good sense is the gift that Nature has distributed most fairly among us, for there is no one who is unsatisfied with the share he has been allotted — and isn’t that reasonable enough? For whoever saw beyond this would see beyond his sight. I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does not think the same of his own?

The sentence that convinced me to buy the book, though, is by Farnsworth and comes on the very first page of the preface.

The Stoics had their limitations, of course; they held some beliefs that very people do anymore. But in other ways they were far ahead of their times. They said a number of the best things that anyone ever has.

That last sentence (They said a number of the best things that anyone ever has) makes me smile every time that I read it. There’s the quiet elegance of that dropped said, first of all. He could have written They said a number of the best things that anyone has ever said (which has a braindead over-earnest high school expository essay quality to it) or he could have written They said a number of the best things that anyone ever has said (which sounds non-idiomatic, unless you italicize the has, in which case it sounds overbearing and finger-jabbing). But he trusted us to perform that pleasant little act of the grammatical Distributive Property: multiplying both sides of the sentence by a common verb.

More importantly, though, I love the calm unflinchingness with which the sentence makes its massive assertion. How tempting it is as a writer to hem and haw, to quibble and qualify, to repeatedly gesture toward the obvious fact that you are merely asserting what seems true to you. And what a surprising relief it is when a writer dispenses with all that and merely says it! We know that you don’t have a comprehensive list of every human utterance, sorted by quality (as determined by an international panel of interdisciplinary Nobel laureates). If you’d say it to a friend on a walk (these really are the best thing anyone’s ever said), then just say the damn thing! Would the inscription at the base of the Michael Jordan statue in Chicago (The best there ever was. The best there ever will be.) give the same shiver if it read, Among the best shooting guards of his era, by most metrics, although of course who’s to say, players do keep seeming to improve?

Farnsworth has no time for elaborate qualifications, no time for commas; he barely has time for two-syllable words. There are paddlers to save.