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By Thomas Hulse
I love a good adage. Much might be said about the illustrious works of history’s greatest philosophical minds, but few hold a candle to a simple, elegant, true adage. Prudent verbiage is a virtue, and those proverbs which pass down through tradition do well to resonate with our spirits. How passionately am I stirred to be better when Marcus Aurelius exhorts himself, “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
And yet, too often are we met with contradictory bits of admonition on how to live the better life. Taken in isolation, each rings true, but together they seem cobbled in a puzzling array of misaligned lessons. We are told, “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life,” but at the same time, we hear, “Don’t let life pass you by.” We are instructed, “Take time for yourself,” but, “A day spent with friends is always a day well spent.” We are instructed, “Think for yourself,” but, “If you want to be like the Greats, learn from the Greats.” And, it is said, “Forgiveness is the greatest gift you can give yourself,” but that, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve always been.”
What are we to make of this? Do we accept the advice at certain times, rejecting it at our convenience in favor of its antithesis? We can make something more of them. We can take each at its full wisdom while recognizing that not one adage ever stood in contradiction of another.
Place yourself underneath a dogwood in the warm summer heat, book in hand and good friend to side. The fiery sun peaks just over its zenith, patterning the leafy boughs in shadows shimmering like ocean waves at your feet. In favor of the pure beauty of that moment in which you live, the searing words of a poet centuries past burn into your enraptured mind and soul. A particular stanza turns you reflective and you glance up at a cardinal flying overhead. Your entire attention is brought then upon the scene before you. Some dear words exchanged with your reading partner and the beauty of that undying moment rings clear. Not for a single instant—whether your eyes were downcast in poetry or whether raised on the proceedings of Nature—was your time wasted. There were moments missed, but they were reimbursed with another opportunity equally important.
My point in laying out this scene is to show that the perfect life is still one of contradictions. All these adages are fully correct, making no exceptions at any point in time. The only ones that make the exceptions are us. Should a delightful bird distract you from the most impactful sentence, you have missed nothing. Should a striking passage engross you in reading, oblivious to the world surrounding, you ought not have shame. For what we mean when we repeat these sayings is how to square our all too human existence with the eternality and immutability of the universe in which we live. We mean, in the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, “to sing the perfect song, and by a half-tone lost the key.” We mean to do all these things, and the others too, as beings which are enduringly human.
Thomas Hulse is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. He is studying physics and political science at the University of Louisville.