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Subsection 10. Discontents, cares, miseries and the like as causes.
Discontents, cares, setbacks, miseries—whatever disturbs the spirits and causes grief, anguish and perplexity—may properly come under this heading. Some may judge them out of place here; yet since Aristotle in his Rhetoric defines these cares, like envy, rivalry and the rest, in terms of grief, I think I may properly place them in this irascible group. Like the others, they are both causes and symptoms of this disease, producing similar troubles and usually accompanied by anguish and pain.
The familiar derivation will show it: cura, “care,” as though from cor uro, “I burn the heart.” “Maddening cares, sleepless cares, harmful cares, sad, biting, torturing cares,” and so on: biting, eating, gnawing, cruel, bitter, sick, sad, restless, pale, grim, miserable, intolerable cares, as the poets call them—worldly cares, as countless as the sands of the sea. Galen, Fernel, Felix Platter, Valescus of Taranta and others count afflictions and miseries—all these conflicts and vexations of the mind—among the principal causes, because they take away sleep, impede digestion, dry out the body and consume its substance.
Numerous as they are, their causes are just as varied. Not one person in a thousand is free of them or can free himself—no one whom that “goddess Ate,”
Walking softly over human heads, With tender soles upon her feet— Walking aloft over people’s heads, Treading so softly with tender feet—
Homer’s goddess Ate, has not drawn into this discontented company or afflicted with some misery or other. Hyginus, fable 220, tells an entertaining story to this purpose. Lady Cura happened to cross a brook and, picking up some muddy clay, made a figure from it. Jupiter came by soon afterwards and gave it life; but Cura and Jupiter could not agree what to call him or who should possess him. They referred the matter to Saturn as judge, and he gave this ruling: His name shall be homo, “human being,” from humus, “earth”; “Let Care possess him as long as he lives.” Care shall have him while he lives, Jupiter his soul and Tellus his body when he dies.
But to leave stories aside. Discontent, care and misery are a universal and continuing cause, an inseparable condition of human life. Even if no particular affliction troubled a person in this life—and who is free of such affliction?—the mere thought of this common misery would be enough to wear him down and make him weary of living: the thought that he can never be safe, but remains exposed to danger, sorrow, grief and persecution.
To begin at the hour of his birth, as Pliny describes it so well: he is born naked and starts crying at once; he is swaddled and bound like a prisoner, unable to help himself, and so he continues to the end of his life. “Food for any wild beast,” says Seneca, unable to bear heat or cold, labour or idleness, exposed to Fortune’s insults. Lucretius compares him to a naked sailor cast ashore by shipwreck, cold and comfortless in an unknown land.
No rank, age or sex can protect anyone from this common misery. “A person born of woman lives only a short time and is full of trouble,” Job 14:1, 22; “while his flesh is upon him, he will suffer, and while his soul is within him, it will mourn.” “All his days are sorrow, and his labours grief; even at night his heart finds no rest,” Ecclesiasticus 2:23. And 2:11: “All that is in it is sorrow and vexation of spirit.”
Entering, advancing, retreating, departing—it is much the same. Blindness seizes us at the beginning, labour in the middle, grief at the end, error throughout. What day dawns for us without some grief, care or anguish? What morning have we seen so secure and pleasant that clouds have not gathered before evening? One person is miserable, another ridiculous, a third odious. One complains of this grievance, another of that. “Sometimes the sinews trouble us, sometimes the feet”—Seneca—“now a discharge, now a disease of the liver; now there is too little blood, now too much.” Now the head aches, then the feet; now the lungs, then the liver, and so on.
“This man abounds in understanding, but his low birth shames him,” and so on. He is rich, but low-born; another is noble, but poor; a third has means, but perhaps lacks health or the intelligence to manage his estate. Children trouble one, a wife another, and so on. “No one easily comes to terms with his condition”: no one is pleased with his fortune.
A pound of sorrow is commonly mixed with a dram of contentment: little or no joy, little comfort, but danger everywhere, conflict and anxiety in every place. Go where you will and you will find discontents, cares, woes, complaints, sickness, diseases, burdens and outcries. Look into the marketplace, says Chrysostom, and there is brawling and conflict; into the court, and there is roguery and flattery; into a private home, and there are worry, care and sadness, and so on. As the ancient poet said,
Nothing breathing on nurturing earth is more wretched than man.
No creature is so miserable as humanity, so universally afflicted: in misery of body, misery of mind, misery of heart; in misery asleep, in misery awake, in misery wherever one turns, as Bernard found. “Is not human life on earth a trial?” Our life is nothing but a trial—Augustine, Confessions, book 10, chapter 28—“a chain of perpetual evils; and who can endure troubles and hardships?” Who can bear its miseries?
In prosperity we are arrogant and unbearable, in adversity dejected, in every condition foolish and miserable. In adversity I long for prosperity; in prosperity I fear adversity. What middle state can be found? Where is there no trial? What condition of life is free of it? Wisdom has labour attached to it, glory envy; riches and cares, children and burdens, pleasure and disease, idleness and poverty go together—as though, in the Platonists’ view, a person were born in order to be punished in this life for earlier sins.