Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: 'Nimirum hac die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.' [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived. -- Macrobius, Saturnalia]
The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a
philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do
not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and
powers are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things
indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond
that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does
on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the
resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to
any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play,
which is indubitably the hardest (Erasmus, Apophthegmata,
V). In all the rest he can wear an actor's mask: those fine
philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us
may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance
serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself
there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we
must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:
Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res
[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast.
The mask is ripped off: reality remains. -- Lucretius]
That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients [Seneca]) the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart. -- Montaigne, Essays, 1:19
Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity? But if we do not call the dead man happy, and if Solon does not mean this, but that one can then safely call a man blessed as being at last beyond evils and misfortunes, this also affords matter for discussion; for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants....
Now many events happen by chance, and events differing in importance;
small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly do not weigh down
the scales of life one way or the other, but a multitude of great events
if they turn out well will make life happier (for not only are they themselves
such as to add beauty to life, but the way a man deals with them may be
noble and good), while if they turn out ill they crush and maim happiness;
for they both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even
in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many
great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility
and greatness of soul.
-- Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1:10
At the end of a philosophical discussion that had tormented two professors from the University of Graz for decades and had brought not only them but also their families to total ruin and which, as they are reported to have perceptively told a third colleague one day, like all philosophical discussions led to nothing and which, finally, in the nature of things, ruined and actually drove this colleague, who had also become embroiled in their discussion, insane, the two professors from Graz, after inviting their third colleague and adversary, out of habit, so to speak, into the house they had rented jointly for the sole purpose of their philosophical discussion, had blown the house up.
They had spent all the money they had left on the dynamite necessary for the purpose. Since the families of all three professors were present in the house at the time of the explosion, they had also blown up their families. The surviving relatives of one of the professors and adversaries, for whom the decades-long philosophical discussion -- as they themselves had clearly demonstrated -- had proved fatal, considered suing the state because they were of the opinion that the state's moral and intellectual bankruptcy had driven all three to their deaths, but they did not bring such an action after all, because they realized the futility of such action. -- "Consistency," Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator
The most intelligent and famous female poet that our country has produced in the present century died in a hospital in Rome from the effects of scalds and burns that she must have sustained in her bathtub, according to the authorities. I used to go on trips with her, and on these trips I shared many of her philosophical views, as well as her views on the course of the world and the course of history, which had frightened her all her life. Many attempts on her part to return her native Austria, however, came to grief because of the shamelessness of her female rivals and the stupidity of the Viennese authorities. The news of her death reminded me that she was the first guest in my then still completely empty house. She was always on the run and had always seen people for what they really were, as a slow-witted, stupid, thoughtless mass that one simply has to break with. Like me, she had early in life discovered the entrance to hell, and entered this hell even though there was a danger of perishing in this hell at a very early age. People are trying to decide whether her death was an accident or whether it was suicide. Those who believe in the poet's suicide keep saying that she was broken by herself, whereas in reality and in the nature of things she was broken by her environment and, at bottom, by the meanness of her homeland, which persecuted her at every turn even when she was abroad, just as it does so many others. -- "Rome," Thomas Bernhard, in The Voice Imitator
