LETTER 1: Your Frontline
[>] āawful grace of Godā: Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 194.
[>] ākilled the birds in the airā: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 30.
LETTER 2: Why Resilience?
[>] āinto an enjoyable challengeā: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 200.
[>] āas our legitimate propertyā: Quoted in Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 277. Friedrich Nietzsche, āPosthumous Fragments,ā in Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, trans. Pierre Hadot (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 5.2.552ā53. When people quote Nietzsche, they often feel the need to apologize for some reason. Letās acknowledge this about Nietzsche: he was a bit nuts, a bit destructive, and just as I wouldnāt recommend his life to anyone, I wouldnāt recommend that anyone swallow his whole philosophy unexamined. Still, some of what he wrote is brilliant. And we should learn from it. Letās not throw away diamonds of genius because they were produced by imperfect people.
[>] āCultureā was originally a word: Of course, this way of thinking about culture has ancient roots in Eastern as well as Western thought. Two and a half millennia ago, for instance, Confucius was asked which of his disciples loved learning the most. He answered, āThere was one Yen Hui who was eager to learn. He did not vent his anger upon an innocent person, nor did he make the same mistake twice.ā The student who loved learning the most was not the one who had mastered the most facts; he was the one whose character had been shaped most deeply by what heād learned. Confucius, The Analects, VI.3, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 81.
[>] āculture is innateā: Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 22.
[>] āfighting done by foolsā: This quotation is often attributed to Thucydides. Its real source seems to be a nineteenth-century British general, William Francis Butler. The original line reads: āThe nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.ā Butler, Charles George Gordon (London: Macmillan, 1892), 85.
[>] ānature of the subject allowsā: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1094b19-26 (emphasis added).
[>] āwe bring them backā: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 9ā10.
[>] āpeople love old truthsā: Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, RĆ©flexions et Maximes, trans. F. G. Stevens (London: Humphrey Milford, 1940), Ā§400.
[>] āset before our eyesā: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistle XCIV, in Moral Epistles, vol. 3, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917ā1925), 27ā29.
[>] āand tolerate other peopleā: Epictetus, Discourses, 3, 21, 4ā6. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 267.
[>] āmagnanimity, and trustā: Henry Thoreau, Walden (Philadelphia: Courage, 1990), 13.
[>] āface of the voidā: Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, trans. David Macey (New York: Penguin, 2009), 47.
LETTER 3: What Is Resilience?
[>] āheavily for their acquiringā: Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribnerās Sons, 1932), 192.
[>] āthrough these laborsā: Sophocles, Philoktetes, trans. Seth L. Schein (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2003), 85.
[>] āThe wounded man knows somethingā: Robert Bly, Iron John (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 32.
[>] āthe road through sufferingā: Quoted in Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 147.
[>] āWhatās done cannot be undoneā: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.1.71, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1998), 83.
[>] āstrong at the broken placesā: Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribnerās Sons, 1957), 249.
[>] āfree from freedomā: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 31.
[>] āor rather, all the differenceā: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1103b25ā26.
[>] āwho botch the businessā: Terry Eagleton, āThe Nature of Evil,ā Tikkun, Winter 2011, 80.
[>] āwhatever they might beā: Quoted in James C. Collins, Good to Great (New York: Harper Business, 2001), 85.
[>] āGive no groundā: In Richmond Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3.
[>] āExactly like it, just as roundā: In Guy Davenport, trans., Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 38.
LETTER 4: Beginning
[>] ādonāt let me f*** upā: Quoted in Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 198 (and still known as āShepardās Prayerā). However, Shepard himself later reported the quotation as, āDonāt f*** up, Shepard.ā
[>] ābeginning of philosophyā: Plato, Theatetus, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 155d.
[>] āone cannot feel tamelyā: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 141.
[>] āable to find those wordsā: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York: Norton, 1934), 27.
[>] āwisdom to know the differenceā: Deborah Galasso, Living Serenity (Cicero, NY: 5 Fold Media, 2014), 12.
[>] āreconciled to the uncontrollableā: Solomon ibn Gabirol, A Choice of Pearls, XVII, trans. Benjamin Henry Ascher (London: TrĆ¼bner and Co., 1859), 41.
[>] āsaying no to that situationā: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 83.
[>] āpurification of the motiveā: T. S. Eliot, āLittle Gidding,...