Stoicism

NOTES ON JACKIE O.'S FUNERAL

If a stoic were to visit us, he would feel represented by the following poem. To many (sophisticated) lovers of poetry, one of the greatest poets who ever breathed is C. P. Cavafy. Cavafy was an Alexandrian Greek civil servant with a Turkish or Arabic last name who wrote almost a century ago in a combination of classical and modern Greek a lean poetry that seems to have eluded the last fifteen centuries of Western literature. Greeks treasure him like their national monument. Most of his poems take place in Syria (his Grecosyrian poems initially drew me to him), Asia Minor, and Alexandria. Many people believe it worth learning formal semi-classical Greek just to savor his poems. Somehow their acute aestheticism stripped of sentimentality provides a relief from centuries of mawkishness in poetry and drama. He provides a classical relief for those of us who were subjected to the middle-class-valued melodrama as represented by Dickens’s novels, romantic poetry, and Verdi’s operas.

I was surprised to hear that Maurice Tempelsman, last consort of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, read Cavafy’s valedictory "Apoleipein o Theos Antonion" ("The God Abandons Antony") at her funeral. The poem addresses Marc Antony, who has just lost the battle against Octavius and was forsaken by Bacchus, the god who until then had protected him. It is one of the most elevating poems I have ever read, beautiful because it was the epitome of such dignified aestheticism—and because of the gentle but edifying tone of the voice of the narrator advising a man who had just received a crushing reversal of fortune.

The poem addresses Antony, now defeated and betrayed (according to legend, even his horse deserted him to go to his enemy Octavius). It asks him to just bid her farewell, Alexandria the city that is leaving him. It tells him not to mourn his luck, not to enter denial, not to believe that his ears and eyes are deceiving him. Antony, do not degrade yourself with empty hopes. Antony,

Just listen while shaken by emotion but not with the coward’s imploration and complaints.

While shaken with emotion. No stiff upper lip. There is nothing wrong and undignified with emotions—we are cut to have them. What is wrong is not following the heroic or, at least, the dignified path. That is what stoicism truly means. It is the attempt by man to get even with probability. I need not be nasty at all and break the spell of the poem and its message, but I cannot resist some cynicism. A couple of decades later, Cavafy, while dying of throat cancer, did not quite follow the prescription. Deprived of his voice by the surgeons, he used to randomly enter undignified spells of crying and cling to his visitors, preventing them from leaving his death room.

Some history. I said that stoicism has rather little to do with the stiff-upper-lip notion that we believe it means. Started as an intellectual movement in antiquity by a Phoenician Cypriot, Zeno of Kition, it developed by Roman time into a life based on a system of virtues—in the ancient sense when virtue meant virtu, the sort of belief in which virtue is its own reward. There developed a social model for a stoic person, like the gentlemen in Victorian England. Its tenets can be summarized as follows: The stoic is a person who combines the qualities of wisdom, upright dealing, and courage. The stoic will thus be immune from life’s gyrations as he will be superior to the wounds from some of life’s dirty tricks. But things can be carried to the extreme; the stern Cato found it beneath him to have human feelings. A more human version can be read in Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, a soothing and surprisingly readable book that I distribute to my trader friends (Seneca also took his own life when cornered by destiny).