The Kalends of The Thirties: The Rich Are Always with Us

Note: I think about names too much so I pondered the origin of the female name Malbro. I thought at first it was a compromise of mom’s Mallory and pop’s Brooke. But neither name was popular in the early 20^th century. Then, I thought it’s the cigarette, marketed to women in the late Twenties as a brand “Mild as May.” But given the character was born in 1910 the cigarette brand didn’t yet exist. Finally, the obvious struck me: Malbro is from Utah. But I had to reject that too because it lacks the final /ee/ sound and is not double-barreled as in Jersey Jo or Pixley Wren. So I’m at a loss.

The Rich Are Always with Us
1932 / 1:11
Tagline: “A daring story of reckless love and bankrupt morals”

I’d seen Ruth Chatterton only in the superb Dodsworth with Walter Huston, so I was curious to revisit her in The Rich Are Always with Us (1932), a glossy soap opera about wealthy New Yorkers who, lacking money worries, invent emotional ones.

Carolyn (Chatterton) is a devoted wife and one of the richest women in the city. After ten childless years of marriage, she still loves her husband Greg (John Miljan), a stockbroker diminished by the crash. His insecurity makes Carolyn mother him through his professional woes. Yet Greg, despite relying on her, imagines he loves Alyson (Adrienne Dore), a younger woman whose immaturity and jealousy suggest she enjoys the idea of hurting Carolyn. Everyone admires Carolyn as “a real lady,” a status Alyson covets but knows she’ll never achieve.

Enter Julian (George Brent), a foreign correspondent and novelist who has long loved Carolyn. She flirts lightly but resists him, fearing passion will topple her better angels: “You know perfectly well I can’t think when I’m in your arms.” Her loyalty to Greg keeps her dithering.

For comic relief, there’s 24-year-old Bette Davis as Malbro, a flighty socialite chasing Julian. Carolyn offers wry advice: “Pursue him to the point where he either proposes to you or shoots you. If he shoots you, your troubles are over. If he proposes, they’re just beginning.”

Malbro is an appealing mix of goofy teenage girl and determined adult woman. Nobody can predict if the next thing she says will be from the girl-savage or from the worldly-wise woman. Julian observes the world will be blessed the day Malbro learns to think before she speaks. As the comic relief, she gets the best lines. Here, she is horning in on the extension when Carolyn calls Julian from Paris:

Malbro: Far from loving Julian, I'm beginning to despise him. He's all flabby from not exercising and drinking too much. He's been running around with strange women.
Julian: She's a liar, darling! I've been to two parties in a month.
Malbro: I think he stays at home, smoking opium.
[laughs]
Malbro: He looks it anyhow!

The film plays like an inkblot test. Malbro may seem a sassy delight or a brat; Alyson, either immature or spiteful; Carolyn, either noble or indecisive. Brent is convincing as a patient, grown-up man, avoiding the heaviness typical of male leads of the era. Chatterton shines as a complex woman torn between duty and desire - dignified yet witty, with flashes of vulnerability.

With regard to the script, sometimes yesterday’s sophistication is today’s  puzzle. Could this be a reference to the modernist response to WWI, the loss of complacent certainty in the old pieties? Given Julian was born in 1900, he may have had dark thoughts in the aftermath of Verdun and the Somme ….

Carolyn: “Haven’t you got any morals at all?”
Julian: “Well, they began to ache when I was 16 so I had them pulled out.”

Visually, the film is a feast. The clothes are beautiful as are the cars (one might be an amazing 1933 Auburn 12-165). As for the sets, some drawing rooms look large enough to stable more than a couple of racehorses. It’s a portrait of privilege, but beneath the gloss lurks a question about shifting values in a world still reeling from war and economic collapse.

Stoic Week 2026 #7

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the annual exercise in discovering whether inner peace can survive contact with social media. Enrollment is free, which immediately distinguishes it from most routes to self-improvement. Having lost my teaching outlet when the pandemic throttled the program, I now possess an excess of pedagogical energy. Stoic Week provides a useful release valve. Otherwise, I’ll end up sitting on a boulder in the middle of campus dispensing life advice like a Greek oracle that has seen too many Charlie Chan movies. “Man who read comments section voluntarily enters mosquito swamp.”

If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins ofthe Children that serenity requires focus on what is up to you, Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, and Undertow that happiness requires self-knowledge, then The Fall Guy teaches that adversity itself is seldom the real danger. The real danger is abandoning honesty and sound judgment in an effort to escape adversity. Face bad news immediately. Problems grow larger when procrastination based on fear delays action. 

The Fall Guy (1930): A Stoic Reading

The Fall Guy belongs to that fascinating group of early talkies made when the Depression had settled in to become a harsh daily reality. Jobs vanish, debts multiply, and small lapses in judgment snowball into major problems. From a Stoic perspective, the film is a reminder that the hardship of economic downturns presents serious risks but the genuine danger lies in how we respond to unemployment and money worries.

Johnny Quinlan (Jack Mulhall), a drugstore clerk, loses his job through carelessness and then makes things worse by concealing the truth from his wife, Bertha (Mae Clarke). Like many husbands under pressure, Johnny fears his wife's disappointment, dismay, anger, and worry so much that he chooses avoidance instead. The Stoics regarded this as a classic mistake. Bad news is manageable; it’s not fair to a spouse that they are not told what’s going on.

Desperate for money, Johnny accepts help from bootlegger Nifty Herman. The loan quickly becomes a leash. Everyone warns Johnny to keep his distance, but he convinces himself that necessity excuses poor judgment. Epictetus would have recognized the pattern immediately: one compromise leads to another until a man finds himself carrying burdens he neither understands nor controls. The title is less about bad luck than about the consequences of surrendering one's judgment 

Living with the Quinlans is Bert's brother Danny, played by the terrific Ned Sparks. Danny is unemployed too, but unlike Johnny he has elevated joblessness into something resembling a profession. He spends his days torturing a saxophone with the same miserable tune, creating an accidental soundtrack for Depression life: the same worries repeated endlessly with no improvement in technique.

Like Jason Compson, Sparks is hilarious as a man whose pessimism has ripened into a lifestyle choice. Danny complains about everything, contributes almost nothing, and seems permanently offended that the universe continues to expect effort from him. One begins to suspect that the family's most effective austerity measure would be leaving him on the nearest curb with his saxophone.

Yet the film remains valuable as social history. Bert supports both her irresponsible husband and her impossible brother with a loyalty that borders on sainthood. Meanwhile, despite financial desperation, almost nobody seriously considers the possibility of her seeking work. Economic collapse may shake society, but gender expectations remain remarkably durable.

The picture also captures a moment when Prohibition had lost much of its moral authority. Nobody seems especially troubled that Nifty sells liquor. The concern is practical rather than ethical. Speakeasies attract trouble, federal agents, and occasionally funerals.

As cinema, The Fall Guy is often stiff and unmistakably early-talkie. But its Stoic lesson remains relevant: unemployment, poverty, and misfortune may be beyond our control, yet honesty, judgment, and self-command are not. Johnny's downfall comes less from losing his job than from refusing to face reality directly.

The movie may be modest entertainment, but it preserves a timeless truth. Hard times test character, and avoiding the truth generally creates more suffering than the truth itself. Even when the film creaks, that lesson still lands.

European Reading Challenge #10

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit

A nice story for hardcore readers like us and children, though hard-boiled American kids may be impatient with English niceness and period corniness The didactic intent is more apparent here than in Nesbit’s other stories such as The Phoenix and the Carpet or its prequel The Five Children and It.

First published in 1906 and set in 1905 in rural England, the novel tells the story of Roberta (Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter, three siblings, who suddenly find themselves forced to move out of a pretty London suburb after the mysterious departure of their father one terrible night.

This change from suburb to country is experienced by the siblings as a real adventure, because arriving at Three Chimneys, they find themselves for the first time very close to the train station. The Railway infrastructure - its bridges, carriages, tunnels and signal sheds  - fascinates the three children. Everything to do with trains comes to life in the minds and reality of the three protagonists, who are brought into contact with a varied collection of people – railway workers, passengers, doctors, porters, schoolboys and all sorts of people in trades.

The move means becoming poor, which their mother does her best to make neither the kids nor other people notice. They don’t become poor in the sense that they are precariously on the edge of the abyss: they always have enough to eat, even if they have to be very careful about “either butter or jam, never both butter and jam.” Like E. Nesbit herself, the brave noble mother of Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis has to write stories for weekly magazines and annuals to get food on the table and pay the cook and maid.

Edith Nesbit must have had a wonderful mind to write the way she wrote. Her style is vivid, spontaneous, fresh and extremely fluent. I especially appreciated the metaphors that enrich the descriptions.

    They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.

    “Oh!” said Roberta, drawing a long breath; “it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?”

    “I suppose a dragon’s lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,” said Phyllis.

As in the other books, the author will digress to confide in the reader. She’ll bust through that fourth wall, asking us unsociable and end-gaining post-moderns to see where our heroes Roberta, Phillys and Peter are coming from, as they worry so deeply about not hurting those who are close, about doing everyone a loving-kindness, without keeping score and without becoming prigs about it.

The happy ending will make most readers misty but just as touching is the Edwardian optimism that the world really is getting better, richer, healthier. Kind of melancholy too, our knowing that born in 1895 Peter is just the age in 1915/16 to be one of thousands of officers and squaddies whose life expectancy was about a year and a half in the trenches.

Happy Halloween

Dead on Arrival: A Field Guide to Teenage Death Songs

Teen tragedy records were essentially ancient folk ballads dressed in the clothing of postwar youth culture. Where earlier ballads told of drowned maidens, dead soldiers, and ill-fated lovers, the records of the early 1960s substituted hot rods, railroad crossings, motorcycles, and high-school romance. They transformed traditional narratives of youthful death into a commercial pop genre aimed directly at teenagers.

Like ghost stories, urban legends, and cautionary tales, teenage death songs allowed young listeners to rehearse fears about love, separation, sex, and mortality within the safe confines of a three-minute pop record. Their melodrama often seems excessive today, but it reflected genuine anxieties surrounding a generation experiencing unprecedented freedom, mobility, and risk of automobile fatalities.

Here are the classics:

Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots – The Cheers (1955)

Lieber and Stoller play the genre for laughs before it was even a genre by telling the story of a motorcycle rebel who dies in a high-speed crash, to the dismay of his ignored GF inevitably named Mary Lou.

Endless Sleep – Jody Reynolds (1958)

This rockabilly song is about a girl who walks into the ocean after a lovers' quarrel. A deep Southern darkness hangs over it, drawn from the same abyss that Dock Boggs had the courage to gaze into and name.

Teen Angel – Mark Dinning (1960)

Goosebumps for sure as a love-struck girl runs back onto railroad tracks to retrieve a ring and learns, in the most dramatic way possible, that jewelry is replaceable. Once, I saw police photographs of a man struck by a train. It is an image that has haunted me ever since, one I would give much to unsee.

Tell Laura I Love Her – Ray Peterson (1960)

It doesn’t get more sentimental than this tale of a boy who enters a stock-car race to win money for an engagement ring and dies in a fiery crash. I seem to recall dimly this song was popular when The Twist was a hit, which was the song that got me interested in listening to the radio all the time, to my parents’ consternation.

Laurie (Strange Things Happen) – Dickey Lee (1965)
Patches – Dickey Lee (1962)

Lee took multiple stabs in the genre. In Laurie, the somewhat awkward lyrics get across a story in which a boy dates a girl who turns out to have died a year earlier. Patches is much more effective lyrically; I still get torn up by the lines “pretty Patches there watchin' the door” and “floating face down in that dirty old river.” This song should not be confused with the sad inspiring song Patches with the immortal lines “Then one day a strong rain came | And washed all the crops away.”

Ebony Eyes – The Everly Brothers (1961)

Count on the Irish to be restrained but devastating in their treatment of a plane crash that separates lovers. That this great song is much less remembered than the inferior Wake Up Little Suzy makes me despise popular taste. In case you've not noticed, I’ve eaten for breakfast disdain for popularity - my own or anybody else's - since I was about ten.

Leader of the Pack – The Shangri-Las (1964)

I was eight when one of the era's greatest records was released. My friends and I thought the motorcycle crash that followed the lovers' rebellion against her parents was a hoot. We laughed at the doomed devotion of "Look out! Look out! Look out!" as children often do, with the effortless cruelty of the innocent. Only later did I recognize the shadow moving beneath the story: youth rushing headlong toward fate, love colliding with death on a dark stretch of road. Lawsy, what little monsters we were.

Johnny Remember Me – John Leyton (1961)

A dead girl's ghost calls to her lover but the realistic singer - an phlegmatic Englishman probably - figures “Well some day I guess I'll find myself another little girl To take the place of my true love.” Corny and eerie at the same time, which doesn’t happen very often.

Last Kiss - J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers 1964

The record's plainspoken sincerity is exactly why it works. No ghosts, no stock-car races, no doomed motorcycle rebels. Just young love, bad luck, and one of pop music's most efficient emotional sucker punches. Even listeners who spend most of the song rolling their eyes may find themselves surprisingly misty-eyed by “… she smiled and said Hold me darling for a little while.”

These form My Best Of List of teen tragedy records. They're melodramatic, earnest, and often unintentionally funny in our 2026, but they're also strangely moving. It seems such a long time ago, teenagers sniffling over 45-rpm records about train wrecks, car crashes, and doomed romances.

Stoic Week 2026 #6

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, a free online program devoted to the radical proposition that not every irritation requires a passionate reaction. Since my teaching career was collateral damage in the pandemic era, D. H. Lawrence’s “passion of instruction” remains sadly unemployed. If left unchecked, it may force me into the quad where I’ll offer unsolicited lectures under a cardboard sign reading, “Ask me about the Royal Order of Adjectives.”

A life that suits someone else may not suit you. Know your nature before making choices that shape your future. If Bad Girl teaches that strength requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires questioning first impressions, The Sins of the Children that tranquility requires letting go what is not up to you, and Parole Girl that character can be rebuilt through habit, then Undertow teaches that happiness depends on honest self-knowledge. Many short-lived marriages begin when people fall in love with an idealized version of themselves or the SO rather than the person they actually are.

Undertow (1930): A Stoic Reading

"Know thyself" is the lesson at the heart of Undertow , a Pre-Code melodrama that understands how badly a life can go wrong when people mistake fantasy for self-knowledge.

The film opens with lifeguard Paul (Johnny Mack Brown) rescuing a child and winning the admiration of Sally (Mary Nolan), a city woman who claims she longs for the simplicity of life in a remote lighthouse. Paul, raised on the Georgia coast, believes her. Sally believes herself. Both are mistaken.

Three years later, they are married with a daughter and living in isolation. Paul is content because the lighthouse suits his nature. Sally is miserable. The endless waves, wind, and solitude that once seemed romantic now feel like imprisonment. She craves stimulation, company, and city life. What she imagined she wanted and what she actually needed turn out to be very different things.

From a Stoic perspective, Sally's mistake is not marrying Paul but failing to understand herself beforehand. Epictetus repeatedly warned against pursuing an imagined good without examining whether it truly fits one's nature. Sally falls in love with an idea: the noble lighthouse keeper, the lonely coast, the escape from crowds. She never asks whether she is actually suited for such a life.

Paul has his own blind spot. Because solitude comforts him, he cannot understand why it torments his wife. His failure is not cruelty but a lack of perception. He assumes that what brings him peace should bring peace to everyone. Like many Stoic cautionary examples, both husband and wife suffer from false judgments about reality.

The film becomes a study of what happens when people resist reality rather than seeing it clearly. Sally grows resentful and restless. Paul remains bewildered. Meanwhile, her rejected former fiancé Jim Payne quietly nurtures a grudge and uses his influence to prolong their unhappiness. Everyone becomes trapped by emotions they seem unable to examine head on.

The melodrama eventually escalates into blindness, revenge, and romantic conflict, with the neglected three-year-old child forgotten by both the characters and the screenplay. Yet beneath the overheated plot lies an interesting psychological insight. Sally is not wicked. She is self-deceived.

Mary Nolan gives the film's strongest performance, portraying a woman slowly realizing that she has built her life around a profound misunderstanding of her own temperament. The lighthouse itself becomes a symbol of that error: what once looked like freedom becomes a prison because it was chosen without self-knowledge.

The Stoic lesson is simple but enduring. Happiness depends not on romantic dreams or dramatic escapes but on understanding one's nature and living in accordance with it. Had Sally known herself, she would never have chosen a life she was fundamentally incapable of enjoying.

The tragedy of Undertow is not that Sally married the wrong man. It's that she never truly knew herself before making one of the most important decisions of her life.

Stoic Week 2026 #5

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, an annual opportunity to spend seven days practicing equanimity while the world does everything in its power to make that difficult. It’s online, free, and lacks the unpleasant side effects associated with retail therapy. As I no longer teach, the instructional impulse has become a hungry ghost searching for a body. Without Stoic Week, I risk becoming one of those campus eccentrics who corners strangers and begins sentences with, “Trousers, tongs, bangs – tell me more nouns that exist only in the plural form.”

If Bad Girl teaches that courage requires vulnerability, Flaming Gold that wisdom requires examining impressions, and The Sins of the Children that peace of mind requires distinguishing what is up to us and what is not, then Parole Girl teaches that virtue is a skill. People become better not through wishes, reading, or atonement alone, but through the difficult daily work of making better choices until those choices become second nature. The Fight Club reference at the end actually fits the Stoic point nicely: real moral improvement is usually quiet, incremental, and unglamorous. The work happens internally, one choice at a time, long before anyone notices the result.

Parole Girl (1933): A Stoic Reading

This movie sounds like a crime melodrama but seen through a modern Stoic lens, Parole Girl is story about moral reform. Its central question is one that would have interested Epictetus: can someone whose habits have been shaped by bad choices become a better person through reasoned action and self-discipline?

Sylvia Day (Mae Clarke) begins as a participant in fraud, but Stoicism distinguishes between a person's mistakes and their character. Her wrongdoing stems from misplaced loyalty to Tony Grattan, a con man who once helped her family. Like many of Mae Clarke heroines, Sylvia's problem is not a lack of virtue but virtue misdirected. Loyalty without judgment becomes a vice.

Even her prison scheme to secure parole reveals this conflict. The deception is real, yet so is her desire for respectability. Likewise, her hostility toward insurance investigator Joe Smith grows from wounded pride and resentment at being permanently defined by past mistakes. She feels condemned by appearances rather than judged by who she might become.

As the story unfolds, the real struggle becomes internal. Sylvia enters Joe's life intending manipulation, but continual exposure to decency slowly alters her own conduct. The Stoics believed character is formed through repeated choices. We become honest by acting honestly, courageous by practicing courage, and just by making fair decisions. Ironically, Sylvia develops these habits while merely pretending to be an honest wife. What begins as performance gradually becomes reality.

This transformation elevates the film above its often implausible plotting. When Sylvia refuses to join Jeanie Vance's blackmail scheme, she demonstrates something she lacked at the outset: moral discernment. No longer choosing between self-interest and loyalty, she chooses between right and wrong. 

One of the film's strengths is its refusal to treat redemption as a sudden conversion. Sylvia does not become good because she falls in love. Rather, love becomes possible because she changes her character. The ending suggests not rescue through romance but the achievement of self-respect through better judgment.

Much of the film's success rests on Mae Clarke. With her severe haircut and tough demeanor, she projects both resilience and vulnerability. She never asks audiences to excuse Sylvia's conduct, but she encourages them to understand it. Clarke captures a deeply Stoic insight: people should not be reduced to their worst actions.

Director Edward F. Cline handles the material with surprising economy and toughness. Though the plot depends on coincidences, the emotional logic remains convincing because the focus stays on character rather than mechanics. Ralph Bellamy also benefits from a role more complex than the agreeable romantics he later specialized in.

Ultimately, Parole Girl understands a truth central to Stoicism: human beings are works in progress. Bad choices can damage character, but better choices can repair it. Redemption is neither automatic nor impossible. It is the gradual work of making actions consistent with principles until virtue becomes habit and self-respect follows. Like doing mindfulness meditation, however, this kind of inner work is not something you talk about unless your interlocutor also belongs to a fight club.

Stoic Week 2026 #4

Note: This week is Stoic Week 2026, the yearly invitation to test whether your troubles shrink when viewed from the perspective of eternity. It’s free, online, and costs substantially less than angrily refreshing the news every fifteen minutes. Since I no longer have students upon whom to inflict learning points, I need somewhere to redirect what D. H. Lawrence called “the passion of instruction” before campus security finds me conducting impromptu seminars on collective nouns.

The Stoics were Socratics so they urged “Moderation in all things.” Managing our unhelpful thoughts and feelings is crucial if we want to experience serenity and deal with the inevitable sufferings of life. This is also crucial because our unhelpful cognitive silliness and craziness will literally break our hearts.

The Influence of the Mind on the Body (1908)

Paul Dubois The Influence of the Mind on the Body is one of the earliest and most influential attempts to explain how thoughts, emotions, and beliefs affect physical health. Writing as a Swiss neurologist and psychiatrist in 1908, Dubois challenged the prevailing medical view that mind and body operated as separate realms. His central argument was simple but far-reaching: many physical symptoms are shaped, intensified, or sustained by patterns of thought, particularly fear, anxiety, and suggestion.

Viewed today, the book reads almost like a bridge between medicine and Stoicism.

Dubois observed that patients frequently worsen their suffering by dwelling on symptoms or interpreting ordinary bodily sensations as signs of catastrophe. Fear creates vigilance, vigilance creates anxiety, and anxiety amplifies physical discomfort. He argued that both external suggestion, from physicians, family, and society, and internal suggestion, from one's own worries and expectations, can have profound effects on health. As a result, treatment should address not only disease but also the patient's beliefs about disease.

His preferred method, sometimes called "moral therapy," relied less on drugs than on conversation, education, and the correction of harmful thought patterns. The physician's task was to help patients replace fear with understanding and uncertainty with rational judgment. In essence, Dubois sought to teach patients how to govern their own minds.

Modern science has largely vindicated his intuition. While Dubois lacked the language of modern neuroscience, endocrinology, and immunology, contemporary research confirms that mental and physical processes are deeply interconnected. Chronic stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, elevating cortisol levels and contributing to inflammation, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders, and metabolic dysfunction. What Dubois called worry and anxiety are now understood as physiological events that affect the entire body.

His insights regarding expectation have also been remarkably durable. The placebo effect demonstrates that belief can produce measurable changes in pain perception, brain chemistry, and physical functioning. Neuroimaging studies reveal that expectations alter activity in specific brain networks, lending scientific support to Dubois's claim that suggestion can create genuine bodily effects.

Perhaps the modern discipline most closely aligned with Dubois is cognitive behavioral therapy. Like CBT, his approach focused on identifying distorted beliefs, challenging unhelpful assumptions, and cultivating more balanced interpretations of experience. Although less systematic than contemporary psychotherapy, Dubois anticipated many of its central principles decades before the field formally emerged.

The connection to Stoicism is equally striking. Epictetus taught that people are disturbed not by events themselves but by their judgments about those events. Dubois repeatedly arrives at a similar conclusion. Patients often suffer not only from symptoms but from the fear, interpretations, and expectations attached to those symptoms. In both systems, the path toward relief begins with examining one's judgments.

Stoicism and Dubois share the conviction that tranquility depends upon distinguishing between what is and what we imagine. Both emphasize rational self-examination, disciplined attention to thought, and resistance to catastrophic thinking. A Stoic confronting illness seeks to judge symptoms accurately rather than emotionally. Dubois encouraged precisely the same habit. His efforts to teach patients calm interpretation, rather than fearful speculation, closely resemble Stoic exercises in cognitive reframing.

Not surprisingly, Dubois even prescribed reading Seneca* to some patients. He recognized that Stoic philosophy offered practical tools for reducing anxiety and restoring perspective. Practices such as monitoring internal dialogue, accepting uncertainty, and focusing on what lies within one's control complement his therapeutic methods almost perfectly.

There are differences. The Stoics pursued virtue and inner freedom as the highest goals of life, while Dubois was primarily interested in improving health and reducing suffering. Yet both arrive at a shared insight: the mind is an active participant in shaping experience and that shaping has an effect on health and well-being.

______

* Judgmentex® – Corrects errors in thinking before they become errors in living. Equanimitol® – Restores calm by lowering the body's exposure to needless alarm. Ask your philosopher whether Seneca is right for you. Do not read Seneca if you are allergic to personal responsibility.