Stoic Week #4

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. My mother was a born Stoic, and so is my wife. Me, I was built half Stoic. Even when I was kid, I knew that greedy and out of control were not paths to happiness. I also knew I had to work on my hot-headed responses to problems if I wanted to think clearly, act wisely, worry less, and stay out of fussin' and fightin'. With age and Stoicism I’ve gotten better about self-control. But I still need to work on getting too irritated in traffic, letting work issues get to me, and worrying about the health of other people.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Stoic Role Models: The Japanese &William Faulkner

When I was working in an English department in Japan, I noticed with surprise Japanese scholars of American Lit had great interest in the twentieth-century writer William Faulkner. I thought his notorious difficulty would scare off non-native speakers. But after working in Japan a spell it dawned on me that some Japanese firmly believe that taking on challenges builds character.* That of course calls to mind Epictetus:

“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?” 

Faulkner simply resonates with some Japanese readers. Like Japanese novelists from Murasaki Shikibu to Murakami Haruki, Faulkner always tells you what the weather is doing and is prone to provide detailed descriptions of plants and birds and insects and landscapes. Faulkner loves the moon and nighttime darkness, as the Stoics and Epicureans liked sunrises. See Old Man. 

Like Seneca, Faulkner has a strong sense of the shortness of life** that is widely shared by the Japanese. Mono no aware (物の哀れ)  – the pathos of things – is a feeling that phenomena like cherry blossom, the sound of frogs and crickets, youth, autumn are beautiful because their beauty is short-lived, that earthly existence ends in frailty, death, dissolution, melancholy. The bittersweet sense that change is incessant, life is transient, and death inevitable is all over Faulkner's stories, for example, Aunt Jenny's visit to the graveyard in Sartoris.

For Faulkner, nature reflects a divine order to which rational creatures – that would be us – have duty to follow. The God of Order helps them that help themselves – i.e. we’re on our own - and chaos in the form of sickness, accident, misfortune, and malice will threaten our work – always - but we human beings like the Stoic Cash in As I Lay Dying are capable of rising above our own greed, anger, and fear. Cash did his best, their quest ended up in shit; it's better to do your best anyway, like the Stoic Archer, and focus on the process, not outcomes.

The Japanese are ones for putting up a good front even when one feels lousy and gloomy. Faulkner too implies we had better be cheerful. Beware the grim example of Jason Compson in The Sound and The Fury.  As a Stoic gone wrong, Jason is the most amoral, materialistic, and ornery person in the novel. Jason is comically perverse in his Stoic pessimism. He sees himself as the sole person in town who is sane and logical. He expects the worst of people and nature to be directed against him. He assumes no good can come to him, because its occurrence would show that Jason does not have a properly gloomy bead on the situation, which in his rationality he has identified. In appalling standup routines, he manages some bitter private humor that the worst he can negatively visualize does not come about when opportunity arises, since the dumbbells he must deal with are not endowed with such imagination or intelligence or energy that they can manage to come up with the worst that they can do. It's hilarious. 

Don't be a sour Stoic like Jason Compson, kids. Be of good cheer, it prevents the mind from falling into "depths of sorrow."

Faulkner has a powerful sense of the ethos gaman (我慢) and ganbaru (頑張る, stand firm). Originating in Japanese Zen – what a surprise - gaman means “enduring the unbearable with patience and dignity.” Ganbaru is doing your best tenaciously as long as you can do it. But gaman is enduring when you don’t have any tenacity left. This is from Light in August:

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

Faulkner died of a sudden heart attack at 64 in 1962, too young to experience what we often face nowadays - a feeble old age - but he understood the fortitude that refused to be downed by anxiety and depression about the prospect or reality of defeat and disability. The gaman sensibility is all over As I Lay Dying.

*Alan Watts rolled his eyes that some Japanese turned Zen meditation into mere body mortification. But some Japanese relish the self-torture of marathon training and standing under falls of freezing water. The pioneer reality show Takeshi’s Castle (1986 – 1990) was a monster hit when I was in Japan, and in fact, was the inspiration for Squid Game.

** “There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust – mortal - ” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned