19So, then, my beloved brothers, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; 20for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God. 21Therefore, putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with humility the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. 22But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves. 23For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror; 24for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and continues, not being a hearer who forgets, but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does.
This passage pairs patience with action. It suggests that most of our trouble comes from reacting too quickly and speaking before we have understood. Hearing good counsel is the easy part, and the harder part is letting it change what we do on an ordinary Tuesday. The image of glancing at yourself and then forgetting what you saw is an honest picture of how easily insight fades without practice.
How could we become prudent if we had learned what is truly good and what is truly bad, but had never practised despising the things that only seem good? So when we have learned the lessons that belong to each virtue, training in practice must always follow, if we hope to gain anything from what we have learned. And this practice matters more for the student of philosophy than for the student of medicine or any similar craft, because philosophy claims to be a greater and harder discipline than any other. Those who enter other professions have not had their souls corrupted beforehand. Those who set out to study philosophy have been born and raised among corruption and vice, and so they come to virtue needing a longer and more thorough training.
Translated for Dalton Daily
Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic teacher of the first century AD. He wrote nothing himself, and his lectures survive as notes taken by a student, Lucius, mostly through excerpts preserved by the anthologist Stobaeus. Epictetus attended his classes.
Most of us know better than we behave. We know what matters, and we still reach for the phone, snap at someone we love, or chase the thing that only looks good. Musonius says knowing is only the first half, and that character is built by repetition, as a body is. He also doesn't pretend we start from a clean slate. We were raised among bad habits, so changing will take longer than reading a good idea once.
PracticePick one thing that only seems good and that you reach for out of habit, such as a snack, a scroll through the news, or a bit of gossip. Today, notice the urge each time it comes and decline it at least once on purpose. Tonight, write down how many times you managed it.
A short Spanish book from 1554 invented the rogue narrator, and its author has never been identified.
Outside Salamanca, at the entrance to a bridge, stood a worn granite beast that looked a little like a bull. In 1554 a short book put it at the center of one of the most famous scenes in Spanish prose. A blind beggar tells his new boy, Lázaro, to press his ear to the statue and listen to the noise inside. The boy does, and the man slams his head into the stone. Then comes the lesson: a blind man's servant must stay a step ahead of the devil. Lázaro says the pain lasted three days.
That is the style of La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. It is blunt and deadpan, and it is told by the victim in the first person. Lázaro writes as an adult, and he reports each humiliation with a straight face. He stays with the blind man until the day he walks the old man into a stone pillar. He then serves a priest so stingy that Lázaro swaps a loaf for a key to the bread chest, and later a squire too proud to eat. Each master is a type, with his own hypocrisy.
Anonymous editions appeared in 1554 in Burgos, Alcalá de Henares, Medina del Campo and Antwerp. The Inquisition listed the book in 1559 because it mocked clergy. In 1573 an edition appeared with whole chapters cut, and an unabridged text did not circulate in Spain until the nineteenth century. Scholars have proposed several authors, but none has been proved.
The word pícaro, meaning rogue, never appears in the book, yet the book gave the picaresque novel its pattern. The pattern is a low-born narrator, a string of masters, and society seen from below. Later writers copied it, and Don Quixote's Spain was full of its descendants.
RememberLazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554, turned a hungry servant's deadpan memoir into a new kind of novel.
Read nextAnonymous, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (free at Project Gutenberg, translated by Clements Markham)
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Project Gutenberg text of Lazarillo de Tormes