22It is because of Yahweh’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. 23They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. 24“Yahweh is my portion,” says my soul. “Therefore I will hope in him.” 25Yahweh is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. 26It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of Yahweh. 27It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. 28Let him sit alone and keep silence, because he has laid it on him. 29Let him put his mouth in the dust, if it is so that there may be hope. 30Let him give his cheek to him who strikes him. Let him be filled full of reproach. 31For the Lord will not cast off forever. 32For though he causes grief, yet he will have compassion according to the multitude of his loving kindnesses. 33For he does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.
These words come from a man sitting in the ruins of everything he knew, and yet he chooses to name what has not run out. The passage suggests that hope is less a feeling than a practice of remembering, renewed each morning like a task that must be picked up again. It also allows for honest sorrow, admitting that hard seasons are real without insisting they are permanent. Waiting quietly, it says, can be its own kind of strength.
If somebody sharply bids you take Crispinus' scrapers to the bath, and then abuses you as a lazy scoundrel, no strict bond of slavery, certainly, bids you stir, no force from without comes in to move your muscles; but if masters grow up within, in that sickly bosom of yours, how do you get oft scot-free any more than the man who was sent off to fetch the scrapers by the terror of his master's whip?
G. G. Ramsay, 1918
Persius (34–62 AD) was a wealthy Etruscan knight who studied under the Stoic Annaeus Cornutus and died at about twenty-seven, leaving only six short satires. After his death, Cornutus is said to have trimmed the poems and handed them to Persius's friend Caesius Bassus to publish. They then survived through medieval manuscripts, and Satire 5 is Persius's tribute to Cornutus, with a long Stoic argument that only the wise are free.
Persius takes the old Stoic paradox that most of us are slaves and gives it a bathhouse scene. A slave who runs errands because he fears the whip is no different from a free man ruled by appetite, fear or craving. The difference is that the free man's masters live inside him, so nobody else can see them and he is slow to admit they are there. Most of us have a boss we never voted for: the urge to check the phone, to snap back, to buy something, or to hit snooze.
PracticeToday, name the inner master each time you feel yourself pushed. Say quietly to yourself, "That is craving" or "That is fear." Then, once, decline to obey it for ten minutes and see what happens.
A family glassmaker risked a fortune on a process nobody could prove would work. Then it licensed the result to its competitors.
Until the 1950s, good flat glass was expensive. Molten glass was rolled into sheets, and the sheets were then ground and polished on both sides until they were clear and undistorted. That took huge machines, a lot of energy and a lot of waste. Cheaper sheet glass existed, but it was wavy, and you could see it in shop windows and car windscreens.
In 1952 Alastair Pilkington, an engineer at Pilkington Brothers of St Helens, hit on a different idea. He was no relation to the family that owned the firm. Pour the molten glass onto a bath of molten tin. It spreads out and goes flat under its own weight, and both faces come out smooth enough to need no polishing. Making that work at industrial scale was another matter. Pilkington later said the principle sounds simple, but it took seven years and £4 million before the firm could make any saleable glass. The total reached £7 million before the process could replace plate glass. For a family-controlled company, that was a very large wager on a single process.
The process was announced on 20 January 1959, and the first full-scale profitable sales came in 1960. Pilkington then did something that looks odd for a firm with a breakthrough. It licensed the process to the world's leading flat-glass makers, and the licences began in the early 1960s. Royalties repaid the development bill. The licences also required licensees to keep the technique secret, and they tied the whole industry to Pilkington's design. The firm had a near-monopoly on the technology, because it owned all but one of the float plants then operating worldwide.
The design outlasted the patents, which expired by the early 1980s. Today roughly 90 percent of the world's flat glass is made this way.
RememberPilkington spent seven years and £7 million on one process, then licensed it to its rivals, and the royalties repaid the cost.
Read nextTheodore C. Barker, The Making of a Glass Empire: Pilkington Brothers (see also Pilkington's own lecture on the float process)
Source: Wikipedia: Alastair Pilkington; Pilkington (company); Encyclopaedia Britannica on float glass