Bion of Borysthenes.

Bion of Borysthenes. I was unaware of the existence of this philosopher; I didn't even remember ever hearing or reading about him. And now that I am reading Montaigne's Essays, I felt like searching for something related to him. And why Montaigne? Because this author mentions the philosopher Bion on a few occasions. A particularity of Montaigne is that in his work he mentions many characters and events; there, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Pyrrhonists, and humanists coexist—that is, a plurality of voices even though he was, or at least is recognized as, a skeptic. That mix is no coincidence, but a mosaic that reinforces his skepticism: if so many philosophies contradict each other, none can claim absolute truth.

Biography. Who was Bion of Borysthenes?

Entry with the biography in J. Ferrater Mora's Dictionary of Philosophy.
BION OF BORYSTHENES (fl. 230 BC), a student in Athens of the Academic Crates (whose doctrines he harshly criticized), of the Cyrenaic Theodorus, and of the Peripatetic Theophrastus, adhered to Cynicism, which he popularized, especially through the introduction of the literary form known as the diatribe. According to Diogenes Laërtius (IV, 53), Bion of Borysthenes—who had been the slave of a rhetoric master—was distinguished by his literary skill and especially by his brilliant parodies. Now, Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one. Consequently, Bion—like his imitator, Teles, and like Menippus of Gadara—almost completely abandoned the old Cynic idea of effort and the hardening of the wise man to give Cynic life that rhetorical, skeptical, and realistic tone that prevailed during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Horace followed and imitated some of the literary forms developed by Bion.
J. P. Rossignol, Fragmenta Bionis Borysthenitae philosophi, Lutetiae, 1830 and F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, II, 423 et seq. — On Bion: J. M. Hoogvliet, De vita, doctrina et scriptis Bionis, 1821. — Art. by H. von Arnim on Bion (Bion, 10) in Pauly-Wissowa.

The bronze head of a philosopher was recovered in 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck. It was part of a life-size statue of the man. Date of creation: between the 3rd century BC and 1st century BC. It is not certain that it represents the figure of the philosopher Bion, although it is the main hypothesis most cited by art historiography. The sculpture—formally known in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens as the Philosopher of Antikythera (3rd century BC)—does not retain any inscription confirming who it is. Therefore, the attribution to Bion of Borysthenes is a probable attribution, but not a definitive one.

•    The Bion of Borysthenes hypothesis: It is the most accepted identification by various archaeologists due to the features of the portrait: an expressive face of maturity, a thick combed beard, and unkempt hair that fit the stylistic profile of Cynic philosophers (the movement to which Bion belonged).
•    Other possible attributions: Over the decades, other specialists have proposed that the portrait could represent the Cynic Antisthenes or contemporary orators/philosophers of the Hellenistic period.

Links.
•    https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Antikythera_philosopher.JPG
•    The Bronze Head of Antikythera – A Late Classical or Very Early Hellenistic Masterpiece? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349657262_The_Bronze_Head_of_Antikythera_-_A_Late_Classical_or_Very_Early_Hellenistic_Masterpiece
•    http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=5564

Bion in Montaigne's Text. He mentions Bion. "And the philosopher Bion, speaking of that king who pulled out his hair in grief, was he not witty when he said: 'Does this man think that baldness relieves grief?' Who has not seen people chew and swallow playing cards, or gorge themselves on a bag of dice, to have something on which to avenge the loss of money?" Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter IV. How the soul discharges its passions upon false objects when true ones fail it.
This passage belongs to Chapter IV of Book I of the Essays, and he quotes it just as he is building a broader argument: that the soul, when overwhelmed by passion, needs to discharge itself onto something, and if it does not find the true object (the real cause of grief or anger), it invents a false one just so as not to be left with an unreleased passion. The king pulling his hair out, the gambler biting cards: they are not reasoning; they are acting out emotion on whatever surface is available.
Why Montaigne quotes him. The entire chapter is an accumulation of examples—Caligula wanting to destroy the world over his sister's death, Xerxes lashing the sea, Cyrus taking revenge on a river—that all point to the same thing: passion does not obey reason; it seeks an object even if that object is absurd or non-existent as a real cause. Montaigne is not assembling a systematic thesis (that would be the Stoic approach); he is stacking concrete cases to undermine, through empirical accumulation, the claim that human beings govern their affections with reason.
The connection with skepticism. That is the Pyrrhonian nerve of the essay. The Stoics maintained that reason could—and should—master passion. Montaigne uses these examples as evidence to the contrary: if even kings and philosophers end up biting dice or tearing out their hair, reason does not have the control attributed to it. It is not a frontal attack with a deductive argument; it is the typical technique of the essai: testing the idea with cases, not syllogisms, and letting the accumulation of anecdotes generate doubt. Montaignian skepticism does not say "this is false"; it says "look how much evidence there is that we do not know what we think we know about ourselves." It is failed self-knowledge put on display, not refuted by logic, but by observation.
Bion's specific Cynicism. Bion of Borysthenes was an itinerant philosopher with Cynic training (and also touched by Academic skepticism), famous for his biting diatribes. The phrase about baldness is Cynicism in its purest state: it takes a conventional and "noble" gesture—mourning, tearing out hair as a sign of genuine grief—and reduces it to its absurd literalness. That is the Cynic method: deflating pretension through sharp irony, showing the gap between what the gesture claims to mean and what it actually does.
Why Montaigne turns to Bion and not another. Because Cynicism and skepticism, although starting from different places, function as rhetorical allies: neither builds a positive system; both are corrosive to self-complacency—the Cynic through direct mockery of convention, the skeptic through methodical suspension of judgment. Montaigne, who distrusts any discourse that claims to own the truth about the human soul, finds in Bion's joke a perfect tool: there is no need to refute the Stoic with another treatise; a single phrase exposing the ridiculousness of the gesture is enough. It is exactly his own method on a minimal scale—the Cynic aphorism as a miniature of the skeptical essay. The skeptical essay operates by dismantling absolute certainties through exploration, systematic doubt, and argumentative detours. When that same impulse toward suspicion undergoes maximum condensation, the result is the Cynic aphorism: not a dogmatic maxim seeking to establish a truth, but a quick thrust aimed at dismantling an illusion.

He mentions Bion: "My spirit was always on that side. All things considered, it takes more effort to guard money than to earn it. If I did not do quite as much as I say, at least it cost me an effort to avoid doing it. I derived little or no profit from it. Having more spending capacity did not make it weigh any less heavily on me. For, as Bion used to say, the hairy man gets just as angry as the bald man if his hair is pulled; and once you have accustomed yourself and fixed your fantasy upon a certain pile, it ceases to be at your service. You would not dare diminish it. It is a building that, so it seems to you, will completely collapse if you touch anything. Necessity will have to grab you by the throat for you to reduce it. And previously, I used to pawn my rags and sell a horse far less forcibly and reluctantly than what then made a dent in this favorite purse, which I kept aside. But the danger lay in the fact that one can hardly establish safe limits to this desire—they are hard to find in things believed to be good—and fix a boundary to saving. One continues to enlarge the pile, increasing it from one number to another, until vilely depriving oneself of the enjoyment of one's own goods, basing everything on custody, and not using them. According to this form of use, the richest people in the world are those in charge of guarding the gates and walls of a fine city. Every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious. Plato thus ranks bodily or human goods: health, beauty, strength, wealth. And wealth, he says, is not blind, but very clear-sighted when illuminated by prudence." Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter XL. That the taste of goods and evils depends in large part on our opinion.
This passage is central to Chapter XL because Montaigne is not talking about money in general, but illustrating his thesis: that pleasure and pain do not reside in things themselves, but in the opinion and habit we project onto them. Bion's anecdote is the argumentative hinge of the whole fragment.
Who Bion is and why he quotes him. Bion of Borysthenes is a curious figure: he passed through the Academy, through hedonistic Cyrenaicism, and ended up fixed in the Cynic orbit through Crates (a pupil of Diogenes). He left no system of his own; he left a style—the diatribe, the sharp aphorism, the maxim that strikes without constructing doctrine. Montaigne almost certainly takes him via Plutarch (who collects the same image in On the Love of Wealth), and it serves him perfectly because Montaigne himself proceeds in this way: he does not cite authorities to ground a system, but to "essay" a personal intuition using borrowed material.
The logic of the aphorism (bald/hairy). Bion's point is of almost behavioral precision: the pain of loss is not proportional to the amount one possesses, but to the mental fixation (the "fantasy," as Montaigne says) placed upon it. It hurts the bald man just as much to have his only lock of hair pulled as it does the hairy man to lose one out of a thousand. This is what Montaigne finds in himself: he loses a horse with less anguish or pawns clothes—things he never "accumulated" with attachment—than touching his "favorite purse," precisely because that purse became a symbolic building, not an objective sum.
The skeptical link. There lies the Pyrrhonian heart of the chapter. The title itself—that the taste of goods and evils depends on our opinion—is a classic skeptical thesis: nothing is by nature (physei) good or bad, pleasant or painful; it becomes so by custom and judgment (nomos, doxa). The Pyrrhonists (Sextus Empiricus being the underlying source) held that opposing appearances have equal force (isosthenia) and that suffering arises from dogmatically adhering to the belief that a certain thing "is" valuable. Bion's example is almost a skeptical thought experiment in miniature: it shows that pain does not follow the real magnitude of the loss, but the fixed belief about the object. Montaigne does not say "saving is bad"; he suspends judgment on the objective value of money and demonstrates that suffering is an artifact of the mind, not a property of the thing.
The Cynic link. But the passage does not remain solely within epistemic relativity: it has a moral edge that is purely Cynic. The final paradox—that the richest people in the world are, strictly in terms of use, the guards who watch over the gates and walls of a city—is an inversion in the style of Diogenes: the person who "possesses" actually serves what is possessed; ownership does not liberate, it enslaves in perpetual vigilance. It is the same gesture Diogenes makes by living in a tub and mocking Alexander: real wealth is the reduction of need (autarkeia), not accumulation. When Montaigne says "every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious," he is applying that Cynic diagnosis of pleonexia (the desire that has no natural limit, "safe limits are hard to find… in things believed to be good").
How they connect. Skepticism provides the epistemology (why pain/pleasure has no objective foundation, only opinion); Cynicism provides the ethics (what to do about it: do not fix your fantasy on the pile, because to possess is to begin serving). Montaigne merges them without declaring allegiance to any school—which is exactly his method: he uses Bion as one uses another's tool to carve out an observation about oneself, not to prove a system. Cynic ethics answers the question of what to do after discovering that nothing has intrinsic value. Cynic ethics is active and provocative; skeptical ethics is passive and adaptive. An echo that might resonate: the quote from Plato at the end (wealth as blind except when illuminated by prudence) is almost an anti-Cynic closure within the same paragraph—it tempers the radicalism of Bion and Diogenes with the idea that wealth is not bad in itself, but in the blind relationship one maintains with it. Here Montaigne returns to his usual tone: he does not advocate for asceticism, but for clarity regarding one's own attachment.

He mentions Bion. "They affirm, he says, by virtue of the reason of their judgment, that whatever is told about hell and future punishments is fiction. But when the opportunity to experience it arises, when old age or illness brings them close to death, the terror of it infuses them with a new belief out of horror for their future condition. And since such impressions make minds fearful, he forbids in his laws any instruction regarding such threats, as well as the belief that any evil can come to man from the gods except with a view to a greater good, when appropriate and with a medicinal effect. They tell of Bion that, infected by the atheisms of Theodorus, he had long mocked religious men; but that, when death caught him by surprise, he surrendered to the most extreme superstitions, as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need." Essays. Montaigne. Book II. Chapter XII. An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
This passage belongs to one of the sharpest moments of the Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and most radical chapter of the Essays, where Montaigne develops his Pyrrhonian skepticism against the presumption of human reason.
The argument Montaigne is building. Just before mentioning Bion, Montaigne is discussing an idea he takes from Plato (The Laws): that although hell and future punishments may be "fictions"—useful constructs, not rationally proven truths—those same fictions re-emerge with full force the moment death approaches. Old age or illness causes terror to reactivate a belief that reason had discarded. For this reason, he says, the prudent lawmaker forbids teaching that the gods can do harm to man except for a "medicinal" purpose (a kind of therapeutic, non-dogmatic theology).
Bion as concrete proof of that thesis. Bion of Borysthenes is the historical example Montaigne uses so as not to remain in abstraction. Bion was a curious figure: he passed through several schools (including the Cyrenaic, hence the "contagion" with the atheism of Theodorus, a follower of that movement) and ended up adopting the Cynic style—a wandering life, biting satire, provocative contempt for conventions, including religious ones. He became famous for openly mocking pious people.
But according to the anecdote (which comes from Diogenes Laërtius, and which Montaigne probably knew through Plutarch), when death came upon him, Bion abandoned that posture and fell into the most extreme superstition. Montaigne concludes with a devastating phrase: "as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need"—that is, Bion's gods were not the object of a stable conviction (neither in atheism nor in faith), but a reflection of his own mood and fear.
How it connects to Montaigne's skepticism. Here is the core: Montaigne does not use this example to mock Bion or to defend official religion. He uses it to demonstrate the radical inconstancy of human reason in the face of passions, which is the engine of the entire Apology. His point is: Bion's religious "Cynicism" or skepticism was not a solid rational conclusion, but an intellectual posture, almost a rhetorical fashion (Bion was famous precisely for his biting wit, for dressing philosophy "in courtezan robes," according to Eratosthenes' famous phrase about him). It was surface skepticism, maintained as long as there was nothing at stake. When a real existential threat appears (death), that position collapses instantly, revealing that underneath there was no deep rational conviction, but pure fear disguised as philosophical certainty.
This is exactly the type of argument Montaigne repeats time and again in the Apology: reason does not govern man; it is governed by him—by his humors, his fear, his vanity. Neither the defiant atheism of Bion alive nor his desperate superstition dying were the result of a stable judgment; they are two sides of the same weakness. That is why Montaigne, later in the same chapter, will extend this distrust to all human claims of knowing ultimate truths through reason alone, which forms the basis of his fideism: if not even the sharpest philosopher can maintain a firm stance in the face of death, what authority does reason have to rule on the divine?
In summary: Bion is mentioned neither as a villain nor as a buffoon, but as a mirror of man in general—living proof that "rational" convictions regarding gods and death are, for Montaigne, more an effect of circumstances and passions than a stable achievement of the understanding.
Connection with modern skepticism. I will take a phrase to relate it to a more modern and current reading of skepticism. The phrase "maintained as long as there was nothing at stake" is the perfect gateway to connect Montaigne with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's contemporary concept of "skin in the game," as well as his critique of superficial and bookish skepticism. Fake skepticism vs. flesh-and-blood skepticism. For Taleb (and for Montaigne), there is a vast difference between opining from the comfort of an ivory tower and suffering the real consequences of your actions or beliefs.

•    Bion (the case Montaigne refers to): Played at being a skeptic or a Cynic when everything was going well. He had an elegant "opinion" about death and the gods, but it was a theoretical stance.
•    The acid test: When the Grim Reaper arrives (the real threat), that intellectual conviction evaporates because it was never anchored in the reality of "skin in the game." It was merely rhetoric to impress at banquets. Skin in the Game. In Taleb's philosophy, no one can consider themselves the owner of a true belief or knowledge if they have nothing to lose by it. If you say you do not fear death or that you despise religion, but you enter into absolute panic and recant everything at the first symptom of a serious illness, it proves that your stance lacked skin in the game. Montaigne, being a great precursor of this existential empiricism (bringing philosophy down from its metaphysical pedestal and placing it directly on the terrain of everyday experience), detested armchair philosophy. For him, ideas are worth as much as a man's behavior when life gets difficult. Montaigne's true skepticism is not an abstract mental game; it is a humble acceptance of our bodily weakness and our passions. Superficial skepticism vs. deep skepticism. Taleb frequently distinguishes between intellectuals who theorize about the world ("intellectual yet idiots" or IYI) and those who operate in the real world under risk.
•    Bion's superficial skepticism survives only in the absence of risk.
•    Montaigne's radical skepticism, by contrast, is profoundly honest: it recognizes that reason is weak before passions and fear because both share the same mortal flesh.

Why do some authors label Bion as a "hedonistic philosopher"?
A biography defines him as: "Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325–250 BC) was a Cynic philosopher known for his provocative style and his hedonistic approach within Cynicism."
They call him a hedonistic philosopher (or, more precisely, a hedonistic Cynic) due to his blend of Cynicism with Cyrenaic influences.
Diogenes Laërtius places him among the Academics due to his initial training, but modern scholars consider him an atypical Cynic.
He studied under several schools: the Academy (Xenocrates and Crates of Athens), Cynics, Theodorus the Atheist (a Cyrenaic philosopher), and Theophrastus (Peripatetic). The influence of Theodorus and the Cyrenaics is key: they advocated pleasure (especially physical and immediate pleasure) as the supreme good.
His Cynicism was not the ascetic and rigorous style of Diogenes of Sinope. According to sources like Ferrater Mora's dictionary, "Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one." He largely abandoned the idea of the extreme hardening of the wise man and adopted a more rhetorical, skeptical, realistic, and accommodating tone.
He accepted, in the Cyrenaic style, making use of present circumstances (wealth or poverty) and diverse social roles, including relationships with kings (such as his connection with Antigonus Gonatas). Diogenes Laërtius describes him as someone who sometimes lived in a degree of luxury, moved from city to city, adopted young men, and was a "lover of himself," though these accounts stem partly from hostile sources.
In summary: he was not a pure hedonist in the style of Aristippus of Cyrene, but an eclectic Cynic who softened classic Cynic rigor with hedonistic/Cyrenaic elements. That is why Spanish Wikipedia presents him directly as a "hedonistic Cynic and skeptical philosopher," and he is known for popularizing a more flexible and satirical version of Cynicism that influenced the diatribe and Latin authors such as Horace.
The label reflects that philosophical hybridization rather than a systematic defense of pleasure as the sole end. He is difficult to fit into a single neat box, which is why labels often appear together or with nuances: atypical Cynic, hedonistic Cynic, eclectic, etc. He is difficult to fit because he did not allow himself to be boxed in. That very difficulty is what makes him interesting. That combination makes him a hybrid figure of the early Hellenistic period: Cynicism was transforming, moving away from harsher rigorism and drawing closer to more rhetorical, skeptical, and "realistic" forms. Bion precisely represents that transitional moment. That is why modern scholars usually say "Cynic with strong hedonistic/Cyrenaic inclinations" or "atypical Cynic" instead of forcing him into a single label.

Links:
•    https://www.ferratermora.org/ency_filosofo_ad_bion.html
•    https://symploke.trujaman.org/Bion_de_Bor%EDstenes
•    https://www.informacion.es/sociedad/2026/05/13/bion-boristenes-filosofo-cinico-hedonista-130091097.html
•    https://concepto.de/hedonismo/
•    https://e-torredebabel.com/compendio-de-las-vidas-de-los-filosofos-antiguos-bion/
 

Something interesting to me, given my interest in chance, randomness, luck, and fortune, are these two fragments: "Far from considering her a deity properly speaking, the early Cynics despised Fortune, refused to take her seriously, and interpreted her blows as a stimulus for moral effort. However, starting with Bion of Borysthenes (c. 335–245 BC), their attitude changed significantly. They sought to accept whatever she sent them, regarding her as the khorēgos of the great human comedy, the director who assigns each person their role on the stage of life, and whom, therefore, we must obey." "Only one of his ideas cannot be attributed to the first generation of Cynic thought. It arises when Bion expresses himself regarding the idea of Tychē, Fortune. In fragment 16 Kindstrand, preserved in Teles' diatribe On Self-Sufficiency, Bion compares Fortune to a poet. The poet distributes roles to actors, and good actors know how to perform well in their roles. Similarly, Fortune distributes roles to men, and good men know how to accept the roles assigned to them: one is a king and another a beggar; one commands and the other is commanded. Consequently, Bion advises every man to accept the role assigned to him. This attitude is markedly different from that maintained by earlier Cynics, who criticized Fortune and laughed at her attacks. But this is the only aspect, I believe, that does not agree with Diogenes. Thus Bion could very well have found the content of his critiques in Cynicism, even if he expressed them in his own particular style." The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

The fragment highlights one of the most interesting philosophical evolutions of Cynicism: the transition from frontal combat to strategic acceptance of life. Early Cynicism (Diogenes, Crates): Provocation and combat. Initially, Tychē (Fortune/Chance) was not seen as a sacred destiny, but as a rival to be challenged. For the early Cynics, setbacks of luck were not misfortunes, but a "moral gymnastics" (askēsis). Poverty or exile were not suffered: they were actively used to demonstrate the wise man's autarky (self-sufficiency) and apathy (imperturbability). The shift with Bion of Borysthenes: The theater metaphor. Bion introduces a crucial nuance that would enormously influence later Stoicism (especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius): life as a theatrical play.
Fortune is no longer an enemy to fight against, but the khorēgos (the producer/director of the play). You do not choose whether you play the role of king, beggar, or servant; your sole moral duty is to flawlessly act the role assigned to you by the director, without wishing for another.

The diatribe. *"Quite simply, the map of Greek literature was never the same after the Cynics. Nor were their innovations limited to prose: the Cynics wrote in iambics, elegiacs, and hexameters, and Cercidas invented a new meter, the meliamb, for a political poem from a Cynic perspective.
The diatribe, frequently associated with Bion of Borysthenes, constitutes another fine example of a form that was certainly extra-literary or oral in the Classical period, and which the Cynics established as a characteristic part of their own literary repertoire."* The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

 The concept of the diatribe as a written work arose in the 3rd century BC, attributed to Bion of Borysthenes, the Greek Cynic philosopher. Just as some authors credit him with inventing it as a genre, others argue that he brought it from the oral world into the written world, and others hold that he was the one who popularized it.
A diatribe (from Classical Greek: διατριβή, diatribē, "spoken discourse," "lecture") is a violent, sometimes abusive text directed against individuals or social groups. As a written work, its purpose was to reach a broader audience, although at that time it did not carry the somewhat offensive connotation the word has today; rather, it consisted of Bion's humorous yet sharp attacks against human flaws and weaknesses.
In its original meaning, this term named brief ethical speeches delivered by Cynic and Stoic philosophers. However, due to the polemical tone that typically characterized these popular moral lectures, the concept quickly shifted toward its modern sense of invective.
 

Core sources:
•    The Essays. Michel de Montaigne. (According to the 1595 edition by Marie de Gournay). Prologue by Antoine Compagnon. Edited and translated by J. Bayod Brau. Digital edition. Epublibre 2014. https://archive.org/details/montaigne-michel-de.-los-ensayos-epl-fs-1580-2014/mode/2up
•    https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ensayos-de-montaigne--0/html/
•    Montaigne. Essays (I)(II)(III). Complete edition. Ediciones Orbis. 1984. Translation by Juan G. de Luaces.

Transparency note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude, Gemini, and Grok for text analysis and structuring. The illustrations, informative graphics, and visual infographics were generated with the support of Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT.

Envy as Punishment for the Original

 

“With fame, in just proportion, envy grows; / The man that makes a character, makes foes.” — Edward Young

There are phrases one quotes because they sound good, and there are phrases one ought to audit before quoting them. This belongs to the second category, though the real find lies not in an invention, but in an operation of translation and stylistic integration.
The complete sentence belongs to Edward Young, who in Satire I of his Love of Fame (1725) wrote in an exact couplet: “With fame, in just proportion, envy grows; / The man that makes a character, makes foes.” José Ingenieros took it for Chapter III of El hombre mediocre (The Mediocre Man), but in translating it, he dissolved the poetic meter of eighteenth-century English and turned it into a prose maxim of impeccable rhythm: “Just as blister beetles thrive on the goldenest wheat fields and the most flourishing rosebushes, envy targets the men most renowned for their character and virtue.”
The second clause is not, as it might seem at first glance, an insertion of Ingenieros's own, but rather his adapted translation for “makes a character” (which in the English of the period alluded to asserting oneself with personality and moral fortitude). By dissolving the meter of the original poem to turn it into a prose maxim, the phrase loses the air of eighteenth-century poetry and acquires the imprint of early 20th-century moralist sociology. However, the “seam” exists and is entirely his: by assimilating the maxim into the tone of his moralist sociology, Ingenieros made the English poet’s voice indistinguishable from his own, circulating ever since as a Hispanic aphorism of almost shared authorship. I am interested in that seam because the central theme condenses within it: how what is inherited and translated molds itself to one's own thought until it appears born from scratch. Even with all that, the quote is 100% Edward Young in its content.
The superficial reading of the aphorism is simple and does not require much elaboration: whoever stands out becomes visible, and visibility is a tax paid in the form of envy. The higher recognition rises, the more hostility grows—“in just proportion,” says Young, with almost mathematical precision—from those who feel displaced by the comparison. One does not need to offend anyone to generate enemies; standing out is enough. Envy does not respond to a concrete offense but to a perceived asymmetry, and that asymmetry expands on its own, without the one who stands out lifting a finger.
But the aphorism, as completed by Ingenieros, does not only speak of success: it speaks of character. And there lies the distinction that separates this text from a commonplace cliché about envy. “The man who represents a character” is not the one with the most applause, but the one with non-negotiable convictions. It is someone who acts from a stable identity rather than calculating what suits each audience. That firmness—not fame itself—is what discomforts, because it exposes by contrast those who prefer the comfort of remaining undefined. The man of character does not need to offend: existing consistently is enough for him to function as a mirror, and the mirror is rarely welcome.

The Connection Ingenieros Missed (or Chose to Ignore)

Now, if one abandons the aphorism as it reached us and goes searching for its source—Night Thoughts, the work by Young from which the first half of the phrase emerged—a much more uncomfortable cross-reference appears than the one Ingenieros constructed. In that same poem, Young leaves another sentence, less quoted but sharper: “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?”
Placed side by side, Young's two phrases cease to be isolated aphorisms and begin to function as a mechanism. The second describes the default fate: society does not demand that one be original; it demands that one become copyable, because what is copyable is predictable, and what is predictable threatens no one. Dying a copy is the path of least resistance, taken by the overwhelming majority without even realizing they are taking it. The first phrase describes the price of not taking that path: he who refuses to dilute himself, who insists on remaining original to the end, is precisely “the man who represents a character.” And that man, upon achieving visibility, does not merely spark comparison: he exposes. He makes it clear that being a copy was a choice, not an inevitable fate, and that is what the copied majority never forgives.
Put another way: the envy described by the aphorism is not an isolated individual vice, as it is usually presented in self-help manual morality. It is a device of collective discipline. The masses do not merely envy achievement; they envy the living proof that another option existed. The enemies generated by the man of character are not collateral damage of his success: they are the instrument with which the collective attempts to force him back into copying himself, to abandon the anomaly and join the average. Envy, in Young's universe, performs a job that no institution could perform with equal efficiency: it corrects the one who steps out of line.

From Moral Poetry to Existentialism

What makes Young interesting is that this intuition—formulated in a still religious and moralizing key in the middle of the 18th century—ended up being one of the documented precedents of a problem that existentialism would take almost two hundred years to formalize. The tension between the original and the copy, between one's own character and the social mask convenient to wear to avoid friction, is substantially the same tension that was later called “authenticity.”
The link is neither a forced reading nor a convenient analogy: it is a matter of archival fact. Kierkegaard read Young with the attention of someone finding a predecessor, opening Either/Or with a quote of his on the title page, asking if passions are "the pagans of the soul" as opposed to "baptized reason." The Kierkegaardian distrust of cold reason, anxiety as an existential condition rather than an anomaly to be corrected, the value assigned to the passionate over the calculated: all of this has an identifiable root in Young’s poetry. In the academic genealogy of authenticity as a philosophical concept, “born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?” appears cited, with full formality, as one of the earliest antecedents of the idea that Sartre, Heidegger, and company would finish developing in technical terms: that of a subject who can live in an inauthentic way, dissolved in the “they say” and “they do,” or maintain an authentic existence at the cost of unsettling those who chose the opposite.

The Deception Lies in the Word Order

It is worth returning, in closing, to Ingenieros’s gesture, because it possesses a touch of poetic justice. He took the phrase from a poet who had spent half his life decrying the copy as the tragic fate of modern man, and used it—translated, without fully attributing its exact origin—to build his own argument on mediocrity in a book that is read today in Argentina as if it were entirely his. There is something almost comical in that: the aphorism about the original and the copy ended up, itself, converted into a partial copy, edited and signed by someone else. Young would probably have understood it better than anyone. After all, it is exactly the mechanism he described: the original generates fame, fame generates envy, and envy—when it cannot destroy the original—does the next best thing it can do, which is to appropriate it.

Written with assistance from language models and human oversight.

A Joyful Heart and a Happy Life: A Misattribution That Ends Up Telling the Truth

There are phrases that survive not because of who said them, but because of what they insist on telling us, even when we swap authors. This is one of them. In an old newspaper clipping, I found a line that stopped me in my tracks: "it is better to have a joyful heart than a happy life." The attribution floating around was Fénelon. I set out to trace it—with the help of artificial intelligence, which in this case functioned more as an archive than an oracle—and the result was better than the original quote: a two-century-deep misunderstanding, and two authors who, without knowing it, reached the same destination through opposite paths.

The Phrase That Wasn't Said by Whom We Thought

The exact wording belongs to Ramón Gómez de la Serna, in Nuevas páginas de mi vida, published in Buenos Aires in 1957: "it is better to have a joyful heart than a happy life, for a joyful heart makes up for everything." Fénelon—a 17th-century French theologian and writer—is credited with it through a different route: not because he wrote those exact words, but because he wrote adjacent ideas, and 19th- and 20th-century compilations of quotations rarely distinguish between saying something and having been capable of saying it. Fénelon spoke of preserving inner peace "whatever external events may be," of a joy that "surpasses all sorrows." It's close. But close isn't authorship.
The interesting part isn't correcting the misattribution—any search engine can solve that—but asking why the error was so easy to make, and why it lasted so long without anyone checking it.

Why the Misunderstanding is More Eloquent Than the Fact

Here, it helps to apply a distinction I often use to think about social phenomena: the difference between what is fragile and what is robust in the face of disorder. A misattributed quote is, in a sense, antifragile: it grows stronger with every repetition; each site that reproduces it without verifying the source adds a layer of borrowed authority. Nobody checks the original because the statement already "sounds like" something the supposed author would say.
Fénelon is the perfect candidate for false attribution precisely because his actual body of work is so aligned in tone that the lie requires no effort to sustain itself. The internet's snowball effect doesn't invent an arbitrary falsehood: it recycles a sense of plausibility. The mechanism lies right there, and it isn't exclusive to famous quotes: it is the same process by which a poorly told anecdote becomes "popular wisdom," or by which a failed economic measure is remembered, twenty years later, as the one that worked.

A Joyful Heart Versus a Happy Life: The Real Divide

Setting aside who said it, the phrase points to a rift worth examining closely, because it isn't a difference of degree, but of nature. A "happy life" is an outcome variable: it depends on things—out there in the world, beyond our control—turning out a certain way. In Taleb's vocabulary, it is a long position on external fortune: you bet on the environment cooperating, and when it doesn't, the position collapses. The person who ties their well-being to a "happy life" remains exposed to whatever shake-up chance sends their way, with no cushion.
A "joyful heart," on the other hand, is not an outcome but a disposition. It doesn't bet on the world behaving well: it prepares itself so that, no matter how the world behaves, there is a center that remains unmoved. This isn't textbook Stoicism or passive resignation—that is where Fénelon, with his mystical surrender, and Gómez de la Serna, with his avant-garde irony, diverge in method but converge in diagnosis. Both understood that fragility lies not in taking hits, but in building one's stability on something that does not depend on oneself.

Two Centuries, Two Temperaments, the Same Conclusion

What interested me most about this journey was not the philological correction, but the underlying paradox. Fénelon arrives at the idea through Christian mysticism: peace as surrender to providence, joy as the fruit of resignation to what cannot be controlled. Gómez de la Serna arrives at the exact same point from the opposite extreme: the greguería, humor as a survival strategy against exile and loss, vitality as a form of defiance. One surrenders; the other laughs. And yet, they end up saying the same thing with almost identical words.
This is neither coincidence nor mere literary fluke: it is a sign that the observation is structural, not ideological. When two systems of thought so far apart—mystical resignation and avant-garde irony—converge on the same formula, they are likely describing something real about how human fragility works, rather than a passing trend or a rhetorical gimmick from either of them.

What Remains

Life is hardly happy from start to finish; we already know that, even if we keep buying into the opposite illusion every time we postpone joy for when "things get sorted out." What changes the playing field is the starting point: whether one builds stability on the outcome—the happy life—or on the disposition—the joyful heart. The former is fragile by design because it depends on variables we do not control. The latter is the only honest way to remain safe from what, sooner or later, will go wrong.
And perhaps therein lies the final irony of this story: a phrase about not depending on external circumstances ended up, itself, hostage to an external circumstance—who was credited with it, how many times it was repeated without verification. Not even ideas about inner solidity are immune to the fragility of rumor. The only thing that didn't collapse, through two centuries of bibliographic misplacement, was the substance of the idea. That, perhaps, is the best proof that something in it holds true.

The AI provided the words; I provided the judgment.

Do we understand De Waal, or do we just like his anecdotes?.

I recently finished reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. On the surface, it is undoubtedly a delightful book: it’s filled with fascinating anecdotes about political chimpanzees, elephants that recognize themselves in mirrors, and empathetic bonobos. However, after closing the final page, I was left with an ambivalent feeling that I would like to share.
 

The Anecdote Trap.
The book is extremely pleasant. De Waal writes with a fluency that makes you feel like you're having a conversation over coffee. But therein lies, in my view, the greatest difficulty for the lay reader. Because it is a work by an author at the pinnacle of his career, the text is actually an intellectual battlefield.
 

The Invisible Enemy.
The problem for the average reader is that De Waal throws punches, but we don't always see at whom. If one doesn't know what radical behaviorism is, if one hasn't heard of Morgan’s Canon or the resistance of traditional comparative psychology, many of his statements can seem defensive or unnecessarily insistent.
For those reading for pleasure, the author might seem to be tilting at windmills, when in reality he is taking on scientific dogmas that dominated the 20th century. Without that prior theoretical framework, the reader risks:
1.    Coming away only with the "cute story" of the intelligent animal.
2.    Missing the deep significance of the ethical and biological discussion the author proposes.
 

The Key Word: Anthropodenial.
To understand De Waal’s sometimes combative tone, one must know his concept of "anthropodenial." This is the term he coined to criticize those scientists who—almost religiously—refuse to see human traits in animals. If you don't know that De Waal has spent 40 years dealing with colleagues who consider a chimpanzee to be nothing more than a "biological machine" without feelings, his arguments might seem redundant. In reality, he is trying to tear down an academic concrete wall.
 

The Book as a Mirror, Not a Window.
In the end, you discover that De Waal’s premise is not just a window to look outward (at animals), but a mirror to look at ourselves. The author poses a disarming question: if we are unable to understand the intelligence of a being that shares 99% of our DNA, what does that say about our own intelligence? Perhaps the "blind spot" is not in the chimpanzee's brain, but in our arrogance in believing ourselves to be a species outside of biology.
 

A Suggestion for the Next Reader.
If you are going to read this book, my recommendation is that you don't do it just for the anecdotes. Try to read between the lines and detect who De Waal is talking to when he takes a firm stand. Sometimes, popular science assumes we are all aware of the "hallway fights" of the university, and that can alienate the common reader.
 

A Book for Experts or the Curious?.
I believe this book is enjoyed in two very different ways:
•    For the expert: It is a political and scientific manifesto, a high-level debate between peers who know the rules of the game.
•    For the uninitiated (like me): It is a parade of surprises and wit, but one that leaves a void. Those piercing questions with which the book opens—about our own capacity to understand—perhaps require having first gone through a basic manual of ethology.
 

Conclusion: The Naive Gaze.
Sometimes, ignorance in a subject allows us to approach these readings with a "sense of wonder" that the expert has already lost. But for that surprise not to be merely superficial, we need to know exactly which current the author is swimming against.

In the Spanish entry, I made some additional comments on specific points, which can be found at the following link: https://reuniendoletras.blogspot.com/2021/09/entendemos-de-waal-o-solo-nos-gustan.html

The veil and the wound: notes on humor as a form of intelligence

 “Good humor always places a veil over pain.” 

Wenceslao Fernández Flórez.

There is a phrase worth reading twice. The first time, quickly, like an after-dinner aphorism. The second time, slowly, because it hides a complete architecture. It was spoken by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez on May 12, 1945, in his induction speech to the Royal Spanish Academy, titled Humor in Spanish Literature:

"The humorist is, ultimately, a sad person. They always place a veil over pain: you look at their eyes and they are wet, but, meanwhile, their lips smile. Deep down, there is nothing more serious than humor."

The image is precise to the point of discomfort: a veil. Not a cure, not a solution, not a denial. A veil. Something that stands in the way without erasing what it covers. That is where the problem begins—and also the interesting part of the matter.

Three layers of the same word

Before discussing whether that veil is wisdom or cowardice, it is worth dismantling the term. "Good humor" is not just one thing; it is at least three:
As a state of mind, it is affective: serenity, temperance, a disposition not to be swept away by everyday noise. As a vital attitude, it is almost an Aristotelian virtue: the ability to take a critical distance from oneself, to cushion the gravity of suffering through jovial detachment. And as a trait of intelligence, it is purely cognitive: the skill to detect the absurd, the paradoxical, the implausible that runs through daily life.
Irony, in its good versions, operates in these three registers at once. It neither heals the wound nor resolves its cause. It places a filter—Fernández Flórez's veil—that allows one to look reality in the face without it blinding or burning. Sometimes that filter is a momentary refuge to catch one's breath. At other times, a modest elegance to soften the blow before walking on. In no case is it free: it costs something, and that cost is precisely what makes it interesting as an object of analysis and not just as a pleasant gesture.

The objection, first in its moderate version

Every thesis on the veil deserves its counterargument, and this one has a reasonable version before becoming extreme. The skeptical question is simple: isn't cushioning the pain, deep down, a way of evading it? From that perspective, the veil does not protect: it blinds, it numbs, it masks. It prevents an honest confrontation with existence.
The argument has its logic. Laughter can operate as a social or psychological anesthetic. By softening tragedy with irony, one runs the risk of resigning oneself to it instead of processing it to the end, or trying to transform it. It is the usual critique against any relief mechanism: that it relieves too well, and that this relief substitutes for the real work.

The extreme version: Cioran tolerates no sugarcoating

If the moderate objection distrusts the veil, Cioran outright declares it the enemy. For the philosopher of radical pessimism, good humor is a cowardly defense mechanism against the abyss. Pain and despair are, for him, the only access routes to an unadorned truth. Interposing a veil—however elegant or ingenious it may be—is refusing to look nothingness in the face. His quote summarizes it leaving no room for ambiguity: "Hope is the normal form of a lack of lucidity."
Under that lens, the humorist who smiles with wet eyes is not being brave. They are being incapable of holding a steady gaze into the void without seeking the refuge of a grimace.

Schopenhauer: humor as a truce, not an escape

It is fitting now to bring in someone who, sharing the underlying pessimism with Cioran, reaches an almost opposite conclusion about humor: Arthur Schopenhauer.
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer constructs a theory of incongruity: laughter arises when there is a sudden dissonance between an abstract concept—what reason thinks—and the real object, as it is perceived. It is the momentary victory of concrete perception over the rigidity of the concept. And he distinguishes humor from irony on a key point: irony is objective, saying something serious disguised as a joke for others; humor is subjective, it is the subject's gaze upon themselves. The humorist perceives human misery, the impossibility of satisfying the Will, and instead of despairing, smiles at the incongruity of human endeavors.
For Schopenhauer, then, humor is not an escape: it is a metaphysical escape valve, a brief and ingenious intellectual rest, a truce where intelligence laughs at its own conceptual traps.
There lies the real disagreement between two first-rate pessimists, and it is no minor one: both agree that the world is fundamentally tragic, but they disagree on what intelligence is for in the face of that diagnosis. For Schopenhauer, the world is driven by a blind and insatiable Will that condemns us to oscillate between the pain of not obtaining what is desired and the boredom of obtaining it. But there are windows of liberation: just as art and aesthetic contemplation disconnect us for an instant from the yoke of desire, humor functions as an intellectual shortcut. Laughter reveals a system failure—reason stumbles upon detecting the incongruity—and that stumble suspends, even if only for seconds, the tragic gravity of the Will. The humorist does not ignore tragedy: they understand it so well that they position themselves above it through the intellect. It is contemplative consolation, not denial.
Cioran, an heir to that pessimism, but without the Schopenhauerian faith in aesthetic consolation, rejects any mechanism that mitigates the void. If Schopenhauer sees humor as a rest, Cioran sees it as cowardice or a trap of hope: to smile in the face of pain is to label it, digest it, make it tolerable. And that, for him, is betraying the purity of suffering.

Bergson: laughter does not look inward, it looks toward society

There is still a third way, and it is the most foreign to the previous two because it changes the grounds for discussion: not metaphysical, but social. Henri Bergson, in Laughter (1900), seeks neither consolation nor existential lucidity. He seeks function.
His central thesis is "the mechanical superimposed on the living": life is fluidity, elasticity, constant adaptation. We laugh when someone loses that vital agility and behaves like a machine or an inert object—the stumble from distraction, clumsiness, rigidity of character. For that laughter to occur, Bergson argues, a "momentary insensitivity of the heart" is necessary: empathy must be paused, because humor appeals to pure and detached intelligence. Laughter, then, is not an intimate veil against one's own pain. It is a social corrective, a way society has of gently punishing rigidity or a lack of adaptability, forcing the individual to rejoin the flexible flow of the collective.

Returning to Fernández Flórez, now better equipped

Placed side by side, the three positions draw a fairly clear map. Bergson freezes the heart to correct the behavior of others. Cioran declares that any grimace of relief is cowardice that numbs lucidity. And in the middle of that intersection—neither cold social corrective, nor cowardly denial of lucidity—appears Fernández Flórez's intuition, which is, of the three, the most human and the most everyday: that of the indispensable refuge.
The humorist, in this reading, does not ignore the gravity of the world nor pretends to resolve it with abstract formulas. Nor do they fall into the trap of naive optimism, which would be the easy caricature of all this. They know, like Schopenhauer, that existence creaks under the weight of its own incongruity. But instead of letting themselves be crushed by that certainty, they choose the elegance of detachment.
Humor does not destroy tragedy. It envelops it. It allows one to hold their gaze without being blinded by the glare of their own wound. And there, after navigating Bergsonian anesthesia, Schopenhauer's metaphysical diagnosis, and Cioran's relentless despair, the original paradox returns to its starting point with all its strength intact:

"The humorist is, ultimately, a sad person. They always place a veil over pain: you look at their eyes and they are wet, but, meanwhile, their lips smile. Deep down, there is nothing more serious than humor."

#Co-created with AI.

Life is a great bundle of little things

 “Life is a great bundle of little things.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 

The phrase comes from The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, published in 1860. Holmes does not limit himself to stating that life is made up of small things: he introduces a precise and somewhat domestic image—a bundle, a sheaf, a handful of elements gathered together with no apparent hierarchy. Haz is a possible and quite elegant translation in Spanish, but in everyday Spanish, it could be translated as “La vida es un gran conjunto de pequeñas cosas.” The passage, moreover, contains a subtle ironic interplay. The narrator says, “Life is a great bundle of little things,” and one of the interlocutors reverses the formula: “Life is a great bundle of great things.” The wit lies right there, in that opposition between the great things we imagine constitute a life and the small ones that actually compose it.

It is worth remembering, in passing, that this refers to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the American physician and writer, and not his son, the famous jurist.

There is something almost anti-spectacular about the sentence. When we talk about a life, we usually do so retrospectively. We select events and turn them into milestones: a birth, a death, a marriage, a trip, a war, a published book, an illness, a move. Biography needs to select. Life does not. Daily life does not unfold through neatly demarcated events. It unfolds while we wait for the bus, make a purchase, walk a few blocks, talk to someone, read a few pages, cook, clean, get bored, remember something, forget something else, look out the window, or return to a street we already know. Most of an existence does not seem to be made of events. It is made of intervals. And perhaps therein lies the strength of Holmes's phrase: a life is not the sum of its great moments, but the enormous collection of small experiences that we almost never consider worthy of being recorded.

A possible connection to skepticism appears here, though there is no need to turn Holmes into a philosopher. Skepticism, in a broad sense, introduces a distrust toward overly certain claims—not only toward grand theories, but also toward our own interpretations. And one of the most persistent is imagining that we know which events are truly important. We say, “This changed my life,” “That was the turning point,” “From then on, everything was different.” But how do we know that was the case? It is possible that we are retrospectively constructing a continuity that, at the moment of living it, did not exist. The skeptic can introduce a small discomfort: perhaps we exaggerate the importance of extraordinary events because they are easier to remember, to narrate, and to turn into explanations. A ten-minute conversation can have consequences for twenty years. A seemingly insignificant decision can alter an entire trajectory. A person encountered by chance on a street can end up being fundamental. A book read almost by accident can alter a way of thinking. And, conversely, that which at a given moment seemed monumental may later disappear without leaving almost any trace. Life, seen from this perspective, has something unpredictable and un-narrative about it. It does not behave like a well-constructed novel.

A particularly fertile connection is found in Montaigne. He turned a vast number of seemingly secondary matters into subject matter for thought. He did not need to wait for extraordinary historical events to write about human existence. He could dwell on a custom, a meal, an illness, a conversation, an anecdote, a memory, a physical trait, an observation about animals, or an everyday experience. This alters the traditional hierarchy of topics. The everyday ceases to be merely what occurs between important events and becomes a subject of knowledge. Montaigne seems to say that if we want to know what a man is, we do not need to observe him only when he accomplishes something exceptional. We must also observe him when he is sitting, when he eats, when he sleeps, when he is afraid, when he changes his mind, when he contradicts himself, when he gets bored. Ordinary existence ceases to be the background of life. It is life.

At this point, Ortega y Gasset enters the picture. The proximity to Holmes should not be framed as if both defended the exact same theory. They do not. But there is a particularly interesting connection surrounding the word “circumstance.” Ortega wrote that famous formula: “I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” Circumstance is not simply the stage on which a person exists. It forms part of what that person is. Here, Holmes's phrase can acquire a different dimension. Small things are not merely small external events. They are also the concrete circumstances through which a life is realized: a specific house, a specific street, specific people, specific objects, specific habits, specific schedules, specific places, specific memories. Abstract life does not exist. This life exists. This person. This body. This room. This street. This conversation. This day. In that sense, Holmes's bundle can be read, without pushing the comparison too far, as a collection of circumstances that end up forming what we retrospectively call a life.

Culture usually rewards the extraordinary. Biographies are written around major events. The news selects the exceptional. Social networks favor what can be displayed. Even when we tell the story of our own lives, we tend to select what seems worthy of being told. But a paradox exists: the exceptional occupies very little time. A person can spend twenty years preparing for an event that lasts a few hours. They can take ten years to write a book that will later be read in a few days. They can train for months for a competition that lasts minutes. They can work for decades to reach a retirement that occupies a brief fragment of their existence. The event is visible. The process is quiet. And yet, the process occupies almost all of life. Holmes's phrase forces us to invert our perspective. The small ceases to be that which happens between important things. The small is that which sustains the important things.

A similar formulation is attributed to Charles Dickens: “Little things make the sum of life.” The idea is practically complementary. If Holmes imagines life as a great bundle of little things, Dickens observes that those things end up forming the total sum of an existence. But it is worth pausing here. A sum does not need to be composed of extraordinary elements. It can be formed by thousands of insignificant operations. One day does not seem important. Nor does the next. Nor the next. But thousands of days end up constituting a life. The same happens with habits, conversations, walks, readings, encounters, and even small mistakes. Individual insignificance does not prevent cumulative importance.

Another widespread formulation belongs to Frank A. Clark: “Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.” Here the opposition becomes clearer: doing something big versus living. And perhaps the two are not equivalent. A person can accomplish something extraordinary and yet spend most of their existence doing completely ordinary things. The writer who publishes a great novel spends much more time editing sentences, walking, eating, sleeping, and running errands than writing the sentence for which they will be remembered. The scientist who makes a discovery spends years conducting experiments that lead nowhere. The politician who stars in a historical event also goes through thousands of absolutely banal moments. History preserves the event. Life preserves the rest.

Here, another older tradition can emerge: Seneca. In De brevitate vitae, he insists that the problem is not simply that life is short, but that we waste a huge part of it. But there is an interesting difference. For Seneca, everyday time can be an object of moral management. For Holmes, small things can simply be what existence is made of. A contemporary reading could unite both perspectives: if life is made of small things, then our relationship with them matters enormously. Not because every small thing has to turn into a monumental experience, but precisely because we cannot escape them. We do not only live the events we will remember. We also live all those we will forget.

Another possible literary connection appears with Borges. He had an acute awareness of the relationship between memory, identity, and time. In many of his texts, the suspicion arises that what we believe ourselves to be depends on an arbitrary selection of memories. A life told retrospectively is always a construction. We choose certain events and discard others. But what we discard was not necessarily lived any less. This difference between living and being able to tell what was lived is fundamental. A biography needs a plot. Existence does not. Perhaps that is why a real life always overflows any narrative we construct about it.

There is even an almost political dimension to this vindication of the small. A society obsessed with productivity, success, visibility, and exceptionality tends to value what can be measured or displayed: the result, the promotion, the award, the record, the quantity, the influence, the recognition. But there is a vast area of existence that produces nothing spectacular and yet constitutes virtually all of our experience. Walking without a purpose. Reading a book without turning it into content. Having a conversation without publishing it. Looking at a building facade. Walking down a street once again. Keeping an object because it reminds us of something. Taking a photograph that no one will see. Thinking for hours about something that will never turn into a conclusion. Even getting bored. All those activities seem insignificant from a productivist perspective. But from Holmes's perspective, they constitute precisely the material of which a life is made.

There is also a paradox of memory here. We especially remember that which breaks continuity: the accident, the trip, the death, the celebration, the failure, the discovery, the unexpected encounter. Precisely because those events break the monotony, they are easier to remember. The everyday, on the other hand, vanishes. And perhaps that is why we tend to overestimate the extraordinary. Not necessarily because it was more important, but because it is more memorable. A life reconstructed solely from memory would then be a distorted life: a kind of photograph composed only of exceptions. Holmes introduces a simple correction: let us not confuse the memorable with the important.

We can take the sentence even further. What would be a “little thing”? It can be an action, an object, a thought, a conversation, a habit, a place, a person, a smell, a walk, a read page, a wait, a gesture, a memory, even a mistake. There is no objective unit of life. What is insignificant to one person can be decisive for another. An old photograph may be worth nothing economically and be virtually irreplaceable to the person who keeps it. An ordinary street can be just any street to millions of people and contain the entire childhood of just one. A mediocre book can become a fundamental book simply because it was read at the right time. The importance is not necessarily in the thing itself. It is also in the relationship we establish with it. And that makes defining what constitutes a life even harder.

Here it is worth introducing a fourth connection, particularly attuned to the kind of reflection we have been engaging in: Georges Perec. His literary project of observing the infra-ordinary—that which happens every day and precisely for that reason we stop looking at—functions almost as a perfect literary continuation of Holmes. Perec allows us to take the sentence from philosophy into a kind of archaeology of the everyday: looking at a square, a street, a table, an object, a repeated path, and asking ourselves what is there that we normally do not see. Skepticism then functions not as a doctrine, but as an attitude of distrust toward our own hierarchies of importance. Holmes → Montaigne → Ortega → Perec: a journey that goes from the intuition that life is made of the small to the deliberate decision to stop and observe what usually goes unnoticed.

Perhaps Holmes's phrase can ultimately be read as a warning against our need to find grand explanations. We want our life to have a plot. We want to know what the decisive moment was, what event turned us into who we are, what the reason was, what the cause was. But perhaps the answer is far less satisfying. Perhaps there was no single event. Perhaps there were thousands. Perhaps none was enough. Perhaps a person ends up being who they are through an impossible-to-reconstruct accumulation of small decisions, accidents, encounters, habits, losses, readings, places, and coincidences. A great bundle. A messy handful. An accumulation. A sum. A circumstance. A succession of small things that, seen separately, seem to explain nothing, and together, constitute what we call a life.

And here Holmes's phrase acquires an unexpected force. It does not say that small things are important because they will one day lead to something big. It says something more radical: small things are important because they are most of what we have. Life does not only occur when something happens. Life also occurs when apparently nothing happens. Perhaps, after all, “nothing” is too big a word to describe all those little things.

Generated with AI and human-verified to guarantee accuracy.

The sores of the conscience do not heal

There are phrases that circulate with the borrowed authority of an ancient name, and this is one of them. “The sores of the conscience do not heal” is attributed, with the casual lightness that attributions often carry when no one bothers to check them, to the Roman mime writer Publilius Syrus. Before debating whether the quotation is genuine—and I will say in advance that there is no serious way to sustain it—it is worth lingering for a moment on what the phrase actually says, because that is where the real issue lies.

What the image puts into play

In this reading, the conscience is not a neutral faculty: it is the place where moral damage is registered, the instance that knows what the rest of the person has done. The sores are that damage turned into a wound—something that hurts from within rather than from without. And the absence of scarring is the phrase’s strong claim: that certain wounds do not close on their own, that the mere passage of time—to which so much healing power is routinely ascribed—is not enough.
It is best not to read this as a universal condemnation to eternal guilt. It is more precise, and more interesting, to distinguish the terms:

•    Guilt: the fact of having done something wrong.
•    Remorse: the fact of continuing to suffer for having done it.
•    Conscience: the capacity to recognize that damage and to judge it.
•    Scarring: the always uncertain possibility that time, repentance, or some form of reparation might transform that pain into something else.

Read this way, the phrase functions less as a moral sentence and more as an epistemological warning: beware the comfortable idea that time cures anything simply by elapsing. And behind it emerges a question more interesting than the maxim itself: what happens to someone who manages to live normally while carrying a wound that their conscience refuses to close?

An author who does not support what is attributed to him

Publilius Syrus was a writer of Syrian origin, active in Rome in the first century BCE, known for his mimes—short theatrical pieces, somewhere between comic and moralizing—and, above all, for a collection of maxims that outlived him: brief sentences on conduct, fortune, ambition, and power. But that textual tradition reached us fragmented, filtered through centuries of copies, translations, and compilations, which makes it extremely easy for a phrase to end up stuck to his name without ever having come from his pen.
Searching for the backing of “the sores of the conscience do not heal” in that corpus yields nothing. The Latin text does not appear, no ancient edition of the Sententiae contains it, and there is no identifiable translation or philological reference that would explain the passage from an original to this Spanish version. That does not prove the phrase is false—absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—but it does oblige us to treat it as what it is: an unverified attribution, perhaps a modern paraphrase that attached itself to Publilius Syrus purely by stylistic resemblance, that sententious cadence for which he is recognized.

Where the image does have a home: Montaigne

If the Roman authorship is doubtful, the idea finds a much firmer—and far more elaborated—place in Montaigne. In the chapter “Of Conscience” in the Essays, remorse appears described as an ulcer in the flesh, something that scratches and bleeds itself without anyone intervening from outside. The translation varies according to the edition, but the image in the original French—ulcère dans les chairs—is exactly the same one proposed by the phrase attributed to Publilius Syrus: remorse not as a passive memory, but as an active wound that continues to produce pain in the present tense.
Yet where the maxim attributed to Publilius Syrus is categorical—the conscience has sores, and the sores do not heal—Montaigne complicates the picture. He maintains that reason can relieve many sorrows, but not necessarily those that arise from remorse, precisely because that pain does not come from outside: it is born inside the very person who suffers it. The difference is subtle but decisive: it is not merely that the conscience remembers the damage, but that it can become the site where the damage continues to occur, in the continuous present.
And yet Montaigne does not remain in fatalism either. In other passages he distinguishes remorse from the possibility of correcting one’s conduct, and he goes so far as to affirm that a good conscience can produce satisfaction and tranquillity. The wound, then, is not a fixed destiny: it may remain open, but it may also become the ground of a reparation. Publilius Syrus—if the quotation were his, which cannot be taken as certain—would formulate the persistence of the wound as a fact. Montaigne, by contrast, examines the mechanism: how that wound is produced, what feeds it, and under what conditions it can be transformed into something else.

The tribunal that needs no witnesses

There is a scene in Montaigne that deepens the idea still further, and that is worth recovering because it best closes the argument. During the civil wars he encounters a man from the opposing side who tries to conceal it. The man is so terrified that Montaigne understands the fear does not come from any concrete external threat, but from his own conscience. From this he concludes that conscience “makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves,” and that when there is no external witness, it itself becomes a witness against us.
That is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable twist in the entire trajectory: the wound does not need a judge to point it out in order to remain open. The punishment can continue even if no one accuses, no one asks, and no one remembers. Conscience is not merely the emotion of feeling guilty: it is a kind of interior tribunal that sits without an audience and without a closing date.

A possible rereading

Taken all together—the maxim of doubtful authorship, Montaigne’s ulcer, the tribunal without witnesses—the phrase that gives its title to book Flowers for Simón Latzel acquires a density that the isolated quotation did not possess. The flowers can be read as homage, as memory, even as an attempt at reparation. But the warning the phrase carries—wherever it comes from—is that an homage does not necessarily close a wound. The conscience can go on litigating with itself long after the rest of the world has considered the matter settled.

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Prudence is merely fear walking on tiptoe

There are phrases that survive precisely because no one can agree on who said them first. This is one of them: "Prudence is merely fear walking on tiptoe." I found it in an old, undated newspaper clipping without a clear signature, and upon pulling the thread, I stumbled into the usual dispute: some maintain that the "correct" version speaks of discretion, not prudence, and that what I had in my hands was a later adaptation; others defend the opposite, claiming that the quote about prudence is the original and the one about discretion, a deviation.

The most frequently cited origin points to Miguel Zamacoïs, a Franco-Spanish writer of the Belle Époque, whose original aphorism—in French—read: «La prudence, c'est la peur marchant sur la pointe des pieds». Prudence, not discretion. The curious thing is that a second version exists, also attributed to him or to an adaptation of his work, which replaces "prudence" with "discretion": "Discretion is nothing but fear walking on tiptoe." That single word changes the target of the critique. Prudence is the general virtue of acting with good judgment, of calculating consequences before moving. Discretion is more narrow: tact, reserve, moderation in speech or action. One quote points its barrel at calculation; the other, at silence. Both, however, throb with the same suspicion: that the behavior we celebrate as reasonableness might be, deep down, fear with good manners.
That Zamacoïs was relegated to the background—to the point that his aphorisms end up attributed to more resonant names like Alexandre Dumas—should come as no surprise. That is what usually happens to the quick wits of the press and the theater: they shine in their moment and then dissolve into the anonymity of the "popular," while the phrase continues to circulate, now orphaned. It is also worth noting that this maxim was not born from nineteenth-century serial romance, as its aphoristic tone might suggest, but from the sharp, satirical spirit of the twentieth-century Parisian press. It is a scalpel of a phrase, not a balcony.

What the phrase really says

Stripped of the philological debate, the imagery operates on several registers at once. First, as an exercise of appearance versus reality: what we call caution or good judgment is often the neat mask of a deeper insecurity, the fear of consequences disguised as virtue. Second, as a physical description of fear: walking on tiptoe means advancing without making noise, without drawing attention, exactly as fear tries to pass unnoticed even while taking action. And third, as a critique of paralysis: the phrase invites us to ask ourselves how many times we shield ourselves behind "sensitivities" solely to avoid exposing ourselves to risk or failure.

Prudence as the enemy of serendipity

That is where the phrase ceases to be a simple display of wit and becomes an analytical tool. Because if excessive prudence is, at its core, fear creeping in stealth, then it has a natural and very concrete enemy: serendipity. I understand serendipity as that kind of valuable finding that occurs unexpectedly, when one was actually looking for something else—or looking for nothing in particular. For it to happen, a minimum dose of openness to chance is required, a deviation from the charted path, a certain voluntary exposure to the unknown. That is to say: everything that prudence, by definition, seeks to avoid.
The relationship between these two concepts can be unpacked across three levels.
The first is that walking on tiptoe blocks friction with the unexpected. Serendipity needs to stumble upon something that was not in the plan, and someone walking on tiptoe does the exact opposite: they avoid noise, avoid stepping off the familiar path, and calculate every step to avoid surprises. By eliminating risk and variability from their route, prudence reduces the probability of a chance discovery to zero—or close to zero. The prudent person seeks control; serendipity, on the other hand, requires an accident to exist.
The second level is fear as a paralyzing filter. If we accept that prudence is nothing more than rationalized fear, that fear ends up acting like a pair of blinkers: anyone moved by fear concentrates their entire attention on the threat, or on the strict goal that keeps them safe, rendering themselves blind to the anomalies at the margins. And those margins—out-of-place data, unscheduled conversations, books picked up at random—are precisely the natural habitat of serendipity.
The third level is the most uncomfortable: serendipity demands a certain "fertile imprudence." History’s great serendipitous discoveries usually have someone behind them who was not entirely prudent by the standards of their time. Leaving a culture plate unsealed, like Fleming with penicillin. Deviating from the planned route to pull into a dead-end street. Buying a used book on a subject one knows absolutely nothing about, out of pure curiosity. While the fear that walks on tiptoe keeps a person protected within the realm of the already known, serendipity requires the courage to make enough noise for the world, taken by surprise, to answer back with something unexpected.

The crossover with Bierce

There is a particularly revealing—and rather ironic—crossover when placing Zamacoïs's phrase against the backdrop of Ambrose Bierce, one of literature’s most implacable skeptics. In The Devil's Dictionary (1911), Bierce defines prudence with a bite that fits Zamacoïs’s intuition almost millimeter for millimeter: he describes it as a deficiency of audacity, disguised under a cloak of wisdom.
Both authors operate like surgeons on the same conceptual body: they strip prudence of its vestment as a cardinal virtue to reveal what lies beneath. What is interesting is that their scalpels cut in complementary directions. Zamacoïs portrays the internal emotion: he describes the physical and psychological state of the prudent person—that fear that does not want to make noise and moves in stealth to pass unnoticed and dodge the consequences of living. Bierce, in contrast, portrays the social disguise: he exposes the intellectual magic trick by which what we call "wisdom," "experience," or "maturity" is, often enough, nothing more than a lack of guts made up in noble vocabulary.
If you assemble both readings into a single thought, prudence is left exposed in two beats: the motive is fear—what Zamacoïs says—and the result is camouflage—what Bierce says. For the radical skeptic, the person who boasts of "weighing their steps carefully" is, deep down, using intelligence to rationalize their own cowardice. Prudence ceases to be the guide of the wise man and becomes merely fear's etiquette strategy to avoid looking embarrassing.

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The Comfort Bacon Owes Us and Those Who Collect It

“Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.” The line belongs to Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, politician, and man of letters at the turn of the 17th century, and it possesses the slightly deceptive elegance of aphorisms: it seems to close a debate when, in reality, it opens one.
What Bacon describes is a mechanism of compensation. Prosperity, he says, never comes alone: it drags along the fear of losing it, the envy it arouses, and the new responsibilities it imposes. Adversity, on its part, is not a bottomless pit either: even in the worst-case scenario, human beings find comfort in the smallest details, learn something from the experience, and manage to hold onto the hope that tomorrow will be different. No situation, then, is absolute. Success is not free of cracks, nor is failure devoid of its own light. It is an invitation to moderation and resilience: not losing one's head in times of abundance, not losing faith in the midst of the storm. A neat, almost accounting-like balance between what is gained and what is paid to have it.
The problem—if one must find fault with such a well-constructed phrase—is that this balance takes for granted the existence of a moral symmetry in the universe, a sort of cosmic ledger that gives something back to the person who suffers. Not everyone was willing to sign that contract.
Schopenhauer is the first to break it, and he does so from the root. For him, life does not oscillate between prosperity and adversity as two compensatory states, but between pain and boredom, with no real way out on either side. Where Bacon sees hope as genuine comfort in the middle of the storm, Schopenhauer sees merely a trick of the Will so that we continue suffering without resisting too much. He puts it bluntly: “All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and by nature purely negative... Pain and lack alone are imposed on us in a positive manner. Therefore, when evaluating a life's balance sheet, we must not measure the pleasures enjoyed, but the evils avoided” (The World as Will and Representation). The difference with Bacon is not one of nuance but of architecture: Bacon proposes a compensatory equilibrium—wealth pays with fear and misfortune collects in hope; Schopenhauer maintains that only pain is real, and that hope and comfort are, at best, fleeting truces.
Cioran goes even further, because he does not dispute the efficacy of hope: he disputes its honesty. If for Bacon hope is the engine that pulls us out of adversity, for Cioran it is precisely what prevents us from seeing adversity for what it is. “Hope is the normal form of delirium. We are not cured of it until misfortune has completely devastated us and there is nothing left in us upon which to build a tomorrow” (The Trouble with Being Born). It is not that hope comforts poorly; it is that it comforts too well, and that is precisely the fraud. Where Bacon sees a legitimate spark amid the dark, Cioran sees a blindness we choose because the alternative—looking the void in the face—is unbearable to us.
Leopardi closes the picture from a different perspective: he does not deny that we seek comfort, he denies that nature has anything to do with giving it to us. Bacon's symmetry assumes an order that dispenses fears and hopes with a certain justice; Leopardi observes, instead, an indifferent nature for which evil is simply the normal state of affairs. “Evil is the natural state of things... Hope is the only comfort left to us, but it is also the greatest of the deceptions that Nature has set for man” (Zibaldone). The moderation and resilience that Bacon recommends as a reasonable response to changing fortunes are, for Leopardi, merely the elegant names we give to our need to cover our eyes in front of a fate that teaches nothing and comforts no one: it simply happens.
Placed side by side, these three voices do not refute Bacon so much as they strip him bare. Bacon describes what it feels like to live inside the pendulum between prosperity and adversity; Schopenhauer, Cioran, and Leopardi ask what lies behind the pendulum, and they agree on an uncomfortable answer: nothing holding it up, except our need to believe there is. Perhaps Bacon’s quote is not describing a law of the universe, but rather the only available strategy for someone who still needs to get up tomorrow—which, parenthetically, does not make it any less true for the person living it, though it does make it less objective than its elegance suggests.

Generated with AI assistance and verified by a human to ensure accuracy.

The Dissolving Glow and the Remaining Shadow: Octavio Paz vis-à-vis Emil Cioran

 
In the line “Even light itself is lost,” from his poem Destino del poeta (The Poet’s Destiny), Octavio Paz compresses one of the core insights of his poetics: transience as an inherent condition of beauty and meaning. It explores the ephemeral nature of existence and the fragility of words. For the Mexican Nobel laureate, the act of writing poetry does not consist of erecting immutable monuments, but rather of bearing witness to the brevity of things. Light is not a simple physical metaphor; it is the experience of revelation, the clarity of the instant, the spark of language that illuminates the world. However, within that very phrasing brews a tragic melancholy: the fading clarity does not fall into a neutral void, but is lost within itself, suggesting an almost liturgical exhaustion of the poetic substance. Paz conceives the fragility of the word not as a vulgar impotence, but as a noble yet ephemeral victory over silence; the poet is the heroic officiant who accepts the dissolution of his work in exchange for the fleeting dazzle of naming.

Facing this sacralizing elegy of art and existence, the irruption of Emil Cioran represents an uncompromising demolition. If Paz grieves the extinguishing light, the Romanian thinker questions the validity of mourning what, from the very beginning, never possessed ontological consistency. From the perspective of Cioran's radical skepticism, light is not lost in a gesture of sublime exhaustion; light is merely a cosmogonic accident, an insignificant parenthesis within the untamed hegemony of darkness. While Paz treats the void with the dignity of aesthetic tragedy, Cioran shatters any lyrical attempt by emphasizing that the true matrix of reality is the primal shadow. For the author of The Trouble with Being Born, the claim to bestow metaphysical elegance upon the brevity of being is nothing more than a trap of the ego—an illusion created by language to mask the inanity of existence.

The clash between both authors reaches its climax in the function they assign to language. For Octavio Paz, the word is a brittle yet sacred crystal vessel whose fragility deserves to be guarded, even if it is ultimately shattered by the density of silence. For Cioran, on the other hand, language does not suffer from a tragic fragility, but from a constitutive falsity: it is a structure of fictions designed to console us for a nothingness that admits no adjectives or metaphors. Where Paz finds in the "poet’s destiny" a tragic and transcendent mission—that of sustaining the light while it dissolves—Cioran perceives a futile effort. In Cioran's desolate geometry, light is not lost like someone losing a jewel in the abyss; light goes out because it was never anything more than a perceptual error in the infinite night of being.

This intersection between Octavio Paz and Emil Cioran opens a fascinating rift: the tension between the sacred lament for loss and the relentless demystification of nothingness.
To structure this analytical clash in depth, the focus must not lie solely on light as a phenomenon, but on the role of the poet confronting the void.

Words? Yes, of air…

Words? Yes, of air, and in the air lost.
Let me lose myself among words, let me be the air on a pair of lips, a wandering gust without contours that the air dissolves.
Even light itself is lost.

Octavio Paz

AI brought the words, I brought the judgment.existentialism, poetic analysis.