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.

The Opaque Vessel: Haste, Algorithms, and the Mystery of the Unforeseen Encounter

«Consciousness is like a vessel: if it is not clean, it will sour everything poured into it.» The phrase belongs to Horace. The exact line appears in his Epistles (Book I, Epistle 2, line 54):
«Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcumque infundis acescit.»
(«Unless the vessel is clean, whatever you pour into it turns sour.»)

Horace’s idea is relentless: no matter how pure or noble the liquid may be (feelings, intentions, affection), if the individual’s mind or disposition («the vessel») is contaminated by prejudice, unresolved pain, or rigid expectations, everything that enters it will end up souring. Horace identified with surgical precision this maxim, which presupposes a fundamental condition for encountering what is truly valuable: the cleanliness of consciousness—understood not only as moral rectitude, but as transparency, openness, and the capacity to welcome the foreign without corrupting it with one’s own distrust or bias.
Today, however, we face an unprecedented phenomenon. Contemporary haste and the architecture of digital life have altered the very nature of our «vessel.» Not only do we struggle to keep it clean; we have filled it in advance with the toxins of calculation, impatience, and predictability.

The Algorithm as a Prosthesis of Expectation

We live immersed in an attention economy sustained by recommendation systems. Algorithms are not designed to confront us with what is radically different, but to offer us continuous variations of what we already like. They operate under a logic of domesticated otherness: the feed shows us profiles, ideas, and lifestyles that confirm our inertia.
This dynamic has contaminated how we conceive human relationships. By transferring the logic of consumption into the realm of connection, we seek people who fit into pre-chewed parameters: the exact age range, the ideal ideological filter, matching hobbies. Modern haste—the demand to optimize every minute—abhors the friction of the unknown. There is no time to decipher a stranger; we demand immediate compatibility.

The Unforeseen as a Threat

What happens when life breaks through the algorithmic fence and crosses our path with an unexpected connection? Discomfort sets in. A true encounter with another person is always an experience of alterity: the other is not an extension of our preferences, but an incalculable mystery.
When consciousness lacks «cleanliness»—when it is corrupted by the anxiety for control, the fear of vulnerability, or the rush to categorize the speaker—the mystery of the other is perceived as a threat. If someone does not immediately fit into our molds, we assume they are wrong, dangerous, or a waste of our time.
Following Horace’s image, the pure liquid of an unexpected connection (the opportunity to learn, selfless affection, novelty) falls into a vessel saturated with prejudices and cautions. The outcome is inevitable: the relationship turns sour before having the chance to unfold. We accuse the other of being uncomfortable, when in reality it was our inability to welcome the unexpected that corrupted the contact.

Reclaiming the Cleanliness of the Vessel

Ensuring the possibility of the unforeseen requires a discipline of unlearning. Cleaning consciousness, in the context of the 21st century, implies voluntarily emptying the vessel through three fundamental actions:

1.    Suspending haste: The time required for a genuine connection is not the time of a click. It demands pause, active listening, and relinquishing instant evaluation.
2.    Embracing the other's opacity: Accepting that the human being before us will never be fully summarized by labels or a first impression.
3.    Disarming defensiveness: Recognizing that the discomfort caused by what is different is often a reflection of our own unresolved rigidities.

An unexpected relationship is not an accident to be corrected, but the ultimate proof that we remain alive in a processed world. Only a consciousness willing to clear its own noise can receive the novelty of the other without souring it, transforming the surprise of the encounter into an experience of authentic freedom.

The Skeptical and Extravagant Twist

Now, to twist the bolt of this idea, we can cross Horace's maxim with a skeptical, strange, and almost extravagant stance: what if the problem is not that the vessel is dirty, but that we think we know what dirt is, or worse, what if we suspect that the «liquid» coming from the outside doesn't exist and is merely an illusion of our own vessel?
From a perspective bordering on radical skepticism and the bizarre, the relationship with the other takes on three disquieting nuances:

1.    The Skepticism of the «Ghost Vessel» (Extravagant Solipsism): The radical skeptic suspects everything, even the existence of the other person. In this light, there was never an «unforeseen other» pouring anything into your vessel; everything that enters is merely an echo or a reflux from your own container. We believe we are falling in love or being surprised by a stranger, but we are only reacting to the sediment already sitting at the bottom. The «unforeseen relationship» is not an encounter with a stranger, but a mental magic trick where the vessel invents the flavor of the drink to convince itself it isn't sitting alone at the table.
2.    The Extravagance of «Deliberate Infection»: What if the only way to have an authentic experience in a hyper-calculated world was, precisely, to dirty the vessel in an outlandish way? Algorithms demand a sterilized, predictable, and transparent vessel from us. True skeptical extravagance would consist of consciously contaminating consciousness with absurd ideas, disconnected readings, or unpredictable attitudes, just to see what happens when it collides with another person. The unexpected encounter becomes a bizarre chemical experiment: two vessels with strange poisons or brews that, when mixed, do not default to souring, but instead explode or mutate into a comical or unclassifiable substance.
3.    The Paranoia of Purity (The Toxic Mystery): A skeptic would say of Horace: «Beware of whoever demands a perfectly clean vessel, for they often confuse purity with emptiness.» Someone obsessed with keeping their consciousness free of all stain or prejudice becomes incapable of reacting. A vessel so immaculate and sterilized rejects any liquid that is not distilled water. When a lost, strange, or unexpected person arrives—full of nuances, oddities, and contradictions—the ultra-purged mind does not welcome them; it perceives them as a toxic contaminant. Skepticism warns us that the obsession with «moral or mental cleanliness» is, in itself, the greatest of manias.

Ultimately, epistemological skepticism questions whether what we perceive is real or true, doubting dogmas, appearances, and reason's capacity to reach absolute certainties.
Facing Horace, the skeptic doubts that the vessel can ever be «clean,» or questions whether «dirt» is nothing more than an arbitrary label we slap onto things because we cannot know their true nature. Brought into the realm of unexpected relationships, for the skeptic, the unforeseen other remains an indecipherable enigma: you will never know if they love you, deceive you, or are a projection of your own mind. The unexpected relationship, therefore, does not come to resolve anything, but to force us to suspend our prior judgments (epoché) and learn to inhabit permanent uncertainty.

Made in collaboration with my virtual assistant.

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 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.

Chlorophyll Currencies: On the Unquestionability of the Resource

 

“Money is the only power that is never disputed” belongs to the French writer Alexandre Dumas (fils).

Meaning of the phrase:

•    Unquestionable power: Unlike politics, force, or moral authority, money demonstrates its value immediately and practically.
•    Universal acceptance: People may question the legitimacy of a leader or a law, but they rarely reject the tangible value of money.
•    Practical realism: Reflects a cynical or pragmatic view of how society and human relationships function.

When Alexandre Dumas (fils) declared that “money is the only power that is never disputed,” he drew a precise diagonal across the nature of human institutions. While religious faith shatters in schisms, political authority erodes in revolutions, and moral truths dissolve in philosophical debate, money remains. Its sovereignty appears axiomatic. However, Dumas’s intuition stumbles upon its own anthropocentric limit: human money, as omnipresent as it may be, rests on an intrinsic fragility. It is a legal fiction, a collective act of faith drafted on paper or encoded on screens. All it takes is hyperinflation, financial collapse, or a loss of trust for currency to reveal itself for what it truly is: a negotiable illusion.
To find a power whose value is genuinely indisputable, one must shift one's gaze beyond the polis and descend to the forest floor, where leafcutter ant colonies of the genus Atta reside.

The Tyranny of the Leaf: When Value Is Not a Fiction

In the subterranean galleries of an anthill, there are no central banks or stock exchanges, yet an economy of implacable rigidity operates. Ants do not consume the plant biomass they sever with surgical precision in the jungle canopy; the hijacked leaves are not food, but working capital. They constitute the indispensable entry currency to cultivate their one true sustenance: a symbiotic fungus (Leucoagaricus gongylophorus) that transforms cellulose into proteins.
In this system, the fragmentation of the leaf represents the monetary flow of a superorganism. But unlike human money—subject to speculation, interest rates, and ideological fluctuation—the “chlorophyll currency” admits no debate. No worker ant questions the value of the burden it hauls, goes on strike over the severity of the journey, or casts doubt on the exchange rate between the effort exerted and the mycelium harvest.

The indisputability of this resource lies in the fact that its value is not a symbolic convention, but a biological law. If the circulation of raw material is interrupted, the colony does not face a credit crisis or devaluation: it faces immediate extinction. While man's money promises the illusion of individual power and social status, the ant’s plant currency completely dissolves the individual. The ant does not accumulate leaves for itself; it is merely a cog in the distribution chain of a resource that dominates the entire species with the weight of a genetic mandate.

Dumas acutely observed human submission to capital, but his observation fell short in scale. The only power that is never disputed does not reside in the vaults of empires or in the accounting ledgers of high finance. It dwells beneath the leaf litter of the earth, in the silent and blind march of millions of workers who confirm, with every passing second, that true unquestionable power is not negotiated in markets, but stitched into the very architecture of life.

AI provided the words, I provided the judgment.