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and take upon himself the unnecessary that life inevitably brings altogether, and even
enjoy it from time to time. Can you imagine a dark-faced saint? Internally complaining
what he is not willing to externally articulate. No, it cannot be. It is not. Rather, he also
enjoys with subtlety the revolting of his sins.
Accepting his weaknesses and faults is the greatest trial and character-shaper for the
man of courage. Ultimately this is what builds up his courage. Had a man embraced all
his faults and weaknesses, all his sins, at once, surely he couldnt bear it. Therefore, we
must look for optimizing life in such a way, following a tendency, never pretending to
reach an established final point or a quantity. In interiorizing this a man is allowed not
to fall into the recklessness and blind boldness of believing oneself as perfect; a
common drunkenness product of an dilutional success - the first step on the stairway to
a certain self-defeat.
The unnecessary is what you were running away from, and is what you will drag all
along in your path so shun not the shade you cast. Embrace it as it means you have
positioned yourself under the shine of the solar truth. Those who live in darkness can't
tell whether it is their part or the whole that is shady; they preferred not to be exposed.
Avoiding exposure is all they know.
In doing things you won't always do perfectly and you are not supposed to. You are
only supposed to do things. Furthermore, you are utterly supposed to want to to be
conscious about wanting to do things, above all; especially when you know you could
fail. Be available and receptive and capable to weather storms and quiet days all the
same.
While lifting you are not supposed to know the absolute best training methods, be able
to follow them, then have the perfect meals and supplements, then have the perfect sleep
and mood to optimally recover, etc. You are not supposed to enjoy and believe you
made the best out of your training session. You are only supposed to train. You are
supposed to want to train. You must train hard and accept whether it feels good or not,
whether you think it was good or not; that's all. You, as a trainee, must train. So, walk
the path to perfection and avoid trying to make the walking perfect, since that is the
death of every endeavour.
Roman life was highly scripted, even regimented, in comparison to our own.
But what made the strictures bearable were the spaces, the interstices, the loopholes
that kept the script, the score, from being a trap. It was fortunathe wobble, the improvisation, the
possibility and temptation to transgress, and the possibility,
as well, of death and defeatthat made self-control bearable, that made it beautiful.
46 What made ones speech and gestures more than chains of signification
were wordplay, irony, poetry, silliness, nonsense. It was a discipline, ultimately,
without safety.
This was the Roman discrimen, the moment of truth, the equivocal and ardent
moment when, before the eyes of others, you gambled what you were. This was the
agon, the contest, when truth was not so much revealed as created, realized, willed in
the most intense and visceral way, the truth of ones being, the truth of being. 1
But there were, in the Roman mind, good contests and bad
ones. A good contest obeyed restrictions: it needed to be a) framed and circumscribed
within implicit or explicit boundaries accepted by the competitors, b) between
relative equals, c) witnessed, and d) strenuous.4
The Romans most sacred forms of contract, the vow and the
oath, were bets in which one staked ones name, ones head, ones eyes. 5
Undergoing the ordeal (labor, periculum, discrimen, certamen, contentio, agon) was the
act of defining ones boundaries, of determining ones share or portion. It was
necessary for ones sense of being.
To be men, most of all, they must accept the fact that they are expendable (Gilmore, Manhood
in the Making, p. ). For the evolutionary and biological aspects of male expendability, see the
brief but excellent summary in Walter J. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness,
Amherst, Mass., , pp. . To come to grips with his biological nature, a male must overcome
his instinct for survival as a creaturethat part of himself that he shares with females. A female, being
less expendable biologically, is not required to suffer such a sharp division in her psyche; she does not
need so violent a denaturing to become a woman.
Nathan Rosenstein, It was precisely this readiness to face extreme danger when
no necessity compelled that was acknowledged as the supreme manifestation of personal courage at
Rome and that won decorations for valor. For this reason, he explains, the generals who deliberately
placed themselves in danger, or who refused to surrender or even survive when all was lost, were admired
more than the soldiers on the line, for theirs was the product of an individual decision, not
something expected of them because they were part of a group
The Romans associated virtus with vis, vires (physical power vigor, vitality, energy, violent or forceful
action).42 Accordingly, they also associated
vir with vis and with viriditas, the flourishing vigor and potency of youth.43
But it is important to note that they also associated the female virgo (or vira) with
the same notions.44 The vir and the virgo had in common youthful vigor, growth,
fertility, freshness, and energy.
The great soul belongs not to the man who is generous with what belongs to others, but the
man who extracts from himself what he gives to another (Non est magni animi qui de alieno liberalis est, sed
ille qui, quod alteri donat, sibi detrahit [Seneca, De clementia . . ]).
He never wished to live who did not wish to die (vivere noluit qui mori non vult [Aufidius Bassus,
quoted by Seneca, Epistulae . ]).
Seneca succinctly put it, Who scorns his own life is lord of yours