LETTER 1: Your Frontline
[>] âawful grace of Godâ: Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 194.
[>] âkilled the birds in the airâ: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 30.
LETTER 2: Why Resilience?
[>] âinto an enjoyable challengeâ: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 200.
[>] âas our legitimate propertyâ: Quoted in Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 277. Friedrich Nietzsche, âPosthumous Fragments,â in Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, trans. Pierre Hadot (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 5.2.552â53. When people quote Nietzsche, they often feel the need to apologize for some reason. Letâs acknowledge this about Nietzsche: he was a bit nuts, a bit destructive, and just as I wouldnât recommend his life to anyone, I wouldnât recommend that anyone swallow his whole philosophy unexamined. Still, some of what he wrote is brilliant. And we should learn from it. Letâs not throw away diamonds of genius because they were produced by imperfect people.
[>] âCultureâ was originally a word: Of course, this way of thinking about culture has ancient roots in Eastern as well as Western thought. Two and a half millennia ago, for instance, Confucius was asked which of his disciples loved learning the most. He answered, âThere was one Yen Hui who was eager to learn. He did not vent his anger upon an innocent person, nor did he make the same mistake twice.â The student who loved learning the most was not the one who had mastered the most facts; he was the one whose character had been shaped most deeply by what heâd learned. Confucius, The Analects, VI.3, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 81.
[>] âculture is innateâ: Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 22.
[>] âfighting done by foolsâ: This quotation is often attributed to Thucydides. Its real source seems to be a nineteenth-century British general, William Francis Butler. The original line reads: âThe nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.â Butler, Charles George Gordon (London: Macmillan, 1892), 85.
[>] ânature of the subject allowsâ: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1094b19-26 (emphasis added).
[>] âwe bring them backâ: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 9â10.
[>] âpeople love old truthsâ: Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, RĂ©flexions et Maximes, trans. F. G. Stevens (London: Humphrey Milford, 1940), §400.
[>] âset before our eyesâ: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistle XCIV, in Moral Epistles, vol. 3, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917â1925), 27â29.
[>] âand tolerate other peopleâ: Epictetus, Discourses, 3, 21, 4â6. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 267.
[>] âmagnanimity, and trustâ: Henry Thoreau, Walden (Philadelphia: Courage, 1990), 13.
[>] âface of the voidâ: Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, trans. David Macey (New York: Penguin, 2009), 47.
LETTER 3: What Is Resilience?
[>] âheavily for their acquiringâ: Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribnerâs Sons, 1932), 192.
[>] âthrough these laborsâ: Sophocles, Philoktetes, trans. Seth L. Schein (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2003), 85.
[>] âThe wounded man knows somethingâ: Robert Bly, Iron John (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 32.
[>] âthe road through sufferingâ: Quoted in Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 147.
[>] âWhatâs done cannot be undoneâ: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.1.71, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1998), 83.
[>] âstrong at the broken placesâ: Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribnerâs Sons, 1957), 249.
[>] âfree from freedomâ: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 31.
[>] âor rather, all the differenceâ: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1103b25â26.
[>] âwho botch the businessâ: Terry Eagleton, âThe Nature of Evil,â Tikkun, Winter 2011, 80.
[>] âwhatever they might beâ: Quoted in James C. Collins, Good to Great (New York: Harper Business, 2001), 85.
[>] âGive no groundâ: In Richmond Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3.
[>] âExactly like it, just as roundâ: In Guy Davenport, trans., Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 38.
LETTER 4: Beginning
[>] âdonât let me f*** upâ: Quoted in Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 198 (and still known as âShepardâs Prayerâ). However, Shepard himself later reported the quotation as, âDonât f*** up, Shepard.â
[>] âbeginning of philosophyâ: Plato, Theatetus, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 155d.
[>] âone cannot feel tamelyâ: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 141.
[>] âable to find those wordsâ: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York: Norton, 1934), 27.
[>] âwisdom to know the differenceâ: Deborah Galasso, Living Serenity (Cicero, NY: 5 Fold Media, 2014), 12.
[>] âreconciled to the uncontrollableâ: Solomon ibn Gabirol, A Choice of Pearls, XVII, trans. Benjamin Henry Ascher (London: TrĂŒbner and Co., 1859), 41.
[>] âsaying no to that situationâ: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 83.
[>] âpurification of the motiveâ: T. S. Eliot, âLittle Gidding,...