A Brief History of Wine

14 Jul 2012 2 Comments

by Neel Burton in Wine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Early foragers and farmers made wine from wild grapes or other fruits. According to archaeological evidence, by 6000 BC grape wine was being made in the Caucasus, and by 3200 BC domesticated grapes had become abundant in the entire Near East. In Mesopotamia, wine was imported from the cooler northern regions, and so came to be known as ‘liquor of the mountains’. In Egypt as in Mesopotamia, wine was for nobles and priests, and mostly reserved for religious or medicinal purposes. The Egyptians fermented grape juice in amphorae which they covered with cloth or leather lids and then sealed up with mud from the Nile. By biblical times, wine had acquired some less dignified purposes. According to the Old Testament, Noah planted a vineyard, and ‘drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent’ (Genesis 9:21). Skip to the New Testament and here is Jesus employed as a wine consultant: ‘And no man putteth new wine into old wineskins: else the wine bursts the skins, and the wine is lost as well as the skins: but new wine must be put into new skins’ (Mark 2:22).

Many of the grape varieties that are cultivated in modern Greece are similar or identical to those cultivated there in Ancient times. Wine played a central role in Ancient Greek culture, and the vine—which, as in the Near East, had been domesticated by the Early Bronze Age—was widely cultivated. The Minoans, who flourished on the island of Crete from c.2700 to c.1450 BC, imported and exported different wines, which they used not only for recreational but also for religious and ritual purposes. Wine played a similarly important role for the later Myceneans, who flourished on mainland Greece from c.1600 to 1100 BC. In fact, wine was so important to the Greeks as to be personified by a major deity, Dionysus or Bacchus, and honoured with a number of annual festivals. One such festival was the Anthesteria, which, held in February each year, celebrated the opening of wine jars to test the new wine. Active in the 9th century BC, the poet Homer often sung of wine, famously alluding to the Aegean as the ‘wine dark sea’. In the Odyssey, he says that ‘wine can of their wits the wise beguile/ Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile’. In the Works and Days, the poet Hesiod, who lived in the 7th or 8th century BC, speaks of pruning and even of drying the grapes prior to fermentation. The Greeks plainly understood that no two wines are the same, and held the wines of Thassos, Lesbos, Chios, and Mende in especially high regard; Theophrastus, a contemporary and close friend of Aristotle, even demonstrated some pretty clear notions of terroir.

In Ancient Greece, vines were left to their own devices, supported on forked props, or trained up trees. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes the Ancient Greek practice of using partly dehydrated gypsum prior to fermentation, and some type of lime after fermentation, to remove acidity—but this was no doubt a relatively recent or infrequent practice. The wine was neither racked nor fined, and it was not uncommon for the drinker to want to pass it through a sieve or strainer. Additives such as aromatic herbs, spice, honey, or a small part of seawater were often added both to improve and preserve the wine—which could also be concentrated by boiling. Finished wine was stored in amphorae lined with resin or pitch, both substances that imparted some additional and characteristic flavour. Generally speaking, wine was sweeter then than it is today, reflecting not only prevalent tastes, but also the ripeness of the grapes, the use of natural yeasts in fermentation, and the lack of temperature control during fermentation. At the same time, wine did come in a wide variety of styles, some of which were markedly austere. To drink undiluted wine was considered a bad and barbarian practice—almost as bad as drinking beer like the Babylonian or Egyptian peasant classes. Wine was diluted with two or three parts of water to produce a beverage with an alcoholic strength of around 3-5%. The comedian Hermippus, who flourished in the golden age of Athens, described the best vintage wines as having a nose of violets, roses, and hyacinths; however, most wine would have turned sour within a year and specific vintages are never mentioned.

Together with the sea-faring Phoenicians, the Ancient Greeks disseminated the vine throughout the Mediterranean, and even named southern Italy Oenotria or ‘Land of Vines’. If wine was important to the Greeks, it was even more so to the Romans, who thought of it as a daily necessity of life and democratized its drinking. They established a great number of Western Europe’s major wine producing regions, not only to provide steady supplies for their soldiers and colonists, but also to trade with native tribes and convert them to the Roman cause. In particular, the trade of Hispanic wines surpassed that even of Italian wines, with Hispanic amphorae having been unearthed as far as Britain and the limes Germanicus or German frontier. In his Geographica (7 BC), Strabo states that the vineyards of Hispania Beatica (which roughly corresponds to modern Andalucia) were famous for their great beauty. The area of Pompeii produced a great deal of wine, much of it destined for the city of Rome, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD led to a dramatic shortage. The people of Rome panicked, uprooting food crops to plant vineyards. This led to a food shortage and wine glut, which in 92 AD compelled the emperor Domitian to issue an edict banning the planting of vineyards in Rome.

The Romans left behind a number of agricultural treatises that provide a wealth of information on Roman viticulture and winemaking. In particular, Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura (c. 160 BC) served as the Roman textbook of winemaking for several centuries. In De Re Rustica, Columella surveyed the main grape varieties, which he divided into three main groups: noble varieties for great Italian wines, high yielding varieties that can nonetheless produce age-worthy wines, and prolific varieties for ordinary table wine. Pliny the Elder, who also surveyed the main grape varieties, claimed that ‘classic wines can only be produced from vines grown on trees’, and it is true that the greatest wines of Campania, such as Caecuban and Falernian, nearly all came from vines trained on trees—often elms or poplars. Both Caecuban and Falernian were white sweet wines, although there also existed a dry style of Falernian. Undiluted Falernian contained a high degree of alcohol; so high that a candle flame could set it alight. It was deemed best to drink Falernian at about 15-20 years old, and another classed growth called Surrentine at 25 years old or more. The Opimian vintage of 121 BC, named after the consul in that year Lucius Opimius, acquired legendary fame, with some examples still being drunk more than 100 years later.

The best wines were made from the initial and highly prized free-run juice obtained from the treading of the grapes. At the other end of the spectrum were posca, a mixture of water and sour wine that had not yet turned to vinegar, and lora, a thin drink or piquette produced from a third pressing of grape skins. Following the Greek invention of the screw, screw presses became common on Roman villas. Grape juice was fermented in large clay vessels called dolia, which were often partially sunk into the ground. The wine was then racked into amphorae for storing and shipping. Barrels invented by the Gauls and, later still, glass bottles invented by the Syrians vied as alternatives to amphorae. As in Ancient Greece, additives were common: chalk or marble to neutralize excess acid; and boiled must, herbs, spice, honey, resin, or seawater to improve and preserve thin offerings. Maderization was common and sought after; at the same time, rooms destined for wine storage were sometimes built so as to face north and away from the sun. Following the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church perpetuated the knowledge of viticulture and winemaking, first and foremost to provide the blood of Christ for the celebration of Mass.

Sex & Sexuality in Ancient Rome

13 Jul 2012 Leave a Comment

by Neel Burton in Psychiatry/psychology Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sex is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus. —Marcus Aurelius

In Rome, a woman had no legal identity other than as a man’s daughter or wife, entirely subjected first to her father and then to her husband, who was entitled to beat her if he felt that she had overstepped her mark. Although women from good families were taught to read and write, the vast majority did not receive any formal education. They could not vote or take up any formal role such as magistrate or soldier, and were effectively confined to running the home and having children. Almost every woman came under pressure to bare a healthy son who would survive into adulthood to inherit his father’s estate, after which the widowed woman could well find herself destitute. There were, of course, a few exceptional women, and many if not most women exerted an important influence over their husbands, sons, and brothers—even when, as with Agrippina the Younger, these happened to be emperors.

Both women and men, but especially women, were supposed to uphold pudicitia, a complex virtue that may be translated as restraint or chastity. A woman with a high degree of pudicitia, that is, a univira or ‘one-man’ woman, would seek in particular to appear modest and to limit her social interaction with men other than her husband and male relatives. At the same time, a divorced woman did not suffer stigma; in the upper classes, it was common and even expected for a divorced or widowed woman to remarry. Pudicitia symbolized reason and goodness, whereas impudicitia—that is, shamelessness and sexual vice (struprum or ‘sex crime’)—symbolized chaos and a loss of control. A univira woman was held in high esteem and even idealized, with Augustus going so far as to enact a programme of legislation to promote the notion and its observance. Livy in particular upheld the legendary figure of Lucretia as the epitome of pudicitia, and it is possible that her rape and subsequent suicide are not so much historical fact as an allegorical tale constructed both to uphold Roman values and to account for the fall of the monarchy and birth of the Republic. Other writers and thinkers to have pored over the concept of pudicitia include Valerius Maximus, Cicero, Tacitus, and Tertullian.

All this is not to say that the Romans were in any way prude, or, indeed, that they never lost sight of their high ideals. Later Christians may have exaggerated their degree of depravity, but it is certainly true that they had highly ambivalent attitudes to sex. In particular, it was socially acceptable and even expected for freeborn men to have extramarital sex with both female and male partners, especially adolescents, provided they (1) exercised moderation, (2) adopted the dominating role, and (3) confined their activities to slaves and prostitutes or, less commonly, a concubine or ‘kept woman’. As the property of another freeborn man, married or marriageable women and young male citizens were strictly off-limits. Musonius criticized the double standard that granted men greater sexual freedom than women, arguing that, if men are to presume to exercise control over women, they ought to exercise even greater control over themselves. He maintained that, even within marriage, sex should be undertaken as an expression of affection and for procreation, and not for ‘bare pleasure’.

Vestal virgin

The Romans sought in particular to control female sexuality because they thought of it as the basis of the family and, by extension, of social order and prosperity. These notions are epitomized by the cult of Venus, the mother of Aeneas and so of the Roman people, and, of course, by the absolute virginity of the Vestals, who would be buried alive if convicted of fornication. Any act that violated a Vestal’s vow of chastity constituted an act of religious impurity (incestum) and thereby also violated Rome’s treaty with the gods, the pax deorum. Roman religion very much reflected and regulated sexual mores, with the male-female duality enshrined in the pairings of the 12 Dii Consentes or major deities (the Roman equivalent of the Olympian gods of the Greeks): Jupiter-Juno, Neptune-Minerva, Mars-Venus, Apollo-Diana, Vulcan-Vesta, and Mercury-Ceres. Many Roman religious festivals incorporated an important element of sexuality, for example, the Floralia, which marked the renewal of the cycle of life with, amongst others, nude dancing by prostitutes, and the Lupercalia, which culminated in a fertility rite.

In addition to their other religious and ceremonial duties, the Vestal Virgins tended the cult of the fascinus populi Romani, the sacred image of the divine phallus and male counterpart of the hearth of Vesta. Like the Palladium, Lares, and Penates of Troy and the eternal fire, the fascinus populi Romani assured the ascendency and continuity of the state. Similarly, during the Liberalia or festival of Liber Pater (another name for Bacchus), devotees carted a large phallus throughout the countryside to bring fertility to the land and people and to protect the crops from evil, after which a virtuous matron placed a wreath around the phallus. Smaller talismans in the form of a penis and testes, often winged, sometimes even in gold, invoked the protection of the god Fascinus against the evil eye. These charms, or fascini, were extremely common, either emblazoned onto various objects or worn as a ring or amulet, especially but not exclusively by infants, boys, and soldiers.

A freeborn man’s libertas or political liberty manifested itself, amongst others, in the mastery of his own body, and his adoption of a passive or submissive sexual role implied servility and a loss of virility. Homosexual behaviour amongst soldiers not only violated the decorum against intercourse with another freeborn man, but also compromised the penetrated soldier’s sexual and therefore military dominance, with rape and penetration the symbols (and sometimes also the realities) of military defeat. According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the 2nd century BC, a soldier who had been penetrated could have attracted the ultimate penalty of fustuarium or cudgelling to death. The Latin language does not have a strict equivalent for the noun ‘homosexual’, which is a recent coinage and concept; however, a minority of men did, then as today, express a clear same-sex preference or orientation.

Most extramarital and same-sex activity took place with slaves and prostitutes. Slaves were regarded as property, and lacked the legal standing that protected a citizen’s body. A freeman who forced a slave into having sex could not be charged with rape, but only under laws relating to property damage, and then only by the slave’s owner. Prostitution was both legal and tolerated, and common, often in brothels or in the fornices (arcade dens) under the arches of the circus. Most prostitutes were slaves or freedwomen. By becoming a prostitute, a freeborn person suffered infamia (loss of esteem or reputation) and became an infamis, losing her or his social and legal standing. Other occupations to suffer from infamia—a concept that still retains some currency in the Roman Catholic Church—included not only pimps but also entertainers such as actors and dancers, and gladiators. Members of these groups, which had in common the pleasuring of others, could be subjected to violence and even killed with relative impunity.

Wall painting from a lunar (brothel) in Pompeii

A man who was anally penetrated was perceived as taking on a woman’s role, but a woman who was anally penetrated was perceived as taking on a boy’s role. When his wife offered him anal sex to encourage his fidelity, the poet Martial tauntingly replied that anal sex with boys was superior to anal sex with women. Given that men could and often did indulge in extramarital sex, it has sometimes been assumed that Roman marriage did not presuppose any sexual attraction, let alone passion. At the same time, the houses and bedrooms of the nobility were often decorated with erotic scenes ranging from elegant amorous dalliance to explicit pornography. Suetonius reported that Horace had been alleged to have a mirrored room for sex, and that the emperor Tiberius stocked his bedrooms with sex manuals by the Greek poetess Elephantis. In Ancient Rome as in Victorian England, the opposites of virtue and pleasure often existed side by side, the one exposed in the public arena, the other dissimulated in the shades of night. And so, according to Seneca,

Virtue you will find in the temple, in the forum, in the senate house, standing before the city walls, dusty and sunburnt, her hands rough; pleasure you will most often find lurking around the baths and sweating rooms, and places that fear the police, in search of darkness, soft, effete, reeking of wine and perfume, pallid or else painted and made up with cosmetics like a corpse.

The Beauty of Latin

18 Jun 2012 Leave a Comment

by Neel Burton in Uncategorized

Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla!
…
Recordare, Iesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuæ viæ:
Ne me perdas illa die.
———
The day of wrath, that day
Will dissolve the world in ashes
As foretold by David and the sibyl!
…
Remember, merciful Jesus,
That I am the cause of thy way:
Lest thou lose me in that day.

—Mass for the Dead, sequence by Thomas of Celano (c. 1200-1260)

Our Rose-Tinted Spectacles: Good or Bad?

04 Jun 2012 Leave a Comment

by Neel Burton in Psychiatry/psychology


Most people see themselves in a much more positive light than others do them, and possess an unduly rose-tinted perspective on their attributes, circumstances, and possibilities.

Such positive illusions, as they are called, are of three broad kinds, an inflated sense of our qualities and abilities, an illusion of control over things that are mostly or entirely out of our control, and an unrealistic optimism about the future.

For example, most people think that they are a better than average driver, citizen, or parent, collectively implying that the average driver, citizen, or parent is in fact not at all average—which is obviously a statistical impossibility. A couple on the verge of getting married is likely to over- estimate the odds of having a sunny honeymoon or a gifted child but underestimate the odds of having a miscarriage, falling ill, or getting divorced.

Positive illusions may confer certain advantages such as an ability to take risks, see through major undertakings, and cope with traumatic events. In the longer term, however, the loss of perspective and poor judgement that come from undue self-regard and false hope are likely to lead to disappointment, failure, and even tragedy, not to mention the emotional and behavioural problems (such as anger, anxiety, and so on) that can be associated with a defended position.

Of special interest is that positive illusions are more prevalent in Occidental and Occidentalized cultures. In East Asian cultures, for example, people do not tend to self-enhance and may even be self-effacing. Positive illusions are also more prevalent in unskilled people. The explanation for this is thought to be that, in contrast to unskilled people, highly skilled people tend to assume—albeit falsely—that those around them enjoy a similar level of competence to them. This so-called Dunning-Kruger effect is neatly encapsulated in a short fragment from the introduction to Darwin’s Descent of Man: ‘…ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…’

And of course it may also and simply be that, compared to highly skilled people, unskilled people are far more dependent on positive illusions for their self-esteem.

Neel Burton is author of The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide and Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception

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The History of Bordeaux

19 May 2012 Leave a Comment

by Neel Burton in Wine

The region of Bordeaux, which means ‘on the edge of the water’ (au bord de l’eau), is situated in Aquitaine around the confluence of the rivers Garonne and Dordogne. This confluence gives rise to the Gironde estuary, the largest estuary in Europe, which stretches northwest for some 65km before spending itself into the Atlantic Ocean. Here the Romans cultivated the vine, as attested by the 1st century naturalist Pliny the Elder and the 4th century poet and consul Ausonius who is remembered by Château Ausone in St Emilion. In 1152, Henry II married the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine: the region came under English rule and ‘claret’ under great demand. By the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, France had regained control of the Bordelais; but despite heavy export duties, the British Isles remained an important market for claret. In the course of the 17th century, Dutch traders drained the marshland around the Médoc, which soon outclassed the Graves as the pre-eminent area of the Vignoble de Bordeaux. Nicolas Alexandre, marquis de Ségur (1695-1755) acquired the epithet Prince des Vignes after coming into possession of the Médoc properties of Château Lafite, Latour, Mouton, and Calon-Ségur. He turned some pebbles of Pauillac into buttons for his coat, which Louis XV once mistook for diamonds. Pierre de Rauzan, a grand bourgeois and manager of Château Latour until his death in 1692, accumulated the land that later became Châteaux Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Pichon Longueville Baron, Rauzan-Ségla, and Rauzan-Gassie. In 1855, Napoleon III ordered a classification of the top châteaux of Bordeaux for the Exposition Universelle de Paris. Bordeaux brokers ranked 61 châteaux into five crus or ‘growths’ based on a savant mélange of price and reputation. All these 61 châteaux are in the Médoc bar one—Haut Brion in the Graves. The 1855 Classification also includes a chapter on the sweet white wines of Sauternes and Barsac, with 26 châteaux divided into first and second growths and Château Yquem standing apart and alone as a Premier Cru Supérieur. The classifications of the Graves and of St Emilion are relatively recent, dating back, respectively, to 1953 and 1955, with Pomerol continuing to resist and defy classification. Starting in the late 19th century the Vignoble de Bordeaux began to suffer from a succession of American imports, first oidium (powdery mildew), second phylloxera. As a result of phylloxera, the vineyards had to be replanted onto American rootstock, and the grape varieties that tolerated this best such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot rose to pre-eminence. Then came downy mildew and black rot, followed by war, economic depression, more war, and an oil crisis. Many châteaux came out the other end in a state of utter disrepair and dilapidation, and in dire need of the restoration and regeneration that is still under way.

Arrogant Philosophers

04 May 2012 1 Comment

by Neel Burton in Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have spotted a certain propensity for arrogance amongst philosophers and creatives, particularly amongst the most studied or celebrated ones. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, of course, but even doubting Descartes and gentle Hume appear to have had their moments.

Here is a list of some of the most arrogant or downright offensive offerings ever to come out of some of the greatest philosophers and creatives. Needless to say, I do not in any way condone or subscribe to these positions—or, at least, not to the vast majority of them… Some may raise a laugh, others are nothing but distasteful.

And here are some questions that I pondered whilst compiling the list.

What is arrogance?
How, if at all, might arrogance be helpful?
Can arrogance ever be excused or justified?

Your answers on the back of a card, please.

1. ‎I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery. —Descartes

2. Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people. —Hegel

3. Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought. —Hegel

4. I’m not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation. —Hegel

5. Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.—Aristotle

6. Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one’s feelings, that is, to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward’s part), and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar. —Aristotle

7. I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle. —Descartes

8. As a consequence of her weaker reasoning powers, woman has a smaller share of the advantages and disadvantages these bring with them. She is, rather, a mental myopic… —Schopenhauer

9. Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex … More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling of receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please. —Schopenhauer

10. Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. —Nietzsche

11. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. —Nietzsche

12. After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands. —Nietzsche

13. ‘Evil men have no songs.’ How is it that the Russians have songs? —Nietzsche

14. It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave. —Hume

15. I have written on all sorts of subjects… yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians. —Hume

16. I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. —Freud

17. To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful. —Jung

18. I don’t do drugs. I am drugs. —Dali

19. My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. —Picasso

20. There was a time when I was running about the world, fancying myself to be well employed, but I was really a most wretched thing, no better than you are now. I thought that I ought to do anything rather than be a philosopher. —Socrates

21. Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honours as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? —Socrates

22. …if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomede, gold in exchange for brass. —Socrates

23. Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive. —Nietzsche

21 Things We Should Have Been Told At Graduation

29 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment

by Neel Burton in Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychology

The education that we receive barely prepares us for the challenges that lie ahead. This is what we should have been told at graduation instead of all the misplaced, self-congratulatory platitudes.

1. We strived to give you the best education. But what is the best education? The best education is not that which enables you to make a good living, nor even that which enables you to make a social contribution, but that which enables you on the path to freedom and individuation, and which, in the longer term, leads to the fullest living and the greatest social contribution.

2. Always ask for plenty of advice, but only from people whom you admire or seek to emulate. Best of all, seek advice from great works of literature and philosophy. Shakespeare and Plato are far wiser than anyone you will ever meet.

3. On the other hand, don’t dish out advice unless you are specifically asked.

4. Keep on asking silly questions. People may look at you funny, but at least you thought of the questions.

5. Be very sensitive to your feelings and intuitions. They are your unconscious made conscious. And they are almost always right.

6. Don’t be envious. Whenever you come across someone who is better or more successful than you are, you can react either with envy or with emulation. Envy is the pain that you feel because others have good things; emulation is the pain that you feel because you yourself do not have them. This is a subtle but critical difference. Unlike envy, which is useless at best and self-defeating at worst, emulation is a good thing because it makes us take steps towards securing good things.

7. Make friends with people who drag you up rather than drag you down. It is better to be taught than to teach, and better to be consoled than to console. In the long run, you become just like your friends. You are your friends.

8. Never get into a relationship because you are bored, lonely, or insecure, or because society expects you to. Things will go badly wrong.

9. The same also applies to having children.

10. Don’t expect to find perfect love, perfect virtue, or perfect wisdom in this world. These things simply do not exist in their idealized forms—or, at least, not outside our imagination.

11. Given the choice between laughing and crying, go with laughing. There is, sadly, no end of things to laugh about in this world.

12. All of the above requires a great deal of self-confidence. Try to cultivate it: it comes with habit. And it is divinely attractive.

13. The corollary here is: never be afraid. Or at least, never appear to be afraid. Danger and bad luck are attracted to fear.

14. If you don’t appear to want something, you are far more likely to get it. More importantly, when you do want something, be sure that it is worthy of you. And remember: we are rich not only by what we have, but also and especially by what we do not.

15. Never get angry. Just like fear, anger is a superfluous feeling that does far more harm than good. Most of a person’s actions and the neurological activity that they correspond to are determined by past events and the cumulative effects of those past events on that person’s patterns of thinking. It follows that the only person who can truly deserve your anger is the one who spited you freely, and therefore probably rightly! This does not mean that anger is not justified in other cases, as a display of anger—even if undeserved—can still serve a benevolent strategic purpose. But if all that is ever required is a strategic display of anger, then true anger than involves real pain is entirely superfluous.

16. Man is a product of the world which he inhabits. He seldom chooses to endure the things that he does. Simply being conscious of this fact can help to increase your degrees of freedom, and it only takes one free action to change the course of an entire lifetime.

17. Find whatever it is that you love doing and just do it, regardless of what others might think. It won’t feel like work. And chances are you will be very good at it.

18. Avoid working for other people or, worse, faceless corporations. It’s not psychologically healthy. And it’s not a game you’re ever going to win.

19. Think long term. The main difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich made a plan and stuck to it.

20. When you do find success, don’t expect anyone to be happy for you. In fact, many less successful people will actively resent you—even, sometimes, friends and family. Some people are small. Just accept it as collateral and move on.

21. Unless your work is your passion, you work so as to live and not vice versa. Spend at least half your waking hours simply reveling in the world around you. Never forget that our consciousness and its objects are the greatest of all miracles.

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