Of Constancy

The Stoics say that the wise man does not act in anything by the impulse of passion, but by reason alone. There is much in this that is admirable, and something that is impossible. The wise men themselves, when they have argued most powerfully for tranquility, have been seen to flinch at a sudden noise, to blanch at news of misfortune. Nature is not so easily overruled. What the Stoics call wisdom, nature calls numbness; and numbness is not a virtue but an absence.

True constancy, it seems to me, lies not in refusing to feel what we inevitably feel, but in refusing to be governed by those feelings when reason points elsewhere. A man can be moved by the sight of his friend dying and still act rightly at his bedside. A general can feel fear before a battle and still advance his troops in good order. The feelings are not the problem; they become a problem only when they displace the judgment that ought to be directing them.

“I do not wish to be so poor in fortitude as not to feel misfortune; I wish only to be so rich in it that misfortune does not prevent me from doing what must be done. The oak bends in the storm; it is the tree that does not bend that breaks.”

What we call firmness in great men is often this: not that they did not feel, but that they did not let what they felt determine what they did. Julius Caesar wept for Pompey. He also marched the next day. I do not think these facts contradict one another. I think they illuminate each other.

The danger of the Stoic ideal, pushed too far, is that it invites a kind of performance — a man pretending to feel less than he does in order to appear more than he is. Real constancy has no audience in mind. The man who is truly firm does not need to show it; it is simply how he moves through difficulty, the same way a well-built ship moves through heavy water: with effort, but without theatrics.