About the book
An apparent stoicism seems to surround us everywhere. From companies and advertisers to athletes and influencers, everyone advises living in a stoic way. But aren’t we giving up the pleasure of the little things, those that we can choose from the millennia-old legacy of Epicurean wisdom? Denigrated, misunderstood, relegated for centuries to oblivion, Epicurus proposed with his philosophy a path to achieve something as elusive for his contemporaries as it remains for us: happiness.And he did so in a simple and coherent way, moving away at the same time from the incessant search for pleasure – a vain enterprise, with which we only achieve increasing our desires more and more – and from extreme asceticism.
Charles Senard invites us to let ourselves be rocked by the testimonies of the one who was known as the “master in his Garden”, to live in the present and enjoy Epicureanism in the same way as its creator intended, in small sips.
There is a school of thought that attempts to reconcile effort and discipline with pleasure, without strictly opposing them as the Stoics so often claim. We call this school Epicureanism.
«For the Epicureans, memory is an active, powerful faculty, capable of making past pleasure present and of compensating for the pain that the body suffers in the present. And, like the imagination, memory rests on a physical support: let us remember that, for the Epicureans, all sensation obeys simulacra, the atomic films that we receive after detaching ourselves from the bodies. The disposition of the soul – for the Epicureans, also composed of atoms – is modified by the simulacra it receives.
»Like Baudelaire, the Epicurean can exclaim: “I know the art of evoking happy minutes,” and inhale, at will, “in waves the wine of memory.” For Epicureans, memories are, says Plutarch, like the wine that is poured into our soul, where it improves with time to become, once the bottle is uncorked, a nobler and more precious product.
»The comparison is not accidental. Wine is precisely a symbol that associates pleasure and memory. It is «among all the products of the earth and of man’s work, […] a place of memory.»
Extract from the chapter The Wine of Memory.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/ser-estoico-no-basta
