Word: stoicly
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Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) saw the Roman Empire begin to crumble about him in war, invasion, pestilence and revolution. A great Stoic, he wrote: "Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name . . . Why then dost thou not wait in tranquillity for thy end?" The U.S. Navy, contemplating the atomic age, last week achieved a comparable attitude...
...more than all this, what truly keeps Art stable is his stoic philosophy about the business he is in. He best expressed this philosophy himself, when he addressed a student rally before the Columbia game: "When 22 men are chasing a pigskin spheroid, it's hard to tell which way the ball will bounce. And when that spheroid is not even round, the variables are unlimited." All he can do as a coach, he feels, is get his 11 men in a better position to chase the ball--and then pray it isn't jinxed. A mortal...
...Tragic Sense. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer also apprenticed himself to the late Professor Arthur Ryder, greatest Sanskrit student of his day. In the long winter evenings, he and a handful of other students visited Ryder's house to share his Sanskrit learning and his Stoic faith...
From Ryder, the eternal apprentice also got a new "feeling for the place of ethics." Says Oppenheimer: "Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic ... a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary." Tartly intolerant of humbug, laziness, stupidity and deceit, Ryder thought that "Any man who does a hard thing well is automatically respectable...
...five, the title poem of this book, is mainly a befuddled piece of pseudo-Stoic claptrap, to be read in sorrow by all who admire the author. Its burden is that God and King are gone, even Man is a little shopworn, but the "human perishable heart" remains as the hero of the future, since there...