Amor Fati

 I get mixed messages when the stoic daily reading quotes Nietzsche, especially when it's the Nietzsche I know and not the nihilist that people assume.  Ironically, I was having a conversation with Mephistopheles (for those who know) just yesterday about Nietzsche being nothing like what we were told: stating the painfully obvious, which seems to elude the masses, is not nihilistic; if it is any 'istic', it is optimistic, with a genuine hope that someone, anyone, will understand, even if he was "philosophizing with a hammer."  Most the time people only listen when you're yelling.

 Meanwhile...

“The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need demands.  And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man—such as Civic Virtue commends—but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.    
     For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.” ~ Plotinus, First Ennead II, 7

Plotinus' second tractate, on virtue, hit home on a number of different levels.  Primarily in my having to always remind people to focus on what's important, and when they don't seem to understand what I'm talking about, I can never really articulate what I mean, so nothing changes (like it would anyway).  Amor fati, yes, but this definition of fate is nothing more that the mundane things in your life, which we should all easily rise above and be the very best that we can be within our immediate fati.  Id est, you can always refine how you choose to live and understand in the life that was thrust upon you.

Amor fati is also very Zen, like most of the stoics I read: thus; life is a dead leaf falling from a tree in L'autunno, twisting in the chill of the breeze, or maybe I understand nothing; there is a very good chance that I understand nothing.  I am, in fact, an idiot.  I do, however, see the irony in someone who devoted their entire lives to pointing out all the things that were obviously wrong with the world, or our place in it, and our wasting of precious energy on so many stupid things, uttering a phrase like "Amor Fati."  Ok, talking about two very different philosophers in the same post is hurting my brain.

"He would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him.  In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half thing.
     As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps were elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity." ~ First Ennead IV, 15

Happiness, sandwiched between zombie tractates on Happiness and Extension of Time and Dialectic.

"And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to posses happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That." ~ 16

Again, mixed messages from the Universe, but I am getting what I need out of everything, if only the kind of reinforcement I have always gotten from the ancients.  This warehouse that I've always wanted to shoot was more like an art installation than an abandoned building.  The graffiti was not mindless, illegible crap; it was intelligent and necessary, aside from some beautiful things being covered by idiots.  The building was also filled with dozens of fire extinguishers, so whatever happened there was done responsibly.  It was refreshing.  Luckily, while this beautiful soul is completely impatient and blind to her own beauty, she is patient with my madness, so she has mostly kept smiling through all my philosophical and psychological flailing and temporal disengagement, which I now understand as my soul withdrawing to its own place.

Just when I was settling in to Plotinus and getting mildly bored with the rambling writing style, I was absolutely blindsided by the Sixth tractate, Beauty, which I haven't continued reading from, and will likely have to read again.

"The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful."

~ First Ennead VI, 1

I marked like half the tractate to note.