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IX

AMOR FATI: HOW TO

BECOME INDESTRUCTIBLE

And now, reader, time to part again.

I am in Amioun, the village of my ancestors. Sixteen out of sixteen
great-great-grandparents, eight out of eight great-grandparents, and four
out of four grandparents are buried in the area, almost all within a four-
mile radius. Not counting the great-uncles, cousins, and other rela-
tives. They are all resting in cemeteries in the middle of groves of olive
trees in the Koura valley at the base of Mount Lebanon, which rises so
dramatically that you can see the snow above you only twenty miles
away.
Today, at dusk, I went to St. Sergius, locally called Mar Sarkis, from
the Aramaic, the cemetery of my side of the family, to say hello to my fa-
ther and my uncle Dédé, who so much disliked my sloppy dressing during
my rioting days. I am sure Dédé is still offended with me; the last time he
saw me in Paris he calmly dropped that I was dressed like an Australian:
so the real reason for my visit to the cemetery was more self-serving. I
wanted to prepare myself for where I will go next.
This is my plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A
Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final
destination.
I felt robust.
* * *
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378 O N R O B U S T N E S S A N D F R A G I L I T Y

I am carrying Seneca on all my travels, in the original, as I relearned

Latin—reading him in English, that language desecrated by economists
and the bureaucrats of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, did
not feel right. Not on this occasion. It would be equivalent to reading
Yeats in Swahili.
Seneca was the great teacher and practitioner of Stoicism, who trans-
formed Greek-Phoenician Stoicism from metaphysical and theoretical dis-
course into a practical and moral program of living, a way to reach the
summum bonum, an untranslatable expression depicting a life of supreme
moral qualities, as perceived by the Romans. But, even apart from this un-
reachable aim, he has practical advice, perhaps the only advice I can see
transfer from words to practice. Seneca is the one who (with some help
from Cicero) taught Montaigne that to philosophize is to learn how to die.
Seneca is the one who taught Nietzsche the amor fati, “love fate,” which
prompted Nietzsche to just shrug and ignore adversity, mistreatment by
his critics, and his disease, to the point of being bored by them.
For Seneca, Stoicism is about dealing with loss, and finding ways to
overcome our loss aversion—how to become less dependent on what you
have. Recall the “prospect theory” of Danny Kahneman and his col-
leagues: if I gave you a nice house and a Lamborghini, put a million dol-
lars in your bank account, and provided you with a social network, then,
a few months later, took everything away, you would be much worse off
than if nothing had happened in the first place.
Seneca’s credibility as a moral philosopher (to me) came from the fact
that, unlike other philosophers, he did not denigrate the value of wealth,
ownership, and property because he was poor. Seneca was said to be one
of the wealthiest men of his day. He just made himself ready to lose every-
thing every day. Every day. Although his detractors claim that in real life
he was not the Stoic sage he claimed to be, mainly on account of his habit
of seducing married women (with non-Stoic husbands), he came quite
close to it. A powerful man, he just had many detractors—and, if he fell
short of his Stoic ideal, he came much closer to it than his contemporaries.
And, just as it is harder to have good qualities when one is rich than when
one is poor, it is harder to be a Stoic when one is wealthy, powerful, and
respected than when one is destitute, miserable, and lonely.
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A M O R FAT I : H O W T O B E C O M E I N D E S T R U C T I B L E 379

Nihil Perditi

In Seneca’s Epistle IX, Stilbo’s country was captured by Demetrius, called

the Sacker of Cities. Stilbo’s children and his wife were killed. Stilbo was
asked what his losses were. Nihil perditi, I have lost nothing, he answered.
Omnia mea mecum sunt! My goods are all with me. The man had reached
the Stoic self-sufficiency, the robustness to adverse events, called apatheia
in Stoic jargon. In other words, nothing that might be taken from him did
he consider to be a good.
Which includes one’s own life. Seneca’s readiness to lose everything ex-
tended to his own life. Suspected of partaking in a conspiracy, he was
asked by the emperor Nero to commit suicide. The record says that he ex-
ecuted his own suicide in an exemplary way, unperturbed, as if he had pre-
pared for it every day.

Seneca ended his essays (written in the epistolary form) with vale, often
mistranslated as “farewell.” It has the same root as “value” and “valor”
and means both “be strong (i.e., robust)” and “be worthy.” Vale.