THE FIRST DAY OF FEELING WELL AGAIN

It wasn’t, hopefully, too serious, just enough to keep you in bed, and feeling miserable, for three or four days. You had a bowl of lentil soup - hot and bland - and sensed its worthy goodness and nutritious calm. Someone brought you a cup of weak tea and touched you deeply with their attention. While you were feeling poorly, certain themes of your life took a back seat. It didn’t seem to matter so much what was happening at work. You didn’t have the energy to get roused by news. You didn't feel obliged to respond to texts. Your sexual appetites were in recession. Things you’d never normally even notice are now sources of positive pleasure; being able to breathe easily, swallowing without wincing. You can focus on the the back of your head; there’s not a trace of the throb that was your agonising companion for the last 48 hours. Your eyes feel energetic. Your brain is coming alive. The mere act of standing up (without feeling dizzy or weak) is a delight. It’s fascinating to put on proper clothes - and going outside seems, briefly, like a privilege. As we reemerge into the world, we are reconnecting with so much that had been taken for granted. We’re not literally required to be ill to draw pleasure from existence. Potentially we could generate gratitude by a pure exercise of the imagination - but given what our distracted spirits are like, we might just have to wait for the special prompt of a few days of sickness in order to notice the true wonder of being alive.

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AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...

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CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...

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IMPOSTER SYNDROME

PHILOSOPHY In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...

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