The stadium is roaring outside as I write this. Everyone has gone to watch men hit each other, and I have been left alone with my thoughts, which is honestly the better arrangement.
It makes me think about performance — how much of what we do is for the crowd, and how little would survive without one. The athletes train their bodies to absorb punishment, to last, to endure the heat and the blood and the weight of another person trying to put them down. And I find myself thinking: the mind could do all of that and more, if we trained it half as seriously. The body needs equipment, money, coaches, food. The mind needs none of that. It grows from within. Everything required to become good is already inside you.
Liberty cannot be bought. You must give this good to yourself, and seek it from yourself.
Here is the image I can't shake: the actor in full costume, declaiming his kingship to the audience, voice filling the theatre — and then you find out his wage is five measures of grain. The costume is the whole thing. Remove it and there's just a man, ordinary, perhaps frightened, playing a part assigned to him. And we do this constantly — not on stage but in life, in the way we present ourselves, in the things we surround ourselves with to signal worth.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to take it seriously: if you put away the money, the title, the address, the reputation — what's left? Not as a diminishment, but as a clarification. That remainder is you. That's what I'm interested in. That's what I love, when I love you.
If you wish to set a value on yourself, put away everything they gave you, and look into your own soul.
The poor man smiles more genuinely, Seneca says. I believe it. The wealthy man's grief festers under his performance of happiness, too proud or too afraid to show it. There is a kind of freedom in having less to protect. In not needing the costume to hold you together.
You don't need it either. You never did.
With love and without the mask —