[ 日] 2025-10-05

早起健身回家的車上聽到的，莫名的情緒激動。
我的所有旅行是不是都在嘗試逃避什麼？

And so when you read that famous line from Tennyson, the one the poem ends with, he says, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. You realize again, it’s not heroic. It is tragic.

He is cursed. And the Stoics pitied these kinds of people, Seneca most of all. He talked about how many people travel, not unlike the man who is flipping his pillow over and over again, trying to find the cool side as he tosses and turns and is unable to sleep.

The Stoics understood that many people, when they travel, are traveling to flee themselves. You know, too many of us in our travels are running from something. Too many of us in our ambition are hoping that on the other side of a hill, on the other side of some accomplishment, we will finally feel good, we will finally feel sated.

But we won’t. We are subjecting ourselves to the same torture that Odysseus subjected himself to. It’s worse than what the gods can inflict on us.

He says, to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars until I die. What a terrible fate. It makes the whole journey, in a sense, a little pointless.

What was it all for? Why did he want to get home so badly? If just to leave again.

When Marcus Aurelius says that life is warfare and a journey far from home, he is describing again the tragic nature of his fate as the emperor. And that is the cautionary tale of the Odyssey, something we might miss in the first readings. But as we go over it over and over again, we start to see that, yeah, we wouldn’t want to trade places with Odysseus.

來自The Daily Stoic：What The Wise Know—And Fools Ignore | 15 Stoic Lessons from the Birthplace of Stoicism，2025年10月3日
https://podcasts.apple.com/tw/podcast/the-daily-stoic/id1430315931?i=1000729848999&r=1491

就如同 House M.D 裏面 Thirtenn 對 House 講的一樣

You spend your whole life looking for answers, because you think the next answer will change something — maybe make you a little less miserable.

And you know that when you run out of questions, you don’t just run out of answers… you run out of hope.