Overnight I realized that my post yesterday about Walter Kaufmann's account of love as a virtue could give the impression that my view of life is rather dark. Whereas it seems that Kaufmann had something of a tragic sense of life, my outlook is decidedly sunnier. Since I was quite young, I've wondered at the cosmic improbability of being alive. Several months ago I put it this way to a friend:
Emerging from the endless ocean of eternity,
I am a wave that's crashed by chance upon the shore of time.
Beyond the near miracle of existence in the first place, I've always experienced a deep joy in aliveness and awareness. Yes, life has its shadows, but as Achilles put it in the Odyssey, it's better to be a lowly servant laboring under the sunlight than to be king of the underworld. We find similar sentiments in Euripides, Epicurus, and other ancient Greek thinkers: that the sheer fact of living has an inherent sweetness which nothing can take away.
After all, it's only the light that makes shadows possible in the first place!
