Sublime

But not all societies and eras have seen success and failure in such a stark and forbidding light. In ancient Greece, another rather remarkable possibility – ignored by our own era – was envisaged: you could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic

miraculous: that they could be loved without prizes, that true love isn’t about impressing or intimidating someone, that an adult can love another adult a little like a good parent loves their child: not because of anything they have done, but simply and poignantly just because they exist.

An Anglican priest, Bishop Butler believed that egoism, or the exclusive pursuit of one’s own happiness, would not only interfere with but logically preclude its own achievement. Like Mill post-reversal, Butler held that a crucial condition of happiness is caring about things other than oneself. This doesn’t mean you have to be altruistic. What you

We simply cannot trust that sides of our deep selves will have counterparts in those we meet, and so remain silent and shy, struggling to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can have any of the vulnerabilities, perversions and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters. Ideally, the task of culture

Once we have properly surveyed the merits and demerits on offer, we may willingly choose to side with what the modern age typically considers to be a disaster: a quiet life. This is not from any lack of ambition, but from a more focused aspiration for what we now recognize to be the primordial ingredient of happiness: peace of mind.

To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to

We have become tiny, relatively wealthy cogs in giant, efficient machines. And yet, in our quiet moments, we reverberate with private longings to give our multitudinous selves expression.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,