Only True Glory

Giacomo Leopardi, Letters, letter to Pietro Giordani (Recanati, 21st November 1817; tr. Prue Shaw):

. . . love glory: but, first, only true glory: and so not only do not accept undeserved (let alone insincere) praise, but reject it – not only do not love it, but loathe it; second, be quite sure that in this age you will be praised by very few people for doing good, and try always to please these few, leaving other people to please the crowd and be smothered in praise; third, pay no more attention to criticism, malicious talk, insults, ridicule, or unjust persecution than you do to things which do not exist; when it is justified, be distressed only at having deserved it; fourth, do not envy men greater and more famous than you, but respect and praise them as best you can, and love them sincerely and strongly besides. If these conditions are observed, the love of glory does not seem dangerous to me.

The Lonely Road

Lermontov, Alone I Pass Along the Lonely Road (tr. John Pollen):

            Alone I pass along the lonely road,

            Thro’ gathering mist the pebbly pathway gleams;

            The night is still;—the void remembers God,

            And star vibrates to star with speaking beams.

            A wondrous glory moves across the sky;

            Soft sleeps the earth in dove-grey azure light.

            Why aches my heart? Why troubled thus am I?

            What wait I for, what grieve I for, this night?

            No more from life can I expect to gain,

            And for the “has been” it were vain to weep;

            I simply seek repose, release from pain,

            And fain would rest, forgetting all, in sleep.

            But not the sleep which the cold tomb implies;

            But rather would I rest for ages so

            That in my breast the strength of life might rise

            In gentle wavelets, heaving to and fro.

            The while that in my ears by night and day,

            A sweet voice sang of ceaseless love to me;

            And o’er me leaned, greening in every spray

            And faintly whispering, my dark cedar tree.

Ancient Way Of Philosophising

Georginna Anne Hinnebusch, A Philosophy to Live by: Goethe's Art of Living in the Spirit of the Ancients, (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), Intro., p. 1: 

For the ancients, a man was deemed a philosopher by virtue of electing to lead a life conforming to specific values daily exhibited in his ordinary conduct. The mark of a philosophical pedigree was not the espousal of a particular mode of thinking but the evincement of an exemplary way of being. That this characterization of living rather than thinking philosophically has become obsolete, proving alien to prevailing intuitions about the philosopher's defining features, attests to modernity's fateful partitioning of thinker and liver into two mutually exclusive forms of life. The tendency to confine inquiry about a philosopher almost exclusively to his mode of thought, whether through his extant works, his exegesis of authoritative texts, or the re-appropriation of his methods by later philosophical movements, is symptomatic of the marginalization of the ancient conception of philosophy as a fundamental way of life in which the philosopher's lived existence rather than his written works served as an ideal standard for emulation.

History, Autobiography, Self-Reflection, And Fantasia

Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (Selected Works, Volume III), edt. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press 2002), pt. III., sect. 4, Autobiography, p. 222:

Here we approach the roots of all historical comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary expression of the self-reflection of human beings on their life-course. Such self-reflection re-news itself to some extent in every individual. It is always there and expresses itself in ever new forms. It is found in the verses of Solon as well as in the introspection of Stoic philosophers, in the meditations of the saints and in the modern philosophy of life. It alone makes historical insight possible. The power and scope of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them pro- vide the basis of historical vision. Self-reflection alone enables us to give a second life to the bloodless shadow of the past. In combination with a boundless need to surrender to, and lose oneself in, the existence of others, it makes the great historian.

 

But, before this which Dilthey writes, there was the fantasia of Vico, the very capacity he found undervalued under the hands of the narrow-minded philosophes. I quote Isaiah Berlin in: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edt. Henry Hardy, intro. Roger Hausheer (Princeton University Press, 2013, 2nd edition), The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 135

. . . fantasia–Vico’s term for imaginative insight, which he accuses the French theorists of undervaluing. This is the capacity for conceiving more than one way of categorising reality, like the ability to understand what it is to be an artist, a revolutionary, a traitor, to know what it is to be poor, to wield authority, to be a child, a prisoner, a barbarian. Without some ability to get into the skin of others, the human condition, history, what characterises one period or culture as against others, cannot be understood. The successive patterns of civilisation differ from other temporal processes–say, geological–by the fact that it is men–ourselves–who play a crucial part in creating them. This lies at the heart of the art or science of attribution: to tell what goes with one form of life and not with another cannot be achieved solely by inductive methods.