Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.

Companionship was at the top of Epicurus's list of life's pleasures. He wrote, 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory.

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do.

Loving and being loved affirmed one's sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane.

I am not looking for a thing; I am searching for a spiritual experience.

Oscar Wilde: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the

there is no rest for the striver. Just beyond the completion of each goal on our life-achievement “bucket list” looms another goal, and then another. Meanwhile, of course, the clock is ticking—quite loudly, in fact. We become breathless. And we have no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of our twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends or listening to music or musing about the story of our lives. And we will never get another chance for that.

I now realize that I habitually fight against a leisurely pace; I resist giving in to slowness.

If a man cannot invest his life, or any part of it, with meaning, all he has left are distractions from meaninglessness, although few of us acknowledge them as such.

This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus, in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.

But something about this new philosophy of old age does not sit right with me, I suspect that if I were to take this popularly accepted route, I would miss out on something deeply significant. … I am seriously concerned that on that route I would miss for eternity ever simply being authentically and contentedly old.

is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Might

In his popular political essay “In Praise of Idleness,” the twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell chides us for failing to use our free time for, of all things, fun: “It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” The contemporary wit Steven Wright makes a comparable point more succinctly: “Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

La perspectiva de leer a filósofos griegos de la antigüedad rodeado del paisaje pedregoso y soleado donde habían florecido sus ideas me pareció genial.