How to do the right thing

All the main leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes and visionaries have one essential quality in common: the ability to achieve and maintain tranquility. It supports the American Ryan Holidaywriter and media strategist, now in bookstores for Hoepli with Peace of mind is the key. Peace of mind, continues Holiday, allows great champions to keep control over their moods, to ignore distractions and discover new perspectives, to achieve happiness and do the right thing. Starting from the greatest thinkers in history, from Confucius to Seneca, from Marcus Aurelius to Christian monks, Ryan Holiday thus tells what tranquility is and how we can achieve it.

And here we bring you an exclusive excerpt.

ACT WITH COURAGE

“People who notice a need in the world and do something to satisfy it … they are my heroes” FRED ROGERS

In Camus’ latest novel, The fall, the narrator, Clamence, is walking alone in an Amsterdam street when he seems to hear a woman falling into the water. Not being entirely sure of what he has heard, and especially since he was preparing to spend a nice evening in the company of his lover, he decides he does not want to have any trouble and continues straight on his way.

The man is a lawyer who enjoys great esteem within his community, and is considered an absolutely virtuous individual; the day after the events, he returns to his normal life trying to forget the episode he experienced a few hours earlier. He continues to represent clients in court and confront his friends with completely persuasive political arguments as he always has, yet he begins to feel dull.

One day, after a triumphant appearance in court to defend a blind client, Clamence gets the impression that a group of strangers, whom he cannot quite identify, are making fun of him. Later, as he approaches a broken-down motorist at an intersection, he is unexpectedly insulted and attacked. The two unfortunate encounters, albeit unrelated, contribute to undermine the opinion he had long had of himself.

The monstrosity of what he did does not become clear to him suddenly, as if following an epiphany or a blow to the head. Rather it is a slow, but frightening, awareness that makes its way into his mind and that, in a sudden and irrevocable way, overturns the perception he had of himself: that night, on the canal, he had given up the possibility of averting a suicide.

This realization is the downfall of Clamence, as well as the central point around which the novel unfolds. Faced with the emptiness of his vanity and the shame of his failures, man falls apart in a thousand pieces. Although he has always considered himself a good person, when it came to proving it he instead chose to vanish into the night. It is a thought that constantly haunts him. Whenever he finds himself walking down the street at night, the scream of the woman he had ignored so many years ago comes back to haunt him. And play with him, because his only hope of redemption is to hear that cry for help again in real life and finally take the opportunity to dive in and save someone from the bottom of the canal.

But it’s too late. He has failed and there will never be peace for him. Obviously this is an invented story, however very significant, written not by chance in the period immediately following the terrible European moral decay linked to the Second World War. Camus’ message to his readers pierces us like the scream of the woman in the memories of its protagonist: lofty thoughts and inner work are important, but what really matters are the facts. The health of one’s moral ideals is revealed in what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.

Source: Vanity Fair

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