My intention has  been to learn more about Stoicism.

Stoicism was (and is) a point of view as well as a practice located in history 4th century BC. Zeno of Citium facilitated a gathering on Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the north side of the Athenian market place.

This view that you are I are situated where nearly everything is and always will be out of our control, to which indifference is advised, and that cultivation of inner character, appreciation of a cosmic logos transcending the chaos, etc. etc, is what we can manage. How did such a philosophy endure to the Roman period?

Because if you prefer sanity over being dragged into the maelstrom, – a Stoic-like routine of mind will get the job done.

I have started to appreciate how Stoicism intersects with the work of Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher. Heidegger thought that humans are creatures caught between two realities. The earth is a dimension of brute fact, of forces and objects doing-what-they-do. Earth is contrasted to a World of human activity, every tangible object and force classified, and arranged according to human significance and purpose. According to Heidegger to be human is to always be at this crossroads, between Earth and World. Two ways of encountering ourselves

The ancient Stoics, the Existentialism of Heidegger, and the story of Job in the Hebrew scripture, three trajectories that arc toward intersection. And the poem by Joseph Millar seems to get it right.

Job

By Joseph Millar

I’ve just come from walking to and fro
in the earth, Satan tells God
before they make the wager
standing for centuries
as metaphor of man’s existence— 
trapped on the wheel like an insect
under a microscope:
his disastrous ecology,
his ravaged immune system,
even his broken-veined, wine-flushed face
looking back from the rearview
and parked alone by the river.
He should have been born
with fins, he thinks
as the swans arch and preen
and attack one another
though everyone says they mate for life
and the afternoon wind
raises welts of sunlight
over the torqued and rippling surface
and the beautiful ravenous fish.

“A poem written about a dark time, when philosophy wasn’t helping.”
—Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar is the author of seven books of poetry, including Shine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024) and Dark Harvest: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021). He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA programs at North Carolina State University and Pacific University. Millar lives in Richmond, California, on Ohlone land.