On beginning the repair

The Enchiridion ends by turning on the student. For fifty short chapters Epictetus has laid out principles: what is in our power, what is not, how to meet loss. Then in chapter 51 he stops explaining and starts accusing. You already have the principles, he says. You have agreed to them. So what are you waiting for? He names the excuse directly: the man who keeps setting a later date, one more delay, the day after which he will finally attend to himself. That man, Epictetus warns, makes no progress and dies unchanged. The whole manual has been building to this refusal to let the reader treat philosophy as something to begin tomorrow.

This week Darryl Strawberry published Another Life, a memoir of the years after baseball, addiction, and prison, and of the purpose he built once the fame was gone. The interest of such a story is not the fall. It is the fact that a person can decide, long after the applause stops, to become someone else. Epictetus would say the material was always there, waiting only for the decision no one else can make for you.