Hubris

It's an unpleasant sensation to feel yourself slipping through the previously stable surface of an assumption of professional competence on which you have been happily working.  The Ancient Greeks had a word for it and this week I have experienced that unpleasant sinking feeling as a victim of hubris.  My trusty Penguin English Dictionary defines hubris  as 'arrogance, insolence' (page 360).   But I prefer the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary's definition (page 654): 'arrogance or over-confidence, especially when likely to result in disaster or ruin'.  There was no disaster, no ruin, but an act of professional clumsiness that can be explained by workload pressure but not excused by it.  I was left breathless by the stupidity of what I had done.  Was it a salutary lesson?  Most definitely, yes.  And, without wishing to make more of it than it was, it reminded me of the lines from Tobias Wolff:

'You can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yea even its length, will reflect the force of your character and wisdom of your judgements.  And then you hit an icy patch on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke.'

 

Reading about, watching and listening to the news from Japan, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine, Mexico, Syria, and Yemen,  it's appropriate to recall, as Alain de Botton reminds us, of Seneca: 'What need is there to weep over parts of life?  The whole of it calls for tears.'   Quite so.  Seneca's the one in the middle, with Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right.  Nice little medieval illustration but an unfortuante reminder that my 'teach-yourself Ancient Greek chronology' has fallen on hard times.