not everyone can have the benefit of being insane…

Page 115 not everyone can have the benefit of being insane, but anyone can make life easier for themselves by turning down the beam of their reason slightly. With grief, in particular. I'm learned that he could not recover simply by talking himself out of it. He did try some stoic tricks, and he was not afraid to focus is his attention on liberty's death long enough to write his account of it. But most of the time he found it more helpful to divert his attention to something else altogether: a painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it then to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solices, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and inflating I dodge, I am tricky .

— from The Landing (Death) · How to Live by Sarah Bakewell

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The Stoic Epictetus knew how hard this is even for the wise — he taught that if we could truly inhabit the truth that what we love is perishable, we would outwit grief, and then admitted how rarely any of us manage it. There is a gentler counsel, too — that in deep grief a person may need, for a time, to turn down the beam of his own reason slightly, because relentless clear-sightedness can be its own cruelty. It also helps to know that grief comes in more than one form. — The Landing (Death)

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