I cannot help but keeping a copy here the following letter
from a modern Stoic.
This verse in one of Alice in Chains’ most haunting
songs captures the essence of the Stoic battle:
And yet I find
And yet I find
Repeating in my head
If I can't be my own
I'd feel better dead
The need to be one’s own. One’s own man. Free from
outside influence. Free from tyranny. Free from anxiety.
Fear. Unnecessary pain. To be free from the slavery that
Seneca talked about—the slavery of pointless
obligations, other people’s expectations, materialism,
the slavery of addiction or ambition.
And yet it is with some tragic irony that the man who
wrote that lyric was for too much of his talented
artistic life not his own. He was addicted to heroin and
cocaine, cigarettes and self-loathing. In the end it was
death that relieved him of those forms of slavery, or
rather we could say that the slavery killed him and
deprived us of him exactly 16 years ago yesterday.
This is sadly a common Stoic theme too—to fall
personally short of the beauty of words and the insights
of the philosophy. To paraphrase an earlier part of the
song, yet we fight, yet we fight...
So let us repeat that Stoic mantra in our head today and
pray for strength that Layne Staley didn’t have.
