Transcript + vocabulary list + exercise:
[00:00:01.120] - Oliver (Host)
Welcome back to English and Beyond, an intermediate-level podcast for learners of English as a foreign language. My name is Oliver. I'm the host. If you find any of the words, any of the expressions, any of the speed difficult in today's episode, please do go and have a look at the transcript available at www.morethanalanguage.com. If you have any comments or suggestions for topics, then feel free to email me at oliver@morethanalanguage.com. Otherwise, I leave you with this episode, which I'm calling So Happy I Could Die. I'm going to ask César at the end of my speech why he thinks I've called it that. So we'll begin with a couple of questions.
[00:00:54.060] - Oliver (Host)
Would you say that you are a lucky person? Would you say that you've enjoyed a happy life? You may like to wait a little bit longer to see if what I say in this episode changes your mind. I talked a few weeks ago about my worries about being publicly shamed back in Episode 9. Part of that fear, I suppose, really relates to the fact that I know I've been very lucky in life, and I'm always scared that this run of good luck, this pattern of good luck, won't last.
[00:01:27.290] - Oliver (Host)
César does note that bad things have happened to and that's undoubtedly the case. Bad things happen to everyone. No one escapes from life alive, after all. However, I'm also very aware of the fact that in general, I have been very lucky, and my good luck may run out. A good and very visible example of this is what happens to many celebrities. Celebrities often enjoy what we might call charmed lives. They seem to have everything everything: money, talent, success, admiration, good looks. And yet, while we may watch their rise to success with jealous amazement, very often we also observe their shocking fall from grace. We say in English that "what goes up must come down". This obviously seems to refer to gravity's impact on all airborne objects, and its metaphorical meaning is that all trends, all patterns, end. That is, every run of good luck comes to an end eventually. No one can win every time or be lucky forever. Part of the reason, then, that I think I am so preoccupied, so worried by a potential reversal of my fortune, is because of a classical story that I read when I was about 17. This story comes from a book, The Histories, written by a Greek called Herodotus in the fifth century BC.
[00:03:04.360] - Oliver (Host)
Herodotus, in fact, established, he invented, what we call the genre of history. Indeed, the English word itself comes from its title, Historiai, which means "inquiries" in Ancient Greek, really "questions". And this reveals his historical method of literally just going around many places in the ancient world and asking lots of questions. In theory, Herodotus is aiming to write down the hugely consequential clash of two cultures, the Greeks and the Persians. But he loves to tell a good story. So he goes on extremely long digressions to give us lots of background not just about the Greek city states and Persia themselves, but also many of the Kingdoms that make up the Persian Empire.
[00:03:54.390] - Oliver (Host)
He tells a story that made a huge impression on me when I first read it. Lydia was a powerful kingdom in the west of what is now modern day Turkey. Its king was a man named Croesus. Since his kingdom had grown to be one of the richest and most powerful in all of the surrounding lands, he had also grown very rich and equally arrogant. One day, a wise Athenian philosopher politician named Solon came to visit King Croesus. His journey had brought him to Lydia, and Croesus was delighted to have the opportunity to impress this wise man.
[00:04:36.390] - Oliver (Host)
Croesus did what any wealthy autocrat would do. He took Solon on a tour of all of his treasures, his stacks of gold and silver and all of his jewels, an obscene amount of wealth, a disgusting quantity of riches, and to Croesus, the physical manifestation of his good fortune and blessed status in the eyes of the gods. Twice during the tour, Croesus asks Solon if he knows of anyone in the world luckier and happier than Croesus. And twice, Solon says that he does. And each example annoys Croesus hugely. The two examples were as follows. The first was an Athenian called Tellus. Solon describes Tellus as having lived a good and prosperous life. He saw his city flourish. He had sons who grew up well, and he lived to see his grandchildren grow up, too. He died heroically in battle, and his fellow Athenians honoured him with a grand funeral.
[00:05:42.030] - Oliver (Host)
The second example was a pair of brothers named Cleobis and Biton. These were two brothers from Argos who were known for their great physical strength. When their mother needed to go to a festival honouring the goddess Hera and their oxen, the cattle, were not available to pull her cart, Cleobis and Biton strapped themselves to the cart and pulled her all the way to the temple themselves, a distance of about eight kilometres.
[00:06:11.920] - Oliver (Host)
All the people attending the festival were amazed and praised the sons' devotion to their mother. Their mother, in gratitude, prayed to Hera to give them the best gift that God could give to mortals, and Hera granted them a peaceful death. They fell asleep in the temple and did not wake up, which was seen as a blessing because they died at the peak of their honour and their strength. Croesus was extremely angry to hear that Solon considered these common, unimportant, lowly people to be happier than him, the richest king for miles around. He angrily complained, he remonstrated to Solon. Here is a rendering of Solon's response that I like, which I found on www.greek mythology.com. Solon says to Croesus, "I've seen people just as rich as you die more disgraceful deaths than the commonest and poorest of all men. Because, Croesus, man is entirely luck, and nobody knows what the gods may bring tomorrow. You should count no man happy until he dies." Croesus scoffs, he laughs dismissively at this response, and he sends Solon away in disgrace. Unsurprisingly, tragedy befalls Croesus before long. First, he loses his beloved son in a hunting accident, and then he loses his kingdom when he is invaded by the mighty Persians. When he is being strapped to a funeral or a fire, about to be burned alive, he calls up to the heavens and he laments his fate. He regrets the situation in which he finds himself, recognising that Solon was completely correct after all.
[00:07:59.360] - Oliver (Host)
This story struck a chord with me, it resonated for me, it impacted me, because it just seemed so obviously true. It's not over till it's over. This is true of football matches, and it's true of life. Until we are dead and buried in the ground, can we say with total confidence that we've had a happy and lucky life? Sure, we can say that we seem to be enjoying good fortune at this moment, but that can change suddenly at any time. And this seems a good time to mention another of my favourite idioms that I often think about when I witnessed someone else's misfortune: "there, but for the Grace of God, go I". That is, that could be me if God wanted me to suffer in that way.
[00:08:45.660] - Oliver (Host)
Returning to the celebrities I mentioned earlier, you, listener, may be thinking, Well, this was Croesus's fault, and it's the fault of the celebrities too. They bring their bad fortune on themselves, and I certainly often think that's the case. But we can look at it from another perspective. Another concept from the ancient world, this time from ancient Athenian tragedy, is the idea of hamartia, which we can translate as a tragic flaw. Sometimes it can seem that we have a specific problem in our personalities that makes our downfall seem almost inevitable. You can look at certain celebrities and say, "Well, his or her arrogance, or angry temper, or addictive nature is to blame for their downfall." But they often always had that flaw, and it's easy to identify it in hindsight as the cause of their problems. But is it just that we're trying to make sense of things by identifying such a flaw? Finally, then, my overall point of this episode is that I personally was convinced by Herodotus's idea that we cannot pronounce our lives to be happy ones until they are over. Whether it's because we ourselves ruin them by virtue of our own tragic flaws, or whether it's because the gods intervene to ruin us, it's important not to count our successes until the game is over.
[00:10:12.670] - Oliver (Host)
Okay, César. So putting you on the spot, why do you think I've chosen my title?
[00:10:18.820] - César (Guest)
Before I listened to your introduction, I thought the first thing that came to mind, to be honest, was that Lady Gaga song, :So Happy I Could Die:. You told me you went to her concert.
[00:10:31.980] - Oliver (Host)
I've never been to her concert.
[00:10:33.410] - César (Guest)
Who did you go to see? Britney Spears?
[00:10:37.840] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah.
[00:10:38.370] - César (Guest)
Okay. Well, okay. Anyway, I guess you used to like Lady Gaga, and that song is quite famous. So I thought it was because of that song. Also, my second thought would be that because we talked about stoicism and how stoics say, even if you're really, really happy, you should be composed, be tranquil, be mindful, and not be too happy. So I thought maybe you didn't consider yourself a stoic, and that's why you are over-excited when something good happens to you. Those were my two...
[00:11:20.740] - Oliver (Host)
Ideas?
[00:11:23.780] - César (Guest)
Yeah.
[00:11:24.260] - Oliver (Host)
Or suppositions, you could say.
[00:11:26.290] - César (Guest)
[in Spanish] Yeah, I wanted to say "suppositions". Yeah. Sorry.
[00:11:27.970] - Oliver (Host)
Okay.
[00:11:28.940] - César (Guest)
So...those were my two suppositions about the topic.
[00:11:34.480] - Oliver (Host)
What is your conclusion now that you've actually listened to my little spiel?
[00:11:38.790] - César (Guest)
Well, now is that you can't really say... So you consider yourself very lucky in life so far, and I actually disagree. So you['d] potentially be ready to die now because you want to have a happy life. You are like, okay, I've been lucky enough up to this point in my life, so I could die now. Yeah.
[00:12:02.670] - Oliver (Host)
It's not so much about me, but yes, that's the idea that if you are going through a period that is really, really happy, you might consider yourself to be additionally lucky just to suddenly drop down dead because it means that you will escape the reversal of your fortune. But instead, you'll be able to, in your dying moment, say, "Oh, great. I'm dead. Therefore, I can now say, finally, that according to Solon's advice, I have had a happy life." Yeah.
[00:12:33.670] - César (Guest)
But it's quite... I mean, I understand. I love the story. I didn't know it, but it's quite extreme. It's like a quite extreme point of view, because obviously we know that luck is important and there is factors that we cannot control in our life, and that's luck and random things that escape from us. But we also have control in some aspects in our life and these people didn't really seem to consider that.
[00:13:03.790] - Oliver (Host)
Well, I suppose I would say two things. Firstly, in the ancient world, it probably seemed like they had a lot less control over many aspects of life.
[00:13:12.360] - César (Guest)
And they relied on God or their gods.
[00:13:17.150] - Oliver (Host)
Well, I think partially that if you're living in a society where food is scarce, a bad harvest means that everyone in a civilisation can die.
[00:13:27.190] - César (Guest)
The harvest is the food you cultivate, right?
[00:13:29.530] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. The food that you grow in the fields. Then when you collect it, that's called the harvest. If a harvest is bad, then everyone can starve in a city. There was no unified Greece. It was full of mini city states. And they were frequently fighting with each other, having to go off and find new land. And so I suppose that life seemed probably very unstable and out of their control. But then, secondly, I'm sure that lots of Ancient Greeks would say, would say that now we still live an unstable life because anything can happen at any time. You, you - for example, let's say that you buy yourself a flat or something like that, and you think, okay, great. I have been very sensible. I have I've forgone all of those avocado toasts and lattes and managed to buy myself a flat. And because of my good decisions, because of that control that I have exerted over my life, I now have some stability. Then, let's say, your house burns down and the company that was supposed to apply for the insurance had done so incorrectly and the insurance doesn't pay out. Or something goes wrong with the insurance and you get a fraction of the quality of the house or a fraction of the value of the house, and everything is ruined for you.
[00:14:53.910] - Oliver (Host)
So, obviously, a stoic's point of view on that would be "well, you carry on regardless, and actually a house is not that important". But I think the point is that you can still be said to not have control over your life, even if you are very sensible in the way that you live now.
[00:15:12.850] - César (Guest)
Yeah, of course. You can try to minimise the risks, but obviously there's a certain amount of randomness that happens in life.
[00:15:22.010] - Oliver (Host)
For sure.
[00:15:23.410] - César (Guest)
But can I dig a bit in the thing that you said at the beginning of the episode? You said you consider yourself quite lucky and that you had a very lucky life so far, but I don't agree. Like you had some - For example, career-wise, - you had some jobs that you didn't really like and you suffered and you were unlucky because on paper, that job was really good and then it happened to be completely different and you suffered and -
[00:15:54.270] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah, but I think it's a tremendous privilege for some of the biggest suffering that I've experienced to be that my high-flying career in law wasn't as nice as I hoped it would be. I haven't suffered anything terrible.
[00:16:08.950] - César (Guest)
Or your parents got separated. That's, like, a huge crisis for many kids when they are little or teenagers.
[00:16:16.000] - Oliver (Host)
Well, it wasn't a crisis for me.
[00:16:19.380] - César (Guest)
Was it good news?
[00:16:20.790] - Oliver (Host)
I wasn't unhappy. And I never had, I never experienced the things that people experience in terms of the parents arguing in the courts over custody. You know, my parents not talking to each other. I mean, my parents still go on holiday together. So even, even that is a great example of my parents separating and it having very little impact on my life. It didn't impact my happiness. It didn't impact my schooling. It didn't impact anything, really. And I continued to see and talk to my parents every day. So, you know, even that is a good example of how lucky I have been. And I think it's important to-
[00:17:01.050] - César (Guest)
I think you're lucky, but I think also you are normal with your ups and downs. Even, you've got some health issues that are not super important, but there's some issues that you'd like to, not to have.
[00:17:14.400] - Oliver (Host)
When you said I think you're normal or you're lucky with your ups and downs. Your pronunciation of ups sounded a lot like abs. And I was like, "Thank you!" Very lucky with my-
[00:17:25.020] - César (Guest)
Like a six pack?
[00:17:25.360] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah.
[00:17:25.360] - César (Guest)
No, ups, ups!
[00:17:27.770] - Oliver (Host)
Ups, yeah. So, one of the questions I wanted to ask you was what you think about the parable, the fable that I've narrated to you. But I think that we have your answer on that already, don't we?
[00:17:41.180] - César (Guest)
Yeah. Actually, when I was thinking of the two examples of these very lucky people, I was thinking, the first one died in the war in a battle, which is not very nice from my point of view. But for them, the honour and everything, it was obviously different.
[00:17:55.880] - Oliver (Host)
Exactly. I think that speaks to a society's point of view on what is worthwhile.
[00:18:01.590] - César (Guest)
Exactly.
[00:18:02.450] - Oliver (Host)
For them, for the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans, virtually nothing was more important than how you would be remembered by later generations. It was such a defining part of the human experience and what you aspire to. And we still have that now. People still worry about it. But the funny thing is that I think that we overanalyse or analyse to a huge extent the positives and the negatives of people from the past and prioritise those negatives that we find. I think now it's almost impossible for someone from the past to be remembered positively, or at least the narrative around them seems to shift. For example, someone like Mother Teresa was, I think, remembered almost universally, positively. Now there are lots of people that remember her very negatively because of lots of the bad things that she did. I think that there are big cultural shifts from one to the other. Same thing with Winston Churchill, a hero of the country for so long and now you can't mention him positively without someone saying, "Well, actually, what about this?"
[00:19:09.010] - César (Guest)
Do you think that will happen with Elizabeth II, the Queen?
[00:19:14.840] - Oliver (Host)
Of course.
[00:19:15.710] - César (Guest)
Who recently died.
[00:19:16.250] - Oliver (Host)
Of course.
[00:19:16.730] - César (Guest)
Or recently, a couple of years ago.
[00:19:17.790] - Oliver (Host)
I think it's impossible not to. And especially in the age that we live in currently, and maybe this will shift, but we live in an age now, as I've said in previous episodes, where it's not enough to simply not do bad things. You have to actively do good things. I think that being a member of the royal family and the resulting silence that you have to live with means that she's never, and well, she's dead, but none of them are ever going to be able to make active noises. They're never going to be able to make assertions and statements saying, this is how you should live. And therefore, I think that they will be criticised for their silence in the best case scenario.
[00:20:00.120] - César (Guest)
I see.
[00:20:01.950] - Oliver (Host)
But I think that you just, with the Royal Family now, I don't think that they need to be, kind of, great historical figures in the way that would be more important for a Prime Minister. So I have another question. Do you think it's better never to have had great fortune or better to have had it, to be able to experience it and then lose it?
[00:20:29.350] - César (Guest)
It's actually a tricky question. It's a bit like wealth, right? If you've always been poor, you don't really know what being rich means.
[00:20:39.480] - Oliver (Host)
That's exactly what I mean.
[00:20:40.900] - César (Guest)
Yeah. But you mean luck, right? Fortune.
[00:20:44.910] - Oliver (Host)
Well, fortune actually is an ambiguous word. It can mean both luck and money. But I did mean luck. But obviously money for lots of people is part of good luck. Yeah.
[00:20:54.940] - César (Guest)
I think it's better to experience fortune, wealth, luck at some point in your life because you've been in a worse situation before in your life. You probably know that ups and downs might come along. So I think it's better to experience positive things and things that you don't expect that are really good.
[00:21:17.690] - Oliver (Host)
But what if you have a hypothetical situation in which I understand what you're saying, you have that up, you start off low, you go up, or even start off high. But then in my hypothetical situation, you end up dying with bad fortune. So you live the rest of your life remembering the positive.
[00:21:42.020] - César (Guest)
Yeah. I don't know because obviously I've never died. But I guess when you are about to die, you probably reflect on your life. It's very difficult to be on someone's shoes, someone who's about to die.
[00:22:03.970] - Oliver (Host)
In someone's shoes.
[00:22:05.030] - César (Guest)
In someone's shoes. Thank you. I think you reflect on your life and think. You probably think about the positive and the negative, and in the end, you're like, Well, I did my best. If you have experienced great things, fortune, wealth, luck, love, it's better than not experience (experiencing) those things.
[00:22:26.400] - Oliver (Host)
I suppose what I'm getting at is, a little bit like our conception of hell, where hell is so bad in every way that you can't imagine any hope or happiness. I think there are some people who have had so much and they've been so successful, and then they've been reduced down to nothing, where every aspect of their life, romantically, they've lost their family, they've lost their family relationships with their kids, they've lost all their money, they've lost their job, they've lost their reputation in society. There are some people that really ruin themselves. There have been some recent examples in the UK, and it sounds horrible to say their life is over, but their life, as far as they would have envisaged their life, is over. They may be able to find some sort of fulfilment in having a completely different attitude to life, maybe go and do lots of charity work, maybe try to make up for the terrible things done in some way. But for lots of people, they will say, "You will never be able to make up for those things."
[00:23:26.870] - César (Guest)
Yeah.
[00:23:28.520] - Oliver (Host)
"Your life now doesn't have any value."
[00:23:32.030] - César (Guest)
But that's not the case for the majority of people, right?
[00:23:35.450] - Oliver (Host)
No.
[00:23:36.470] - César (Guest)
I think there are very specific examples of this happening. In this case, if someone has been horrible to other people, I think it's the price they have to pay for all the damage they've done in their lives. Like a myth, right?
[00:23:52.010] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. Well, exactly. Do you know that, I think it's a really good point. It is just like a myth. It's just like the ancient Greek and ancient Roman myths because - it's like, they tell the story of Heracles because his life is one of so much horror. I don't know if you know why Heracles is doing his 12 labours?
[00:24:08.160] - César (Guest)
No.
[00:24:09.050] - Oliver (Host)
Basically, he's doing it because he went crazy. It depends on your perspective in terms of how much of his of his craziness, he contributed to himself by his weakness of character. But he basically murdered his wife and children. He's doing these labours and helping people as some sort of penance to try to apologise for the terrible damage he's caused. It's a weird thing in the ancient world because on the one hand, he's this great hero, on the other hand, he's this terrible person, and it's hard to reconcile those two things.
[00:24:43.070] - César (Guest)
The duality.
[00:24:43.880] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. I have a final question actually that is on that kind of note. Why do you think that so many celebrities seem to have these scandals? Do you think that it's that any person, when put in this situation of having so much money and so much power, almost inevitably become corrupt? Or do you think it's that people with these flaws are driven into those kinds of jobs and those positions of power? What causes these people to rise so high that we are fascinated by their fall?
[00:25:15.660] - César (Guest)
I guess it's a combination of different factors. Firstly, if you are an artist or if you are a public figure, it doesn't matter if you're an actor, actress, singer, you need an ego, right? You need to have a really big ego and I think it's important to have it if you're going to be performing for 60,000 people on stage. And that probably doesn't help when you have to be honest with yourself and say, "Maybe I'm taking the wrong path in life." They're probably more exposed to addictions because of the life they live. Also the media, obviously, the media I think they really enjoy taking someone really high and then they fall. Because at the end of the day, it's storytelling, right? It's great to grab someone from a reality show like X Factor, for example, then make them really famous, rich, famous, wealthy, and then do the opposite.
[00:26:22.750] - Oliver (Host)
Well, like you said, it's a story, isn't it? It's a narrative. We like that narrative of observing people go up and sometimes the same people going down.
[00:26:33.650] - César (Guest)
And then going up again.
[00:26:36.590] - Oliver (Host)
Sometimes. It depends on what they've done to take them down. Because there are some people that we can't tolerate going back up, obviously. When I was writing this, I specifically didn't want to mention examples, but there are so many examples of people from the last few weeks of ups and downs, and I think it's a captivating topic. But then I suppose I am just one in many thousands of years of people captivated by the same idea, as you pointed out with the myths. Okay, well, thank you, César. Thank you. Thank you very much for this discussion of these people that go through such significant turns in their fortune in life.
[00:27:25.930] - Oliver (Host)
If you have a comment on any of today's episode, if you found it particularly engaging, or if you have any suggestions for future topics, please do let me know. Email me at oliver@morethanalanguage.com. If not, I look forward to next time. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye.
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