Abstract

In one of his admirable letters to Princess Elizabeth, Descartes asserts that the best way to overcome the annoyances of life is to “divert one's imagination and one's senses away from them as much as possible and to make use merely of one's understanding in dealing with them.” This advice is not easy to follow, and one of the devil's principal tricks is to identify himself so profoundly with our intimate concerns that, in disowning him, we come to believe that we disown ourselves. It sometimes seems that man cares more for his misery than for his pleasure.But whether easy or not to follow, the advice is good. To convert the evil which oppresses you, insofar as possible, into a knot to untie, a safety lock to take apart, a problem to resolve, is to detach it from yourself; it is no longer me, it is mine. I can censure it and perhaps even pin it down. When one can state the evil, then what remains is only half-evil.