From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

The Dagger Dance

Everyone knows about the strength of character of the Stoics. They reasoned on the passions – hate, jealousy, fear, despair – and thus managed to keep a tight rein on them, just as a good coachman controls his horses.

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and of the future. “We have only the present to bear,” they said. “Neither the past nor the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist.”

That is quite true. The past and the future exist only when we think about them; they are impressions, not realities. We go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate our regrets and our fears. I once saw a juggler pile up daggers one on top of the other so as to make a kind of monstrous tree which he balanced on his forehead. That is just the way we pile up and carry around our regrets and fears, like foolhardy performers. Instead of carrying a minute around with us, we carry around an hour; instead of carrying around an hour, we carry around a day, ten days, months, years. A person who has a pain in his leg thinks how he suffered from it yesterday, how he suffered from it before that, how he will suffer tomorrow; he bemoans his entire life. It is clear that in such a case wisdom cannot do much, for the actual suffering is still very much there. But if it is a question of moral suffering, what would remain of it if one could be cured of regretting the past and of worrying about the future?

A rejected lover, who tosses and tums in bed instead of sleeping and who plots a dreadful, Corsican revenge, what would remain of his distress if he did not think about the past or the future? The ambitious man, stung to the quick by a failure, where can he get his misery except from a past that he dredges up and from a future that he invents? One is reminded of the legendary Sisyphus who rolls his stone up the hill and thus renews his torment.

I would say to all those who torture themselves in this manner: keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while.

17 April 1908