Gracian and the Shadows of Heaven
In aphorism 205 (in the Christopher Maurer translation), Gracian writes on the benefits of scorn:
One way to get things is to scorn them. When you look for them, they aren't there, and later, without your trying, they come running. Earthly things are the shadows of heavenly ones, and they behave like shadows; they flee when you pursue them and chase you when you flee them.
He goes on to speak of scorn as a weapon, and to advise people to ignore their critics -- but this seems a serious change in tone. He refers to scorn as "the shrewdest way to seek revenge." At first he writes of a way to achieve your goals through a kind of unconscious state of retirement -- like Mozart playing billiards to take his mind off music, which often resulted in intense flashes of inspiration. But Gracian goes from achieving goals, to getting revenge, to ignoring one's critics as the ultimate flipping of the bird.
Perhaps because of very recent personal experiences, when some opportunities have presented themselves after I had given up hoping for them, I was more interested in the first part of the aphorism. And this notion of chasing the shadows of heaven seems right out of Lao Tzu. It reads to me as vastly more worthy of meditation than merely how best to strike back at trash talkers. But then again, I live like a mole -- in a world in which hardly anyone notices my existence enough to even bother to scorn me, in ways shrewd or not.
