Patience in a Hostile World

 

Pieter Bruegel, "Patientia" (print by Pieter van der Heyden, 1557), Rijksmuseum

 

Patience in a Hostile World

Can you even find the figure of Patience in this image?

She's in the exact lower center of the scene, chained to a big stone block, praying quietly, almost invisible and surely inaudible in a world gone mad.

Next to her, a woman with a dog's body spoon-feeds a goose on the back of a crippled man being attacked by a winged platypus.

Frogs, a medieval symbol of greed, hop and hulk everywhere; many of them have crossbred with other species, engendering frog-dogs, frog-flies, frog-birds and frog-men.

A village in the background is incinerated in a huge fire, a giant egg-shaped man's head is ablaze, a tiny bird roasts above an enormous smoky fire.

You can almost hear the creatures shouting to be heard over the squalling of violins and guitars and horns and harps, the hissing of fires, the roar of a flying lizard, the cries of drowning men and the flatulence of weird monsters mooning each other.

The caption, by the early Catholic theologian Lactantius, reads:

Patience is the bearing with equanimity of the evils which are either inflicted or happen to fall on us.

Lactantius added:

Therefore the just and wise man, because he exercises virtue, has patience in himself; but he will be altogether free from this if he shall suffer no adversity. On the other hand, the man who lives in prosperity is impatient, and is without the greatest virtue. I call him impatient, because he suffers nothing.

Getting what we want makes it difficult to wait for what we don't have. No wonder being patient is so hard.

The Latin pati, "to suffer," is the root not only of our word patience but also the medical term patient. To be patient and to be a patient are the same, linguistically and perhaps psychologically as well.

To be a long-term investor, you have to be patient. And that means you have to be prepared to outlast some suffering. To survive, as Bruegel shows, you have to tune out the noise and look away from the madness.

 

SOURCE: THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR

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By Jason Zweig