My Dear Vegetables

 I loathe the happiness of all these people who don't know they're unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune - the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That's why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 313

FP - "the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and  pain."  How long have humans tried to live lives equal to that of the gods? The answer is exactly how long the gods have punished them for wanting exactly that. Yahweh tossed Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the crime of essentially trying to rival God. However, in the end, at least according to Pessoa, we were trying too hard. the truth is not a studied Stoic or Buddhist transcendence, but instead a witless "living unawares." Of course, are they actually living? Way too many people - apparently around 46% of the adult US population - are apparently living, and voting, vegetatively.