Fortunes favors...

I haven’t been blogging much and my blogging content is way down. Not that it was ever way up but I find it harder and harder to put two coherent thoughts together these days or even to find the time to sit down and try. Worse, I feel this strange, even unsettling feeling that I am out of sync with the universe right now. I was thinking about this the other day while watching a show on Pompeii. One of the things the program talked about was the Roman ideal of virtue. Romans didn’t measure virtue in terms of how good or how bad a person was, that is, with notions of sin. Rather, Roman virtue was tied to success. The virtuous person was the most successful. As Cicero said "Jupiter is called the best (Optimus) not because he makes us just or sober or wise, but because he makes us healthy, rich, and prosperous." Lacking prosperity, people would beseech the favor of the Gods, in hopes of increasing their chances for prosperity. One of the most prominent of these was Fortuna, the goddess of luck. People would beseech the goddess to help them become more successful in business, in politics and in war. In this way, good fortune, or luck was tied to deeds, labor and creativity. Signs of luck went hand in hand with talent, ingenuity and, of course, success. The question of luck was not individual, or personal as in “do you feel lucky” but relied on the preparedness of a whole, as in “fortune favors the prepared” or perhaps even “the lord helps those who help themselves.” As the goddess of fate Fortuna also had the power to foretell the future. This means that she was worshiped as an oracle and someone who could tell you how to proceed. Romans would sacrifice to her at the start of the New Year in hope for a prosperous year. This means that her power extended over the cycle of time and the changing of seasons. Fortune foretold the coming of an early spring or a late harvest, and knew the destinies of newborn children and grown-ups alike. As a goddess of action and deeds fortune is not an ephemeral force beyond our control, one that that steers the course of events towards us. Rather, we looked to fortune for guidance even as we proceeded forward. We tend to think of fortune now-a-days as something that happens to us, something good or bad. The difference between these differing views on fortune is that in one we take action towards fortune, in the other fortune is something that happens to us, like winning the lottery or finding a four-leaf clover. I think that I believe in both types of fortune, in some cases I have no manner of luck at all, in others I feel that fortune has somehow abandon me, rendering all of my efforts useless and futile. I find myself waiting for Fortuna to relent, like Toole writes in the Confederacy of Dunces: “Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by florescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, for the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.” Anyways, I am not really sure what any of this has to do with anything. As I said, I feel out of sync with the universe, so here I am musing on fortune, biding my time trying to figure out what action Fortune wants.