Never Let Me Go, The Consolation Of Philosophy

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Our society today seems to be very focused on finding true happiness, just look at the number of self-help books on the market. While this desire for happiness may seem more idealized than ever, people have been focused on achieving the good life since the beginning of mankind. For me, the good life is one where I feel inner peace, and am connected with the people around me. Saint Anselm’s Proslogion, Never Let Me Go, The Desert Fathers, and The Consolation of Philosophy have all shown me that to achieve my good life and truly be happy, I must spend time away from my stressful environment and practice self-reflection so I can focus on what values are most important to me, and elicit a positive change in myself and others. Like people’s desire …show more content…

He did not choose to go to prison because he thought it would be a nice way to reconnect with himself, but he was still able to use this time alone to discover what happiness meant to him and come to peace with his future death. At first he is completely miserable in his prison cell, but after taking time to think about this misery he is able to realize that he is “wasting away in pining and longing for [his] former good fortune” (Boethius, 22). Reflecting on his life shows him that he had been valuing the wrong things. He sees that the things he has valued for so long, like his reputation or his office, are fleeting things that cannot bring him the happiness he searches for. Instead, he realizes that he needs to be thankful for the things that he has been taking for granted, like his family. He continues to try and discover what happiness is and finds that in his good life “true happiness is to be found in the supreme God” (Boethius, 69). While Boethius did not deserve to be in jail, his time alone proved to be very important for him. If he had not had this time, it is possible he would have been wasting his life away trying to find happiness in the fleeting things Lady Fortune governs and would in the end never have been able to find the true happiness he so desperately wanted. His realizations from his reflective time in prison prove that a person does not necessarily have to be in a peaceful environment to find inner peace, but rather they just have to take time to reflect on their

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