Epictetus, you speak of reason guarding against sorrow while hunger strikes, yet I found that nature itself holds a quiet dignity in its simple needs. When a lean hare trembled before my door and then scurried away with elastic spring into the twilight, it did not fear death so much as it asserted its wild freedom. “Not without reason was its slenderness.” That thinness was not shame but the very proof of its belonging to the soil, far more substantial than any human ledger could account for.