An impasse is a dreadful thing, particularly for any writer and thinker. It either signifies impending doom for a line of thought, the futility of one’s labour, or worse, the loss of inspiration which can only correlate with an unprofitable state of mindless grazing upon pastures which may yet retain their lustre. The impasse is a stupefying event that takes from its victim any intention of working toward something, filling its victim with a sense of faux inebriation and listlessness and severing him with acedia and robbing alacrity of its rightful place in the sun. Even worse is the debilitating randomness of such an event, for it robs its victim so viciously and so swiftly of his agency that it compels the weaker victim to abandon the pursuit altogether, and the stronger victim to the compulsions of the outside world, until the Muses dote upon him again.

This is the state that has afflicted me, in no small part, for a few hours now. Lying formless on a sofa like an oriental despot in my study, hoping that the day would be embellished and dramatised by the arrival of a cyclone, the first to hit urbs primus in Indis for more than a century, and comforted by the prospect of some dramatic occurrence outside, it felt that inspiration had left me to reside in some other body of its choosing. It is not often that this happens, but when it does, sentences no longer form with any fluidity and cadence, and it only reminds me of this from Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Things haven’t fall apart yet, but this is a moment of fragility, of weakness, of a trough that both follows a crest and comes before it. It seems to be the sort of risk one takes when one promises oneself to the vita contemplativa, the downside of living in a magical land, trying to climb up the ladder to the world of forms. It is the sort of wasteful despair that comes along when it is least welcome and when time is of the essence for some reason or the other, proving to be more than an irritation. Oftentimes, it is nature’s calling, to take a break, to slow down, to think slowly and carefully and not lose one’s links with the world that one inhabits at present.

Could this be a problem without a solution? Perhaps, though it is my ardent belief that these dreaded impasses can be profitable in their own fateful manner. By questioning the importance of the vita contemplativa and of the pursuit of the love of knowledge, it keeps the mind thinking and constantly justifying the importance of further study. It imbues in one a sort of soft scepticism that ensures that fleeting fancies are enjoyed briefly and then cast off when they prove no longer to be worth the demands of their time, and it ensures that one does not take oneself too seriously: the last being extremely important, because it is the goal of the humanist not to leave this world completely, but to pursue the studia humanitatis, to understand the feelings and sentiments of human inadequacy more fully, and to keep a watchful gaze on the world of forms whilst remaining fully in this world. Even Gibbon remained a Member of Parliament, fastidiously attending the House of Commons whilst engaged in the preliminary volumes of his magnum opus (and I do not use that phrase in the commonplace fashion which it now serves). As sincere and rigorous his admiration of Rome was, so was his dedication to the Whig cause of his time, and of his devotion to being English in general.

It is in times of cursed impasses that I often take recourse to the works of a priest, of the Delphic kind: Plutarch of Chaeronea, and his excellent Parallel Lives. They tell all sorts of stories, warn of moral lessons, and analyse the lives of great men, both Greek and Roman. They are didactic, but necessarily so, for the reader benefits from the reassuring guiding hand of the teacher, who does not coerce but only directs. Plutarch’s Lives are labours of love for both the author and his readers, and for the variety of impasse that is cursed but short, a single life provides enough in way of inspiration and thought to allay the unprofitable, lazy bandying of time off. Unlike Thucydides, it keeps the romance in history. It tells of Demosthenes’ own problems in oration, of his lisp and his uncharismatic character, and of how he overcome it: inspiration for any one who aspires to elocution and eloquence. If this cursed impasse did not spare even Demosthenes, who could not make a speech without preparing and working for it for hours in his ‘cave-study’ (perhaps like the cave where Romulus and Remus were reared), how would it spare a mere mortal like me? Plutarch is reassuring but not like a sunflower still gazing up even after the moon is lit up in its full splendour. His didacticism, which many seek to admonish, it precisely the reason why I go back to him, time and time again.