There’s a lot of focus on the fanciest part my claim that the best kind of life is a life of contemplation. So I want to return some attention to the rest of it. The life of contemplation is a life of, broadly, science: a life spent reflecting on what is most intelligible. 1/

When I was young and in the academy I had a teacher…and a friend, Eudoxus. He was a brilliant geometer and he spent his life working out an astronomical theory in terms of homocentric spheres. To do this was, for him, a perfect and inexhaustible source of pleasure. 2/

What could poverty or misfortune mean to a man with such a fountain in his own soul? What could poverty or misfortune mean to a man with such a fountain in his own soul? As long as he had time to think and talk, he was happy. No offense weighed on him, no anxieties plagued him 3/

and no indulgence or pain could provoke him to act shamefully. Or, rather, he was a man and all these sorts of things did affect him, but never deeply, and never for long. The spheres were his, and he could trace their eternal motion regardless of whatever else was going on. 4/

He was the source of his own good, this divine man. And as a result, he was kind, patient, and brave, even in the face of a particularly irritating and haughty student who could never quite understand. 5/

To be happy is to have a source of pleasure within yourself. This is possible through a life of action, so far as one is a source of one’s actions through deliberation and choice. But this is perhaps more perfectly possible through the activity of knowing. 6/

Spend an hour each day going through Euclid’s first book until you can go through them in your head. See the bonds of necessity tying each conclusion to its premises, and feel how simple ideas like “triangle” and “area” are fleshed and made alive by their elaborations. 7/

We get bored, or tired, or confused with such things all to easily. It takes a lot of work to turn someone into the sort of person who can be pleased by knowing, and who can endure the subtle pains of learning. 8/

But once such a character is in place, a person can become like a god: a source of their own good. Just like my dear, dead friend. 9/9

In very partial answer to your question, @morallawwithin.