The third chapter of the Enchiridion is short and it comes at once, immediately after the opening lines about what is and is not in our power.
Epictetus gives an exercise. With everything you find attractive, useful or dear, say what it is: name the thing. Begin with the smallest. If you love a jug, say: I love an earthenware jug. Then when it breaks it does not shake you.
And then the sentence that has stopped readers down the centuries. If you kiss your child or your wife, say: I am kissing a human being. Then when they die you are not shattered.
The jug comes first, and that is no accident. He practises the movement on something small before applying it to something large.
Later readers have taken offence, and that began early. Commentators from Simplicius onward have had to explain that no coldness is being asked for but accuracy, and that explanation has been needed ever since.
What corrects the picture stands elsewhere in this collection. The same Epictetus took in, in old age, a child that would otherwise have been abandoned, and brought a woman into his household to raise it. He never married and owned almost nothing, and he of all people bound himself at the end to the most binding thing there is.
The jug, then, is not his conclusion but his practice material. What he practised with it he applied to something he genuinely did love.
You love something that can break. You can know that or push it away, and both cost you something.
The tempting sorting is that he is asking you to love less. Something else is written there, and the difference is the whole chapter.
He is asking for an accurate description. A jug is earthenware, and earthenware breaks; that is not a gloomy thought but a fact about jugs. A person is mortal, and that is not a gloomy thought but a fact about people. Whoever says so in advance sorts it into the box where it belongs.
What happens then is subtle. The love stays in your box, because loving is something you do. What moves to the other box is the demand that it last, and that is exactly the part you never had.
The formulation is hard because it is exact. I am kissing a human being, not: I am kissing something that can never be taken from me. The second is untrue, and saying untrue things to yourself is not protection but postponement.
It remains uncomfortable reading, and it is fair not to smooth that over. For someone with a sick child this chapter is not a consolation but a blow, and Epictetus softens it nowhere.
There is moreover a practical objection. Constantly telling yourself that your child is mortal can become a form of distance that damages the being together; the exercise can spoil what it means to protect. The Stoics would say you are then doing it wrongly. But an exercise that is often done wrongly is also an exercise with a design problem.
Which jug in your life do you treat as unbreakable? And does your love for it grow or shrink when you admit that it is not?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions