Here's a new and good article referencing the benefits of Emily Austin's "Living For Pleasure." The writer goes through his background first through fundamentalist religion, and then to Buddhism, and having drunk so heavily from those waters it's not surprising that there are a couple of statements that probably need a little tweaking from a strictly Epicurean point of view.
One, for example, is where he says "From Epicurus I learned that eternal life, as well as being impossible, is also undesirable." Well I am not so sure that's stated precisely right. Of course as a human being, it's undesirable for us to obsess over yearning for eternal life, because it's impossible for us to get, and I feel sure that's what he means. But Epicurus was a big picture thinker, and he didn't think that eternal life is undesirable for the gods, so I would draw a line between saying flatly that something is "undesirable per se" as against "undesirable because it's impossible for us." Someone who's new to the philosophy might think it weird that we shouldn't even wish to live forever if we could attain it, and so I wouldn't imply that Epicurus thought the gods don't get a benefit from living forever. The problem in a desire for humans that leads to more pain than pleasure -- is that it leads to more pain than pleasure -- and not that the desire is undesirable per se because it's "wrong" or violates some absolute rule.
But my tweaks to the article would be relatively few. It's very good article, and it brings to mind many of the issues we regularly discuss. All of us incorporate a lot of scars and tendencies from our pasts that take time to work through and articulate. This is a good article to show how much progress someone can make with just a little good influence from a single book. Sounds like he just read Dr. Austin's book recently, and even in short time the distance he's already come from shows how much good her book can do.
