“We ought not to spend our feelings on things beyond our power”

“We ought not to spend our feelings on things beyond our power” is a maxim from Epictetus that tests the boundary between self-command and indifference. In Santa Rita, Conrad Hensley recalls it while deciding whether his concern for Pocahontas calls him to act or merely exposes him to suffering he cannot control.

Source and Meaning

The maxim comes from Book III, Chapter 29 of The Stoics, a chapter titled “That We Ought Not to Spend Our Feelings on Things Beyond Our Power.” Conrad finds the passage after the encounter between Rotto and Pocahontas has left him shaken. Epictetus argues that another person’s misfortune should not automatically be treated as an evil imposed on oneself, and warns that affection can become a form of miserable dependence. The lesson is not simply to feel nothing: the chapter’s disciple asks how to prove affection, and Epictetus answers that affection should be expressed in a noble rather than miserable spirit.

That distinction matters to Conrad because the passage speaks directly to the conflict he faces. It offers a discipline for keeping another prisoner’s suffering from overwhelming him, but it also makes him question what a humane response requires. The text gives him a rule for governing his feelings, not an uncomplicated instruction about whether he should intervene.

Conrad’s Test of the Maxim

After Rotto leaves Pocahontas, Conrad tries to return to Epictetus, but at first the words blur together amid his fear and agitation. As he regains his composure, he searches Book III and reads the chapter about not spending feelings on what lies beyond one’s power. Looking at Pocahontas slumped over the table, Conrad finds the philosopher’s severity difficult to accept. The passage’s assertion that a person’s misfortune is his own fault seems especially hard to reconcile with the pitiable figure before him.

Later, during evening pod time, Conrad watches Pocahontas walk the edges of the white turf, keeping as far from Rotto as he can without straying into other prisoners’ territory. Other men avoid him or treat him as an object of mockery; Conrad feels the urge to speak to him or offer encouragement, but cannot decide what would help. He repeats the maxim and related lines from Epictetus to himself, making the philosopher his only compass. In the end he stays out of the situation, even as he wonders whether that choice follows the teaching or merely shields him from a duty he recognizes.

Restraint and Its Unresolved Cost

The maxim’s role in the episode remains deliberately unsettled. Conrad’s effort to govern his fear accords with the Stoic distinction between what he can control and what he cannot. Yet his own doubts expose the danger of turning emotional discipline into a ready-made justification for inaction. He considers whether he is misreading Epictetus, or using the philosopher to absolve himself of responsibility; the question remains unresolved when he returns to his letter and reading.

The phrase therefore marks a moment in Conrad’s developing Stoic practice, not a settled answer to the demands of compassion. Its recurrence in his thoughts shows how urgently he needs a principle, while the scene tests whether a principle can be applied without erasing the person in need. Conrad does not learn Pocahontas’s real name, a final detail that sharpens the distance between the suffering he witnesses and the action he cannot bring himself to take.