Topic

Reward

Reward in this collection is almost never immediate or certain, which is what makes the accounts of it interesting. Patience-is-bitter-its-fruit-is-sweet is Aristotle's foundational statement: reward is structurally delayed, and the delay is not an accident but a condition. Franklin's he-who-can-wait-can-have-what-he-will extends the temporal claim. Bacon's choose-the-life-most-useful-and-habit-makes-it-agreeable reframes reward altogether: you do not choose the rewarding life directly; you choose the useful one and discover the reward through habituation. The anonymous give-to-the-world-the-best-you-have-and-the-best-will-come-back is the proverb version of the same argument. Jefferson's luck-and-hard-work is here as well as under effort: the reward for preparation is the appearance of fortune. Shaw's happy-family-as-earlier-heaven is the most ambitious claim: the highest reward available to a human being is a good family, and it is available here and now rather than in any afterlife. What the collection argues is that reward is real but its timeline is almost always longer than the timeline of the desire that generates it.