The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [44]
10. I see that rapacious death is a respecter neither of age nor of condition, though it best likes to choose those the good loved, to punish the goodness of the living.
11. For they, living on, alone or deprived, with the thorn of memory, the abyss of mourning, the unfair demand to remake their world out of ruins of sorrow: they are death’s chief victims.
12. At night, and in the still stretches of day, at waking, at lying down to wearying half-sleep, the black bat of grief closes its wings over us and stifles our breath;
13. How unbearable, how inextinguishable by silence or utterance, is the weight of this stifling; how unlimited the horizon of suffering then, at its worst period.
14. To live is to wait for grief, or to be the occasion for it, or to witness it, or cause it, or be changed by it, or die of it.
Chapter 4
1. My prime of youth is a frost of cares, my feast of joy but a dish of pain,
2. My crop of corn is a field of tares, my wealth no more than dreams of gain;
3. My day is fled, yet I saw no sun; and though I live, my life is done.
4. My spring is past, but not yet sprung; the fruit is dead, with leaves still green;
5. My youth is past, though I still young; I saw the world, myself unseen.
6. My thread is cut, though not yet spun; and though I live, my life is done.
7. I sought for death, it was the womb; I looked for life, it was a shade;
8. I tread the ground, which is my tomb; and now I die, though just new made.
9. The glass is full, yet my glass is run; and though I live, my life is done.
Chapter 5
1. Is nature spiteful, that we live such a brief span? Life hastens by, and ends just as we learn how to live it.
2. Maybe the wise can make one lifetime into many, but the many make one lifetime into less;
3. For so much of it is wasted, and wasted moreover on the trivial and passing, the momentary and empty.
4. One person is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless;
5. One person is besotted with wine, another is paralysed by sloth;
6. One person is exhausted by ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others,
7. Another, driven by the greed of the trader, hastens wearily over lands and seas in hope of gain;
8. Some are tormented by passion for war and are bent either on inflicting danger or preserving their own safety;
9. Some are worn out by servitude in thankless attendance upon the great;
10. Many are kept busy in pursuit of other men’s fortunes or in complaining of their own;
11. Many again, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new;
12. Some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but events take them unawares while they laze and yawn.
13. So surely does all this happen that we cannot doubt the poet who says, ‘The part of life we really live is small.’
14. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time, wasted time.
15. Vices beset us and surround us on every side, and do not permit us to rise anew and lift up our eyes for the discernment of truth;
16. Rather, they keep us low when once they have overwhelmed us and we are chained to lust for gain, reputation, position and indulgence.
17. Their victims are never allowed to return to their true selves; if ever they chance to find some release,
18. Like the waters of the deep sea which continue to heave even after the storm is past, they are tossed about, and there is no rest from the tumult.
Chapter 6
1. Do you think I speak only of the wretches whose evils are admitted? Look at those whose prosperity men flock to behold; they are smothered by their blessings.
2. To how many are riches a burden! From how many do eloquence and the daily straining to display their powers merely amount to suffering!
3. And likewise, how many are pale from constant pleasures! To how many does the throng of admirers and supplicants that crowd about them leave no freedom!
4. In short, run through the list of citizens from