The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [56]
27. A man ends his grief by the mere passing of time, even if he has not ended it of his own accord.
28. But the most shameful cure for sorrow, in the case of a sensible man, is to grow weary of sorrowing.
29. I should prefer you to move on from grief by choice, rather than have grief abandon you; and you should stop grieving as soon as possible,
30. And honour the dead with loving remembrance that is positive and enhances your life, not hinders it: just as they would wish.
31. He who writes these words to you is no other than I, who wept so excessively for my own dear friend,
32. So that, in spite of my wishes, I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief.
33. Today, however, I regret this act of mine, and understand that the reason why I lamented so greatly was that I had never imagined it possible for his death to precede mine.
34. The only thought which occurred to me was that he was the younger, and much younger, too – as if nature kept to the order of our ages!
35. Therefore let us continually think as much about our own mortality as about that of all those we love.
36. In former days I ought to have said: ‘My friend is younger than I; but what does that matter? He would naturally die after me, but he may precede me.’
37. It was just because I did not do this that I was unprepared when fortune dealt me the sudden blow.
38. Now is the time for you to reflect, not only that all things are mortal, but also that their mortality is subject to no fixed law.
39. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.
40. Let us therefore reflect that we shall soon come to the goal which this beloved friend, to our own sorrow, has reached.
Chapter 5: To Marcia
1. If I did not know, Marcia, that you are as far removed from weakness of mind as from all other vices,
2. I should not dare to assail your grief – the grief that we are all prone to nurse and brood upon;
3. Nor should I have hoped to be able to comfort you with philosophy in this trial.
4. But your strength of mind has been already so tested, and your courage, after such a tragic loss, so approved,
5. That this gives me confidence to try. How you bore yourself in relation to your father is common knowledge;
6. For you loved him as dearly as you love your children, save only that you did not wish him to outlive you.
7. And yet I am not sure that you did not wish even that; for great affection sometimes ventures to break the natural law.
8. You dissuaded your father from taking his own life as long as you could;
9. After it became clear that, surrounded as he was by his enemies sent by Sejanus, he had no other way of escape from servitude,
10. So though you did not favour his plan, you acknowledged defeat, and you routed your tears in public and choked down your sobs,
11. Yet in spite of your composed face you did not conceal them – and these things in an age when the supremely filial was simply not to be unfilial!
12. When, however, changed times gave you an opportunity, you recovered for the benefit of men that genius of your father which had brought him to his end,
13. And thus saved him from the only real death, which is oblivion;
14. And the books which that brave hero had written with his own blood you restored to their place among the memorials of the nation.
15. You have done a great service to scholarship, for a large part of his writings had been burned;
16. You have done a great service to posterity, for history will come to them as an uncorrupted record whose honesty cost its author dear;
17. And you have done a great service to the man himself, whose memory now lives and will ever live so long as it shall be worthwhile to learn the facts of Roman history,
18. So long as there shall be anyone who will wish to know what it is to be unconquered when all necks are bowed and forced to bear the yoke of a tyrant:
19. What it is to be free in thought, in purpose and in act.
20. A great loss, in very