The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [62]
15. We must hurry, the enemy presses upon our rear. Soon these companions will all be scattered, soon the battle cry will be raised, and these comrade ties sundered.
16. Nothing escapes the pillage of time; men, poor wretches, scarcely know, amid the rout and tumult of time, that they live!
Chapter 13
1. If you grieve for the death of your son, the blame must go back to the time when he was born;
2. For his death was proclaimed at his birth; into this condition was he begotten, this promise attended him from the womb.
3. We have come into the realm of change and chance, and their power is harsh and invincible.
4. We must expect things deserved and undeserved. We will experience the kindness of chance, and its cruelty;
5. Some will burn with fire, applied, it may be, to punish, or it may be to heal;
6. Some will be bound in chains, in the power now of an enemy, now of a fellow-countryman;
7. Some will toss naked on the fickle sea, and, when their struggle with the waves is over, will not be cast up on the shore, but will be swallowed by some monster;
8. Others will be worn down with divers diseases, long suspended between life and death.
9. Time and chance are capricious. What need is there to weep over the different parts of life, one by one? The whole of it calls for tears.
10. New ills will press on before you have done with the old. Therefore we must observe moderation; against our many sorrows the power of the human mind must be arrayed.
11. Again, why this forgetfulness of what is the individual and the general lot? Mortal were you born, to mortals have you given birth.
12. You, who are a crumbling and perishable body and often assailed by the agents of disease,
13. Can you have hoped that from such frail matter you gave birth to anything imperishable?
14. Your son is dead; he has finished his course and reached that goal towards which all those whom you count more fortunate than your child are even now hastening.
15. Towards this, at different paces, moves all this throng that now quarrels in the forum, that looks on at the theatres, that buys in the markets;
16. Both those whom you love and revere and those whom you despise will be made equal as one heap of ashes.
17. Accept this: return now to the thought of Livia who conquered grief by love and remembrance; remember the living, who need you still;
18. Accept the mortality of ourselves and those we love, and see that to give life is to prepare to lose it, to love is to prepare to grieve,
19. And yet: love, and give life, and be full of courage and honour, for this is our human lot, and we must make it as fine as our powers allow.
Chapter 14: Of old age
1. Wherever I turn, I see evidence of my advancing years. I visited the farm where I grew up, and protested against the money that the bailiff had spent on the tumbledown building.
2. He maintained that the flaws were not due to his own carelessness: ‘I am doing everything possible,’ he said, ‘but the house is old.’
3. And this is the house I saw being built when I was a child! What has the future in store for me, if stones of my own age are already crumbling?
4. I was upset, and took the first opportunity to express my annoyance in the bailiff’s presence. ‘It is clear,’ I cried, ‘that these plane trees are neglected; they have no leaves.
5. ‘Their branches are so gnarled and shrivelled, the boles so rough and unkempt! This would not happen, if someone loosened the earth at their feet, and watered them.’
6. The bailiff protested again that he was doing everything possible, and never relaxed his efforts, ‘But,’ he said, ‘those trees are old.’
7. Now, I had planted those trees myself, I had seen them in their first leaf. I owe it to the farm that my old age became apparent whichever way I turned.
8. And to it I also owed the realisation that one should cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.
9. Just as the farm was serene and mature, with full-grown