The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [63]
10. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the quiet conversation after dinner, when the candles burn low, is best.
11. Each pleasure reserves to the end its best things. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.
12. And I myself believe that even the period which stands, so to speak, on the edge of the roof, possesses pleasures of its own.
13. Or else the very fact of our not wanting pleasures has taken the place of the pleasures themselves. How comforting it is to have tired out one’s appetites, and to have done with them!
14. ‘But,’ you say, ‘it is a nuisance to be looking death in the face!’ Death, however, should be looked in the face by young and old alike. We are not summoned according to our birth dates.
15. Moreover, no one is so old that it would be improper for him to hope for another day of existence. And one day, mind you, is a stage on life’s journey.
16. Our span of life is divided into parts; it consists of large circles enclosing smaller. One circle embraces and bounds the rest; it reaches from birth to the last day of existence.
17. The next circle limits the period of our young manhood. The third confines all of childhood in its circumference.
18. Again, there is, in a class by itself, the year; it contains within itself all the divisions of time by multiplying which we get the total of life.
19. The month is bounded by a narrower ring. The smallest circle of all is the day; but even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.
20. One day is equal to every day: hence, every day ought to be regarded as if it closed the series, as if it rounded out and completed our existence.
21. But if we add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.
22. Those people are happiest, and most secure in their possession of themselves, who can await the morrow without apprehension.
23. When a person has said: ‘I have lived!’ every morning he arises he receives a bonus. It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint,
24. Least of all the one that fills him with apprehension about whether this day or the next will be his last. Welcome all equally.
25. All truths are our own property; what any wise individual has said becomes the property of all the wise.
Chapter 15
1. How shall we live when we have lived long, and the years have come to weigh on our heads, and bowed our bodies to the necessities of age and the passing of our prime?
2. I know how well ordered and equable your mind is, my friend, and how rich in culture and good sense.
3. And yet I have an idea that you are at times stirred to the heart by the same circumstances as myself.
4. I have resolved therefore to ask your opinion of some thoughts about the burden of advancing age, common to us both.
5. I am fully aware that you will support old age, as you do everything else, with philosophic calm.
6. So no sooner had I resolved to meditate on the common destiny of all to whom the years gather,
7. But you at once occurred to me as the person best endowed to comment on my thoughts, and help me improve them.
8. To myself, indeed, thinking of this matter has been so helpful, that it has not only wiped away all the disagreeableness of old age, which I now experience in full, but has even made it luxurious and delightful too.
9. Never, therefore, can philosophy be praised as highly as it deserves, considering that its faithful disciple is able to spend every period of life with fortitude and profit, by attending to its lessons and applying them.
10. People who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome.
11. But those who look for happiness from within can never think anything bad which nature makes inevitable.
12. In that category before anything else comes old age, which all wish to attain,