The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [68]
18. Yes, you will say; but a young man expects to live long; an old man cannot expect to do so.
19. Well, the young man is a fool to expect it. For what can be more foolish than to regard the uncertain as certain, the false as true?
20. ‘An old man has nothing even to hope.’ Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than the young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained:
21. The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long.
22. And yet! what is ‘long’ in a man’s life? For grant the utmost limit: let us expect an age like that of the king of the Tartessi, who reigned eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty.
23. Nothing seems long in which there is any ‘last’, for when that arrives, then all the past has slipped away – only that remains which you have earned by virtue and righteous actions.
24. Hours indeed, and days and months and years depart, nor does past time ever return, nor can the future be known.
25. Whatever time each is granted for life, with that he is bound to be content.
26. An actor, to win approval, is not bound to perform the whole play; let him only satisfy the audience in whatever act he appears.
27. Nor need a wise man go on to the concluding applause. For a short term of life is long enough for living well and honourably.
28. But if you go farther, you have no more right to grumble than farmers do because the charm of the spring season is past and the summer and autumn have come.
29. The word ‘spring’ suggests youth, and points to the harvest to be: the other seasons are suited for the reaping and storing of the crops.
30. And the harvest of old age is the memory and rich store of achievements laid up in earlier life.
31. Again, all things that accord with nature are to be counted good. What can be more in accordance with nature than for old people at last to die?
32. A thing, indeed, which also befalls the young, though nature revolts and fights against it.
33. Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from the young, ripeness from the old.
34. This ripeness is so delightful to those who are wise in their old age, that as they approach nearer to death,
35. They seem as it were to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.
36. Again, there is no fixed borderline for old age, and you are making a good and proper use of it as long as you can satisfy the call of duty and disregard death.
37. The result of this is, that old age is even more confident and courageous than youth.
Chapter 22
1. That end of life is the best, when, without the intellect or senses being impaired, nature herself takes to pieces her own handiwork which she also put together.
2. Just as the builder of a ship or a house can break them up more easily than anyone else, so nature, which knitted together the human frame, can also best unfasten it.
3. Moreover, a thing freshly glued together is always difficult to pull asunder; if old, this is easily done.
4. There may possibly be some sensation of dying and that only for a short time, especially in the case of an old man: after death, sensation disappears altogether.
5. But to disregard death is a lesson which must be studied from our youth up; for unless that is learnt, no one can have a quiet mind.
6. For die we certainly must, and that too without being certain whether it may not be this very day.
7. As a general truth, it is weariness of all pursuits that creates weariness of life.
8. There are certain pursuits adapted to childhood: do young men miss them?
9. There are others suited to early manhood: does that settled time of life called ‘middle age’ ask for them?
10. There are others, again, suited to that age, but not looked for in old age.
11. There are, finally, some which belong to old age.
12. Therefore, as the pursuits of the earlier ages have their time for disappearing, so also have those of old age.
13. And when that takes place, a satiety of life brings on the