The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [70]
12. A third, to be saved from arrest after running away, cuts his veins with a knife.
13. Do you not agree that virtue can be as efficacious as excessive fear?
14. No person will have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that gaining higher office or making more money is a great blessing.
15. Repeat this thought to yourself every day, so that you may be able to depart from life contentedly;
16. For many people clutch and cling to life, even as those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.
17. Most people are jostled in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
18. For this reason, make life as a whole agreeable to yourself by banishing all worry about death;
19. It will come, and so long as the process of dying is itself easy, it has no more terror than dreamless sleep.
20. No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of its loss;
21. Nothing, however, is lost with less discomfort than that which, when lost, cannot be missed.
22. Therefore, encourage and toughen your mind against the mishaps that afflict even the most powerful and the most successful,
23. For accident and illness can in a moment take away all that was built over many years.
24. So I declare to you: he is lord of your life that scorns his own. Be the lord of your own life therefore, by not fearing to lose it.
25. Since the day we were born we are being led towards the day we die: in the interim let us be courageous, and do good things.
Chapter 25
1. You write to tell me that you are anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit, which an angry opponent is threatening you with;
2. And you ask me to advise you to picture to yourself a happier outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope.
3. Why, indeed, is it necessary to summon trouble, which must be endured soon enough when it arrives;
4. Or to anticipate trouble, and ruin the present through fear of the future?
5. It is foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.
6. Think of how much keener a brave man is to lay hold of danger than a cruel man is to inflict it.
7. ‘Oh,’ you will say, ‘spare me any lectures “On Despising Death” and the like; you will soon be repeating the story of Cato.’
8. But why should I not repeat the story of Cato, how he read Plato on that last glorious night, with a sword laid at his pillow?
9. He had provided these two requisites for his last moments: the first, that he might have the will to die, and the second, that he might have the means.
10. So he put his affairs in order, as well as one could put in order that which was ruined and near its end,
11. And thought that he ought to see to it that no one should have the power to slay Cato, or the good fortune to save him.
12. Drawing the sword, which he had kept unstained from all bloodshed against the final day, he cried: ‘I have fought, till now, for my country’s freedom, and not for my own;
13. ‘I did not strive so doggedly to be free, but only to live among the free.
14. ‘Now, since the affairs of mankind are beyond hope, let Cato be withdrawn to safety.’ So saying, he inflicted a mortal wound upon his body.
15. I am reminding you of this for the purpose of encouraging you to face anything that might happen,
16. By knowing how to face that which is thought to be the most terrible thing that can happen: which fools think is death.
17. By which I mean that death is so little to be feared that through its good offices nothing is to be feared.
18. Therefore, when problems threaten, listen unconcernedly. Meet them with the best of your life; or end them by overcoming life.
19. Remember to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom;
20. You will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear.
21. We should strip the