The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [71]
22. Do not drown your mind in petty anxieties; if you do, your mind will be dulled, with too little vigour left when the time comes for it to stand up and do its work bravely.
23. Say to yourself that our petty bodies are mortal and frail; pain can reach them from other sources than from wrong or the might of the stronger.
24. Our pleasures themselves become torments: banquets bring indigestion, carousal exhausts us, overindulgence makes us ill.
25. Say: ‘I may become poor; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place I have been sent to.
26. ‘They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds when I do not have chains about me?’
27. To die is to shed those chains, because it is to cease to run the risk of sickness and death.
28. I remember one day you were discussing the well-known saying that many do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees, dying a little every day.
29. And this, for many, is true: every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane.
30. We lose our childhood, then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time;
31. The very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death.
32. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out;
33. Similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process.
34. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way. Epicurus upbraids those who desire, as much as those who shrink from, death:
35. ‘It is absurd,’ he says, ‘to run towards death because you are tired of life, when it is your manner of life that has made you run towards death.’
36. And again he says: ‘What is so absurd as to seek death, when it is through fear of death that you have robbed your life of peace?’
37. And you may add this: ‘People are so thoughtless, nay, so mad, that some, through fear of death, force themselves to die.’
38. Whichever of these ideas you ponder, you will strengthen your mind for the endurance alike of death and of life.
39. And remember: there is an end to nothing; all things are connected in a circle; they flee and they are pursued;
40. Night is close at the heels of day, day at the heels of night; summer ends in autumn, winter rushes after autumn, and winter softens into spring.
41. All nature in this way passes, only to return, what has gone before coming back in different or renewed form,
42. So that what was a human being might in time be in the trees and clouds, for ever different.
Chapter 26: The consolation of the end
1. I was lately telling you that I was within sight of old age. I am now afraid that I have left old age behind.
2. For some other word would now apply to my years, or at any rate to my body; you may rate me in the class of those who are nearing the end.
3. Nevertheless, I offer thanks to myself, with you as witness; for I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution.
4. Only my vices, and the outward aids to these vices, have reached senility; my mind is strong and rejoices that it has but slight reliance on the body.
5. It has laid aside the greater part of its load. It is alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its time of bloom.
6. Let me take it at its word, and let it make the most of the advantages it possesses.
7. My mind bids me do some thinking and consider how much of this peace of mind and moderation of character I owe to wisdom and how much to my time of life;
8. It bids me distinguish carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do.
9. For why should one complain or regard it as a disadvantage, if powers which ought to come to an end have failed?
10. ‘But,’ you say, ‘it is the greatest possible disadvantage to be worn out and to