brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that
all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has
been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the
whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no
good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that
it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are
wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad
owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply
long for him who orders it properly.
“The part of life we
really live is small.” For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to
postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which
few have attained!
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and—what will perhaps make you wonder
more—it takes the whole of life to learn how to die. Many very great men, having laid aside all their
encumbrances, having renounced riches, business, and pleasures, have made it their one aim up to the very end
of life to know how to live; yet the greater number of them have departed from life confessing that they did not
yet know—still less do those others know. Believe me, it takes a great man and one who has risen far above
human weaknesses not to allow any of his time to be filched from him, and it follows that the life of such a man
is very long because he has devoted wholly to himself whatever time he has had. None of it lay neglected and
idle; none of it was under the control of another, for, guarding it most grudgingly, he found nothing that was
worthy to be taken in exchange for his time. And so that man had time enough, but those who have been robbed
of much of their life by the public, have necessarily had too little of it.
” Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a
yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs,
who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow. For what new pleasure is
there that any hour can now bring? They are all known, all have been enjoyed to the full. Mistress Fortune may
deal out the rest as she likes; his life has already found safety. Something may be added to it, but nothing taken
from it, and he will take any addition as the man who is satisfied and filled takes the food which he does not
desire and yet can hold. And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has
grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long—he has existed long. For what if you should think that that man
had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbour, and, swept hither and
thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same
course?
Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their
foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they
spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet
postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the
present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon
the morrow and wastes to-day
In a word, do you want to know how they do not “live long”? See how eager they are to live long! Decrepit old
men beg in their prayers for the addition of a few more years; they pretend that they are younger than they are;
they comfort themselves with a falsehood, and are as pleased to deceive themselves as if they deceived Fate at
the same time. But when at last some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, in what terror do they die,
feeling that they are being dragged out of life, and not merely leaving it. They cry out that they have been fools,
because they have not really lived, and that they will live henceforth in leisure if only they escape from this
illness; then at last they reflect how uselessly they have striven for things which they did not enjoy, and how all
their toil has gone for nothing.
Honours, monuments, all that ambition has commanded by decrees or reared in works of stone,
quickly sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not tear down and remove. But the works which
philosophy has consecrated cannot be harmed; no age will destroy them, no age reduce them; the following and
each succeeding age will but increase the reverence for them, since envy works upon what is close at hand, and
things that are far off we are more free to admire.
But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and
troubled; when they have reached the end of it, the poor wretches perceive too late that for such a long while
they have been busied in doing nothing. Nor because they sometimes invoke death, have you any reason to
think it any proof that they find life long. In their folly they are harassed by shifting emotions which rush them
into the very things they dread; they often pray for death because they fear it. And, too, you have no reason to
think that this is any proof that they are living a long time—the fact that the day often seems to them long, the
fact that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time set for dinner arrives; for, whenever their
distractions fail them, they are restless because they are left with nothing to do, and they do not know how to
dispose of their leisure or to drag out the time. And so they strive for something else to occupy them, and all the
intervening time is irksome; exactly as they do when a gladiatorial exhibition is been announced, or when they
are waiting for the appointed time of some other show or amusement, they want to skip over the days that lie
between. All postponement of something they hope for seems long to them. Yet the time which they enjoy is
short and swift, and it is made much shorter by their own fault; for they flee from one pleasure to another and
cannot remain fixed in one desire. Their days are not long to them, but hateful; yet, on the other hand, how
scanty seem the nights which they spend in the arms of a harlot or in wine! It is this also that accounts for the
madness of poets in fostering human frailties by the tales in which they represent that Jupiter under the
enticement of the pleasures of a lover doubled the length of the night. For what is it but to inflame our vices to inscribe the name of the gods as their sponsors, and to present the excused indulgence of divinity as an example
to our own weakness? Can the nights which they pay for so dearly fail to seem all too short to these men? They
lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
The very pleasures of such men are uneasy and disquieted by alarms of various sorts, a
Moreover, what is
doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; very wretched, therefore, and not merely short, must the life of
those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they
wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will
never more return. New distractions take the place of the old, hope leads to new hope, ambition to new
ambition. They do not seek an end of their wretchedness, but change the cause. Have we been tormented by our
own public honours? Those of others take more of our time.
We shall
always pray for leisure, but never enjoy it.
And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the
Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that
they may have one year reckoned by their name. Life has left some in the midst of their first struggles, before
they could climb up to the height of their ambition; some, when they have crawled up through a thousand
indignities to the crowning dignity, have been possessed by the unhappy thought that they have but toiled for an
inscription on a tomb; some who have come to extreme old age, while they adjusted it to new hopes as if it were
youth, have had it fail from sheer weakness in the midst of their great and shameless endeavours. Shameful is
he whose breath leaves him in the midst of a trial when, advanced in years and still courting the applause of an
ignorant circle, he is pleading for some litigant who is the veriest stranger; disgraceful is he who, exhausted
more quickly by his mode of living than by his labour, collapses in the very midst of his duties; disgraceful is he
who dies in the act of receiving payments on account, and draws a smile from his long delayed heir.
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