Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing other than to prepare for death. This is because study and contemplation in no way remove our soul from us, and delude it apart from the body, which is some learning and likeness of death; or else it is because all the wisdom and discourse of the world ultimately comes down to this point, to teach us not to fear dying. Either reason mocks, or it should only aim at our contentment. And all its work should aim at making us live well and at our ease, as the Holy Scripture says. All the opinions in the world are based on the idea that pleasure is our goal, even if they take different means to achieve it; otherwise they would be cast out immediately: for who would listen to someone who would establish our pain and discontent as his goal? The dissensions of the philosophical sects, in this case, are verbal.
Let’s skip the most clever nonsense. (Seneca)
There is more opinionatedness and piquancy than is appropriate to such a wholesome profession. But whatever character the man takes on, he always plays his part among them. Whatever they may say, in the very virtue, the ultimate goal of our aim is sensual pleasure. I like to hammer it into their ears, for they are so reluctant to hear it. And if it means some supreme pleasure and excessive contentment, it is better due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance. This voluptuousness, to be more vigorous, energetic, robust, virile, is all the more seriously pleasurable. And we should give it that name, more favorable, sweeter and more natural: not that of vigor, by which we have called it. This other, lower pleasure, if it deserved this beautiful name, should be in competition with it, not by privilege.
I find it less pure of inconveniences and obstacles than virtue is. Besides the fact that its taste is more momentary, fluid and transitory, it has its vigils, its fasts and its labors and the sweat and blood; and moreover particularly its trenchant passions of so many kinds, and at its side a satiety so heavy that it is equivalent to penance. We are greatly mistaken in thinking that these inconveniences serve as a spur and a condiment to its sweetness, as in nature the contrary is vivified by its opposite, and in saying, when we come to virtue, that such successes and difficulties overwhelm it, making it austere and inaccessible, where, much more properly than to sensual pleasure, they ennoble, sharpen and enhance the divine and perfect pleasure it brings us. He who weighs up the cost against the reward, and recognizes neither its grace nor its use, is certainly unworthy of its acquaintance. Those who go about teaching us that its pursuit is difficult and laborious, its enjoyment pleasant, what are they telling us, if not that it is always unpleasant? For what human means ever led to its enjoyment? The most perfect have been content to aspire to it and to approach it without possessing it.
But they are mistaken: for of all the pleasures we know, the pursuit itself is pleasant. The undertaking feels the quality of the thing it looks at, for it is a good part of the effect and consubstantial. The joy and bliss that shines in virtue fills all its belongings and avenues, up to the first entrance and the final barrier. Now one of the principal benefits of virtue is the contempt of death, a means that fills our life with a gentle tranquility, gives us a pure and amiable taste for it, without which all other pleasure is extinguished. This is why all the rules meet and agree on this point. And, although they all lead us by mutual agreement to despise pain, poverty, and other accidents to which human life is subject, it is not with such care, both because these accidents are not so necessary (most men spend their lives without tasting poverty, and some even without feeling pain and illness, like Xenophilus the Musician, who lived a hundred and six years in perfect health), and also because, at worst, death can put an end to everything, whenever we please, and put an end to all other inconveniences. But as for death, it is inevitable,
We are all forced to the same thing, everyone’s urn is turned, sooner or later; Fate will awaken us and we will be doomed to eternal destruction will be imposed on the boat. (Horace)
And therefore, if it frightens us, it is a continual source of torment, and one that cannot be relieved in any way. There is no place from which it does not come to us; we can turn our heads incessantly here and there as if in a suspicious country:
which, like a rock, always hangs over Tantalus. (Cicero)
Our parliaments often send criminals to be executed in the place where the crime was committed: on the way, show them around some beautiful houses, treat them as kindly as you like,
Not Sicilian feasts will produce a sweet taste, Not the songs of birds and lyres will bring back sleep. (Horace)
Do you think they can enjoy it, and that the final intention of their journey, their being usually before their eyes, has not altered and dulled their taste for all these conveniences?
He hears the journey, and counts the days, and the distance of the roads; He measures life, and is tormented by the plague of the future. (Claudian)
The goal of our career is death, it is the necessary object of our aim: if it frightens us, how is it possible to go one step forward without fever? The remedy of the common man is not to think about it. But from where does such brutal stupidity and such gross blindness come? He must have the ass led by the tail,
Who himself traces his footsteps back with his own head. (Lucretius)
It is no wonder that he is so often caught in the trap. Our people are frightened by the mere mention of death, and most of them are afraid of it, as if it were the name of the devil. And because it is mentioned in wills, don’t expect them to put their hands on it until the doctor has given them the extreme sentence; and God knows then, between the pain and the fear, how well they will be able to judge it. Because this syllable struck their ears too harshly, and this voice seemed unfortunate to them, the Romans learned to soften or extend it in circumlocution. Instead of saying: he is dead; he has ceased to live, they say, he has lived. As long as it is life, or has passed, they console themselves. We borrowed it from our late Master Jehan. Perhaps, as they say, the term is worth the money. I was born between eleven and twelve o’clock on the last day of February in the year fifteen hundred and thirty-three, as we now reckon time, the year beginning in January.
It was just a fortnight ago that I turned 39, and I need at least as much time: however, to prevent myself from thinking of something so distant would be madness. But why, young and old alike leave life in the same condition. No one comes out of it any differently than if they were just entering it. Besides, there is no man so decrepit that he cannot see Methuselah before him and think he still has twenty years in him. What’s more, poor fool that you are, who has established the terms of your life for you? You rely on the doctors’ tales. Look instead to effect and experience. By the ordinary course of things, you are living a long time by extraordinary favor. You have passed the usual terms of life. And let it be so, count among your acquaintances how many have died before your age, more than there are who have reached it; and of those very ones who have ennobled their lives by renown, make a register, and I will bet that I will find more who have died before, than after thirty-five years. It is full of reason and piety to take the example of the humanity of Jesus Christ himself: yet he ended his life at the age of thirty-three. The greatest man, simply a man, Alexander, also died at this age. How many ways of dying are there?
What everyone avoids, a man is never sufficiently careful for hours. (Horace)
I will leave fevers and pleurisies aside. Who would have thought that a Duke of Brittany could be suffocated by the press, as was that one at the entrance of Pope Clement, my neighbor, in Lyon; Did you not see one of our kings killed while playing? And did not one of his ancestors die shocked by a pig? Aeschylus, threatened by the fall of a house, may stand on his guard, but there he was, stunned by a turtle’s beak, which had escaped the talons of an eagle in the air. The other died from a grape seed; an Emperor, from the scratch of a comb, while combing his hair; Aemilius Lepidus, for having trodden his foot against the threshold of his door; and Aufidius, for having bumped into the door of the council chamber on entering; and between women’s thighs, Cornelius Gallus, praetor, Tigillinus, captain of the watch in Rome, Ludovic, son of Guy de Gonsague, Marquis of Mantua, and, an even worse example, Speusippus, Platonic philosopher and one of our Popes. Poor Bebius, a judge, while he was giving a delay of an hour to a party, saw it seized, his own life having expired. And Caius Julius, a doctor, examining the eyes of a patient, saw death closing his own.
And if I must mix it up: a brother of mine, Captain Saint Martin, aged twenty-three, who had already given good proof of his valor, playing at palm, received a blow from a club that struck him just above the right ear, without any appearance of contusion or wound. He neither sat down nor rested, but five or six hours later he died of a stroke caused by this blow. With such frequent and ordinary examples before our eyes, how is it possible to get rid of the thought of death, and that at every moment it seems to be snapping at our heels? What does it matter, you may ask, how it is, as long as we don’t bother about it? I agree, and in any way we can protect ourselves from blows, even under the skin of a calf, I am not a man to shrink from it. For it is enough for me to pass at my ease; and the best game I can give myself, I take it, however inglorious and unexemplary you may want,
I would rather seem mad and inert, While my own evils delight me, or at least deceive me, than to be sane and wise. (Horace)
But it’s madness to think of getting there that way. They come and go, they trot, they dance, they are deathly silent. All this is beautiful. But also when it happens, either to them, or to their wives, children and friends, surprising them drunk and uncovered, what torments, what screams, what rage, and what despair overwhelms them? Have you never seen anything so degraded, so changed, so confused? We must wait for a better time: and this bestial nonchalance, when it could lodge in the head of a man of understanding, which I find entirely impossible, is too expensive for us. If it were an enemy that can be avoided, I would advise taking up the arms of cowardice. But since it cannot be done, since he will catch you fleeing and a coward as well as an honest man,
For he pursues the fleeting man, Nor does he spare the weak youth’s Knees, and timid back (Horace)
and no amount of armor will protect you,
Though he, wary of steel, may bury himself in the air, yet death will drag out his enclosed head from there. (Propertius)
Let us learn to support it firmly and to fight it. And to begin to deprive it of its greatest advantage against us, let us take a course contrary to the common one. Let us show it strangeness, let us practise it, let us accustom it. Let us have nothing so often in our minds as death. Let us constantly represent it in our imagination and in every face. At the rearing of a horse, the falling of a tile, the slightest sting of a nettle, let us suddenly repeat: Well, even if it means death? and on that note, let us steel ourselves and make an effort. Among the feasts and joy, let us always have this refrain of the remembrance of our condition, and let us not allow ourselves to be carried away so much by pleasure that we do not sometimes remember how many kinds our joy is subject to death, and how many traps it threatens. Thus did the Egyptians, who, in the midst of their feasts and among their best cheer, had the dry anatomy of a dead man’s body brought in to serve as a warning to the guests.
Believe that every day has dawned for you the last. A welcome hour will come, which will not be expected. (Horace)
It is uncertain where death awaits us, so we should expect it everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing wrong with life for he who has understood that the deprivation of life is not wrong. Paulus Aemilius replied to the miserable King of Macedonia, his prisoner, who sent him to ask him not to take him in his triumph: “He should address the request to himself.” In truth, in all things, if nature does not lend a little, it is difficult for art and industry to go much further. I am not melancholic myself, but broody. There is nothing from which I have ever taken more comfort than from thoughts of death: even in the most licentious season of my age,
When spring was a delightful time of flowering. (Catullus)
amidst the ladies and the games, such thoughts prevented me from digesting, except by myself some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, while I was talking to I know not whom, surprised the previous days by a hot fever and its end, at the start of such a festival, and my head full of idleness, love and good times, like me, and that much was whispered in my ear:
It has already been done, and it will never be permitted to revoke it afterwards. (Lucretius)
I did not frown at this thought either, nor at another. It is impossible that we do not feel stings from such imaginings on arrival. But by handling and re-examining them, on the whole, they are undoubtedly tamed. Otherwise I would be in constant fear and frenzy: for no man ever distrusted his life so much, no man ever made less of its duration. Neither my health, which until now has been very vigorous and rarely interrupted, lengthens my life expectancy, nor do illnesses shorten it. Every minute it seems to me that I am escaping. And I keep thinking: Everything that can be done another day can be done today. Truly, the hazards and dangers bring us little or nothing closer to our end; and if we think how many there are left, without this accident which seems to threaten us the most, of millions more on our heads, we will find that, cheerful and feverish, at sea and in our homes, in battle and at rest, it is equally close to us.
No one is more fragile than another: no one is more certain of himself for the morrow. (Seneca)
What I have to do before I die, to finish it at my leisure, seems short to me, even an hour. Someone, leafing through my tablets the other day, found a memorandum of something I wanted to be done after my death. I tell him, as it was true, that, being only a league from my house, and healthy and vigorous, I hastened to write it there, so as not to be sure of reaching home. As the one who continually broods over my thoughts and lays them down within me, I am prepared at any moment for whatever may befall me. And let the coming of death not forewarn me of anything new. One must always be ready and prepared to leave, as far as we are concerned, and above all beware of having to deal only with oneself:
Why do we shoot brave men at a short age? A fine? (Horace)
For we will have enough to do with that, without any other extra burden. One complains more than of death, which breaks the train of a beautiful victory; the other, that he must leave before having married his daughter, or taken control of the education of his children: one laments the company of his wife, the other of his son, as the main conveniences of his being. I am at this moment in such a state, God be thanked, that I can leave whenever he pleases, without regret for anything, if not for life, if its loss weighs on me. I am disentangling myself from everything; my farewells are half-taken from everyone, except from myself. Never did a man prepare to leave the world more purely and fully, and sprint from it more universally than I expect to do.
Miser, oh miser, they say, he took away everything, One day of infested me so many rewards of life. (Lucretius)
And the builder:
The works remain (he says) interrupted, and the threats of the huge walls. (Virgil)
Nothing should be designed that is so long-winded, or at least with the intention of becoming passionate about it in order to see it through to the end. We are born to act:
When I die, I will be halfway free and halfway between work. (Ovid)
I want us to act, and to prolong the offices of life as long as we can, and for death to find me planting my seedlings, but unconcerned about it, and even more unconcerned about my imperfect garden. I saw one of them die, who, being at the end of his tether, complained incessantly, because his destiny cut the thread of the story he had in hand, on the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings.
They do not add that to these things, nor does the desire for them sit upon you alone. (Lucretius)
We must rid ourselves of these vulgar and harmful moods. Just as we planted our cemeteries next to the churches, and in the busiest parts of the city, to accustom, said Lycurgus, the lower classes, women and children, not to be frightened by the sight of a dead man, and so that this continual spectacle of bones, tombs and funerary processions might remind us of our own condition:
Nay, it was also the custom of old to amuse men with slaughter, and to mix dire spectacles with feasts. A contest with swords, often falling upon them. Having sprinkled the cups, I do not spare the blood of the month. (Silius Italicus)
and as the Egyptians, after their feasts, had a large image of death presented to the spectators by one who cried out to them: Boy and rejoice, for in death you will be like this: so I have made it a habit to have death continually on my lips, not only in my imagination; and there is nothing I inquire about so willingly as the death of men: what words, what faces, what expressions they had at the moment of death; nor any part of the story that I note so attentively. It appears in the farcissure of my examples: and I have a particular affection for this subject. If I were a bookmaker, I would make a commented register of various deaths. Whoever teaches men to die, teaches them to live. Dicearchus made one with a similar title, but for a different and less useful purpose. One will tell me that the effect so far surpasses the imagination that there is no such fine fencing that is not lost, when it comes down to it. Let them say it: to plan it out undoubtedly gives a great advantage. And then is it nothing, to go at least that far without alteration and without fever? There is more: Nature itself lends us a hand, and gives us courage. If it is a short and violent death, we do not have time to fear it; if it is something else, I realize that as I become more involved in the illness, I naturally enter into some kind of struggle with life.
I find that I have much more trouble digesting this resolution to die when I am in good health than when I am feverish. Especially since I no longer cling so tightly to the comforts of life, since I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, I see death much less frighteningly in sight. This makes me hope that the further I move away from the former and approach the latter, the more easily I will come to terms with their exchange. Just as I have tried in several other instances what Cesar says, that things often seem bigger from a distance than up close, I have found that in health I had been much more disgusted by illnesses than when I felt them; the joy I am in, the pleasure and the strength make me perceive the other state as so disproportionate to this one, that by imagination I magnify these discomforts by half, and conceive them more burdensome than I find them when I have them on my shoulders. I hope that death will be like this for me. Let us see to these ordinary mutations and declensions that we suffer, as nature robs us of the taste of our loss and deterioration. What remains for an old man of the vigor of his youth, and of his past life,
Alas, what a portion of life remains for the elderly. (Maximianus)
Caesar to a soldier of his guard, recru and broken, who came to the street to ask him for permission to kill himself, looking at his decrepit posture, replied pleasantly: You therefore think to be alive. Who would suddenly fall into it, I do not believe that we would be capable of such a change. But, led by its hand, on a gentle slope and as if insensitive, little by little, step by step, it rolls us into this miserable state, and tames us to it: so that we feel no jolt when the youth dies in us, which is in essence and in truth a harder death than the complete death of a languishing life, and than the death of old age. All the more since the leap from ill-being to non-being is not so great as the leap from a sweet and flourishing being to a painful and distressing one. The body, bent and bowed, has less strength to bear a burden; so has our soul: it must be raised and uplifted against the efforts of this adversary. For, as it is impossible for it to rest while it fears him, if it is also assured of this, it can boast that it is something beyond the human condition, that it is impossible for anxiety, torment, fear, not the slightest displeasure to dwell in it,
Not the face of a tyrant insistent, Shakes the solid mind, nor the South; The leader of the restless, turbulent Adria, Nor the great hand of thundering Jupiter. (Horace)
She is made mistress of her passions and concupiscences, mistress of indigence, of shame, of poverty, and of all the other injuries of fortune. Let us gain this advantage that can: here is true and sovereign freedom, which gives us the means to defy force and injustice, and to mock at prisons and fetters:
In handcuffs and Fetters, I will hold you under a savage guard. God himself will release me as soon as I fly: I think, He feels this, I will die. Death is the final line of things. (Horace)
Our religion has no surer human foundation than contempt for life. Not only does reason call us to it, for why should we fear to lose something which, once lost, cannot be regretted; and, since we are threatened with so many kinds of death, is there not more harm in fearing them all than in enduring one? What does it matter when it comes, since it is inevitable? To him who said to Socrates: The thirty tyrants have condemned you to death. And nature has them, he replied. What folly is it to toil on the verge of passing to exemption from all pain! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so the death of all things will be our death. Therefore it is the same folly to cry over the fact that we will not live from now until a hundred years as it is to cry over the fact that we did not live a hundred years ago. Death is the origin of another life. Thus we wept; thus it cost us to enter this life; thus we stripped ourselves of our former self when we entered it. Nothing can be a cause for grief that is only once. Is this a reason to fear such a short time for such a long time! Long life and short life are made equal by death.
For long and short is nothing to things that are no more. Aristotle says that there are small animals on the river Hypanis that live only one day. The one that dies at eight in the morning dies in youth; the one that dies at five in the evening dies in decrepitude. Who among us does not laugh at seeing this moment of duration considered as a matter of luck or misfortune? The plus and minus in our life, if we compare it to eternity, or even to the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even some animals, is no less ridiculous. But nature forces us to do so. “Get out,” she says, “of this world, as you entered it.” The same passage that you made from death to life, without passion or fear, make it again from life to death. Your death is one of the pieces of the order of the universe. It is a piece of the life of the world,
Mortals live among themselves and as if they were runners they pass on the lamp of life. (Lucretius)
Don’t I change for you this beautiful contexture of things? It is the condition of your creation, it is a part of you that death: you escape from yourselves. This being of yours, which you enjoy, is also a part of death and life.
The first day of your birth leads you to die as to live,
The first, which gave life, seized the hour. (Seneca)
We die at birth, and the end depends on the origin. (Manilius)
Everything you experience, you take from life; it is at its expense. The continual work of your life is to build up death. You are in death while you are alive. For you are after death when you are no longer alive. Or if you like it better this way, you are dead after life; but during life you are dying, and death touches the dying much more roughly than the dead, and more keenly and essentially. If you have made the most of your life, you are fed up with it, go away satisfied,
Why don’t you leave as a guest full of life? (Lucretius)
If you have not known how to use it, if it was useless to you, what is the point of having lost it, what use is it to you now?
Why do you seek to add more? Again, that it perishes badly, and that the ungrateful one kills everything? (Lucretius)
Life is neither good nor bad in itself: it is the place of good and evil according to how you make it so. And if you have lived one day, you have seen everything. One day is the same as every other day. There is no other light, no other night. This Sun, this Moon, these Stars, this arrangement is the same one that your ancestors enjoyed, and which will entertain your great-grandchildren:
Fathers will not see another, nor will their grandchildren look upon another.(Manilius)
And, at worst, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are completed in one year. If you have paid attention to the movement of my four seasons, they encompass the childhood, adolescence, manhood and old age of the world. He played his game. He knows of no other cleverness than to start over. It will always be the same,
We are there, and we are still there. (Lucretius)
And the year rolls on in its tracks. (Virgil)
I am not minded to make you any other new pastimes:
For besides that, I will find that you are a machine, and that you will find that what pleases you, there is nothing, everything is always the same. (Lucretius)
Make way for others, as others have made way for you. Equality is the first part of fairness. Who can complain of being understood, when everyone is understood? No matter how well you live, you will not change anything in the time you have to be dead: it is useless: you will be in this state for as long as you fear, as if you had died in the cradle,
Although, as you wish, you may conquer the ages by living, Eternal death will nevertheless remain. (Lucretius)
And furthermore, I shall put you in such a condition as will give you no cause for complaint:
In truth, you do not know that there will be no one else in death, Who can mourn for you while you are alive, And still lying there. (Lucretius)
Nor will you wish for the life you now lament so much:
For no one demands both himself and his life for himself, nor does any desire for ourselves affect us. (Lucretius)
Death is to be feared less than nothing, if there is anything less than nothing:
Much less should we think death to be for us; If it can be less than what we see to be nothing. (Lucretius)
It concerns you neither dead nor alive: alive, because you are: dead, because you are no longer. No one dies before their time. What time you have left was no more yours than what happened before you were born: and it does not affect you either,
For look how nothing has happened to us before the antiquity of eternal time.(Lucretius)
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The usefulness of living is not in space, it is in use: he who has lived a short time has lived a long time: wait there while you are there. It depends on your will, not on the number of years, whether you have lived enough. Did you ever think you would get to where you were going? Yet there is no path without its outcome. And if company can ease your burden, does the world not move at the same pace as you?
All things will follow you when your life is over. (Lucretius)
Does not everything shake with your shake? Is there anything that does not grow old with you? A thousand men, a thousand animals and a thousand other creatures die at this very moment that you die:
For no night has followed day, nor dawn followed night, Which has not heard the cries of the sick mixed with the cries of the mourners, the companions of death and the dark funerals. (Lucretius)
What good will it do you to turn back if you cannot go back. You have seen enough of those who have been happy to die, thereby escaping great misery. But have you seen anyone who has been unhappy about it? Is it very simple to condemn something that you have not experienced, either by yourself or by others? Why do you complain about me and fate? Are we doing you wrong? Is it for you to govern us, or us for you? Even if your age is not completed, your life is. A small man is a whole man, like a big one. Neither men nor their lives can be measured by the yardstick.
Chiron refused immortality, having been informed of the conditions of it by the very God of time and duration, Saturn, his father. Imagine how long a life would be, less bearable and more painful for man than the life I gave him. If you did not have death, you would curse me endlessly for having deprived you of it. I have deliberately mixed in a little bitterness to prevent you, seeing the convenience of its use, from embracing it too greedily and indiscreetly. To keep you in this moderation, neither to flee life nor to shun death, which I ask of you, I have tempered both between sweetness and sourness.
I learned from Thales, the first of your wise men, that living and dying were of no consequence. Whereupon, to the man who asked him why he did not die, he replied very wisely: “Because it is of no consequence. Water, earth, air, fire and other parts of this building of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It confers on your death no more than any other.” The last step does not make weariness: it declares it. All days go to death, the last one arrives there. This is the good advice of our mother nature.
Now I have often thought about where this came from, that in wars the face of death, whether we see it in ourselves or in others, seems to us incomparably less frightening than in our homes, otherwise it would be an army of doctors and mourners; and, since there is always one, there is nevertheless much more reassurance among the people of the village and of lowly condition than among others.
I truly believe that it is these dreadful faces and apparatuses, which surround it, that frighten us more than the disease itself: a whole new way of life, the cries of mothers, women and children, the visitation of astonished and transfixed people, the assistance of a number of shocked and tearful servants, a room without daylight, lighted candles, our bedside surrounded by doctors and priests. In short, all horror and all fear around us. We are already buried. Children are afraid of their friends even when they see them wearing masks, and so are we. We must remove the mask from both things and people: let it be as it may, we will only find beneath it the same death that a valet or a simple chambermaid would have passed through recently without fear. Happy is the death that takes away the leisure of the preparations for such a funeral procession.