The House I Built Is Old
Everywhere I turn now I am shown my own age.1
I went out to my country place recently and complained about what was being spent on the tumbledown building. The bailiff insisted it was not neglect on his part — he was doing everything possible, but the house was old.
And that house grew up under my own hands. What is waiting for me, if stones my own age are already crumbling?
I was annoyed, so I took the first opening to vent it. These plane trees are obviously being neglected. No leaves. Look at the branches — gnarled and shrivelled. Look how rough the trunks are. This would not happen if someone loosened the soil and watered them. And the bailiff swore by my own household god that he was doing everything possible and never let up, but those trees were old.
Between you and me, I planted those trees. I saw them put out their first leaves.
Then I turned to the door and asked who the broken-down creature at the entrance was — well placed, I said, since he is clearly outward bound. Where did you get him? What pleasure is there in taking up somebody else's dead for burial?
And the man said: sir, don't you know me? I am Felicio. You used to bring me little toys. My father was Philositus the steward. I was your pet slave.
The man is completely mad, I said. Has my pet slave turned back into a little boy? Though I suppose it is possible. His teeth are dropping out.
Love the Late Part
Let us cherish old age and love it, because it is full of pleasure if a man knows how to use it.
Fruit is most welcome when it is nearly over. Youth is most charming at its close. The last drink is the one that delights the drinker — the one that souses him and finishes the job. Every pleasure keeps its greatest delights for the end.
Tip
Life is at its most agreeable on the way down, before the drop becomes sheer. And I believe that the stretch which stands, so to speak, on the very edge of the roof has pleasures of its own. Or else the simple fact of no longer wanting pleasures has taken the place of the pleasures. How comforting it is to have tired out your appetites and to be done with them.
I am past even this now. Some other word than old age applies to my years, or at any rate to my body — old age means weary, not crushed. Put me in the worn-out class, among men who are near the end.
But I thank myself, with you as my witness, that age has done nothing to my mind. I feel it in my constitution. Only my vices, and the equipment of my vices, have grown senile. My mind is strong, and it is glad to have so little left connecting it to the body. It has put down most of its load. It is alert. It argues with me about old age and insists that this is its flowering season.
Death Should Be in Front of Everybody
You will say it is a nuisance to be looking death in the face.
Death should be looked in the face by the young as well as the old. We are not summoned in order of seniority.
And nobody is so old that it would be improper of him to hope for one more day. One day, mind you, is a stage of the journey.
Look at how a life is built. It is a set of circles, one inside another. One circle takes in all the rest, from birth to the last day. Inside that, the circle of a man's prime. Inside that, the whole of childhood. Then, in a class of its own, the year, which contains every division of time we use. Then the month, in a narrower ring. And the smallest circle of all is the day — which still has a beginning and an end, its own sunrise and its own dark.
Heraclitus, who was called the Obscure because of how he wrote, said: one day is equal to every day. People have taken that in various ways. Some say days are equal in their hours, and that is true. But I think he meant this: the very longest stretch of time contains no element that cannot be found in a single day. Light and darkness. That is all there is, and eternity only repeats it.
Therefore run every day as though it closed the series. As though it rounded your existence off and completed it.
The Man Who Buried Himself Every Night
There was a man called Pacuvius who held Syria so long by simple occupancy that the province seemed to belong to him. Every evening he conducted a funeral sacrifice in his own honour — wine, the customary funeral feasting — and then had himself carried out of the dining room into his bedroom while eunuchs applauded and sang in Greek, he has lived his life, he has lived his life.
So Pacuvius carried himself out to burial every night.
He did it from a debased motive. Let us do exactly the same thing from a good one. Let us go to our sleep with gladness and say: I have lived. The course Fortune set for me is finished.
Important
And if God is pleased to add another day, take it with a glad heart. The man who is happiest, and most securely in possession of himself, is the one who can wait for tomorrow without apprehension. Once a man has said I have lived, every morning he wakes to is a bonus.
What Death Will Decide About You
Everything we have made a show of so far, in word or in deed, counts for nothing. All of it is a slight and deceitful pledge of the spirit, and much of it is charlatanism. I shall leave it to death to determine what progress I have made.
So I am making ready without any faintness of heart for the day when I put aside the stage machinery and the actor's paint, and judge myself — whether I have merely been declaiming brave sentiments, or whether I actually feel them; whether all my bold threats against Fortune were a pretense and a farce.
Put aside the opinion of the world, which wavers and always takes both sides. Put aside your lifetime of study. Your debates and your learned talk, the maxims you have gathered from wise men, your cultivated conversation — none of that proves anything about the strength of your soul. The most timid man alive can deliver a bold speech.
What you have really done will be visible only at the moment you draw your last breath.
I accept those terms. I do not shrink from the verdict. And though you are younger, that changes nothing: there is no fixed count of our years. You do not know where death is waiting for you, so be ready for it everywhere.
Think on Death, Which Means Think on Freedom
Epicurus again, and I make no apology for taking it from him — any truth I find becomes my own property. Think on death.
You may consider it a waste to learn a text you can use only once. That is exactly why we ought to keep at it. When you can never prove whether you have really learned a thing, you have to go on learning it.
And when he says think on death, he is telling us to think on freedom. A man who has learned to die has unlearned slavery. He is above every external power, or at the very least out of its reach. What terror do prisons and chains and bars hold for him? His way out is open.
There is one chain that binds us to life, and it is the love of life. You may not be able to cast it off. You can wear it thin — so that when the moment demands it, nothing holds you back from doing at once what you were always going to have to do.
But do not mistake me. I am not recommending haste. There is such a thing as an unreflecting rush towards death, and it seizes the noblest and most spirited men as readily as the abject ones: the first despise life, the second merely find it tedious. Epicurus scolds the men who crave death as much as those who flinch from it. It is absurd, he says, to run at death because you are tired of living, when it is your manner of living that made you run.
The brave and sensible man does not beat a hasty retreat from life. He makes a becoming exit. We need warning in both directions — not to love life too much, and not to hate it.
The Poem I Cannot Forgive
Set against all that, hear what Maecenas wrote. I am sorry to repeat it.
Fashion me with a palsied hand, weak of foot, and a cripple. Build on me a crook-backed hump. Shake my teeth till they rattle. All is well, if my life remains. Save it, I beg you — though I sit on the piercing cross.
He is praying for the most pitiable condition in the world, and then asking that it be extended. He is seeking a postponement of suffering as though he were asking for life. Maim me, he says, but leave the breath in this battered carcass. Nail me up, if you like, and set my seat upon the cross.
Is it worth pressing down on your own wound and hanging there, in order to put off the one thing that ends the punishment? And what does he buy with it? A longer dying. Men have made even filthier bargains than his — betraying friends to get more years, degrading their own children to keep the daylight.
We have to be rid of this craving. It makes no difference when your suffering comes, since come it will.
Important
The point is not how long you live. It is how well. And often enough, living well is precisely what stops a man living long.
What I Am Doing Now
Let us stop wanting what we used to want. I am doing this: in my old age I have stopped wanting what I wanted as a boy. My days and nights go to this single end — putting a stop to my chronic ills. I am trying to live each day as if it were a complete life.
I do not snatch at it as though it were my last. I do regard it as though it might be.
I am writing you this letter as if death were about to call me away in the middle of the sentence. I am ready to go, and I enjoy life precisely because I am not anxious about the date.
Before I was old I tried to live well. Now that I am old I shall try to die well — and dying well means dying gladly.
So see to it that you never do anything unwillingly. What is a necessity to the man who rebels is not a necessity to the man who wants it. A man who takes his orders gladly has escaped the bitterest part of slavery, which is doing what you do not want to do.
We must get ready for death before we get ready for life. Life is furnished well enough; we are simply greedy about the furniture, and something always seems to be missing, and always will.
Having lived long enough does not depend on your years or your days. It depends on your mind.
I have lived long enough, my dear Lucilius. I have had my fill. I am waiting.
Farewell.