The Good Book (22 page)

  9. Just as the farm was serene and mature, with full-grown trees and the patina of use and familiarity making it mellow, so a human being reaches a point of beauty when time has done its work.

10. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the quiet conversation after dinner, when the candles burn low, is best.

11. Each pleasure reserves to the end its best things. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.  

12. And I myself believe that even the period which stands, so to speak, on the edge of the roof, possesses pleasures of its own.  

13. Or else the very fact of our not wanting pleasures has taken the place of the pleasures themselves. How comforting it is to have tired out one’s appetites, and to have done with them!

14. ‘But,’ you say, ‘it is a nuisance to be looking death in the face!’ Death, however, should be looked in the face by young and old alike. We are not summoned according to our birth dates.

15. Moreover, no one is so old that it would be improper for him to hope for another day of existence. And one day, mind you, is a stage on life’s journey.

16. Our span of life is divided into parts; it consists of large circles enclosing smaller. One circle embraces and bounds the rest; it reaches from birth to the last day of existence.  

17. The next circle limits the period of our young manhood. The third confines all of childhood in its circumference.  

18. Again, there is, in a class by itself, the year; it contains within itself all the divisions of time by multiplying which we get the total of life.  

19. The month is bounded by a narrower ring. The smallest circle of all is the day; but even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.  

20. One day is equal to every day: hence, every day ought to be regarded as if it closed the series, as if it rounded out and completed our existence.

21. But if we add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.

22. Those people are happiest, and most secure in their possession of themselves, who can await the morrow without apprehension.

23. When a person has said: ‘I have lived!’ every morning he arises he receives a bonus. It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint,

24. Least of all the one that fills him with apprehension about whether this day or the next will be his last. Welcome all equally.

25. All truths are our own property; what any wise individual has said becomes the property of all the wise.

Chapter 15

  1. How shall we live when we have lived long, and the years have come to weigh on our heads, and bowed our bodies to the necessities of age and the passing of our prime?

  2. I know how well ordered and equable your mind is, my friend, and how rich in culture and good sense.

  3. And yet I have an idea that you are at times stirred to the heart by the same circumstances as myself.

  4. I have resolved therefore to ask your opinion of some thoughts about the burden of advancing age, common to us both.

  5. I am fully aware that you will support old age, as you do everything else, with philosophic calm.

  6. So no sooner had I resolved to meditate on the common destiny of all to whom the years gather,

  7. But you at once occurred to me as the person best endowed to comment on my thoughts, and help me improve them.  

  8. To myself, indeed, thinking of this matter has been so helpful, that it has not only wiped away all the disagreeableness of old age, which I now experience in full, but has even made it luxurious and delightful too.  

  9. Never, therefore, can philosophy be praised as highly as it deserves, considering that its faithful disciple is able to spend every period of life with fortitude and profit, by attending to its lessons and applying them.

10. People who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome.  

11. But those who look for happiness from within can never think anything bad which nature makes inevitable.  

12. In that category before anything else comes old age, which all wish to attain, and which all grumble about when attained. Such is folly’s inconsistency and unreasonableness!  

13. They say that age is stealing upon them faster than they expected. In the first place, who compelled them to cling to an illusion?

14. For in what respect did old age steal upon manhood faster than manhood stole upon childhood?

15. In what way would old age have been less disagreeable to them if they were in their eight-hundredth year than in their eightieth?  

16. All wisdom begins in first following nature, the best of guides.

17. If nature has written the narrative of our lives like a play, she will not be least careless about the last act as if she were an idle poet.  

18. For the last act is inevitable, just as to the berries of a tree and the fruits of the earth there comes in the fullness of time a period of ripeness and eventual fall.  

19. A wise man will not make a grievance of this. To rebel against nature is folly, but to follow her course brings all the benefits of doing what is wise.

Chapter 16

  1. It is typical of some to complain, when they have grown old, that they have lost the pleasures of the senses, without which they do not regard life as life at all;

  2. And, secondly, that they are neglected by those from whom they were used to receive attentions.

  3. Such men lay the blame on the wrong thing. For if these things had been the fault of old age, then these same misfortunes would have been felt by all others of advanced years.  

  4. Yet many have never said a word of complaint against old age; for they were only too glad to be freed from the bondage of passion, and were not at all disregarded by their friends.

  5. The fact is that blame for complaints of that kind is to be charged to character, not to a particular time of life.

  6. For the old who are reasonable and neither cross-grained nor churlish find age tolerable enough: whereas unreason and churlishness cause uneasiness at every time of life.

  7. Some might reply to this that it is wealth and high position that make old age tolerable: whereas such good fortune only falls to few. There is something in this, but by no means all.

  8. For the philosopher himself could not find old age easy to bear in the depths of poverty, nor the fool feel it anything but a burden though he were a millionaire.  

  9. You may be sure that the weapons best adapted to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues.  

10. For if they have been maintained at every period – if one has lived much as well as long – the harvest they produce is wonderful,

11. Not only because they never fail us even in our last days, though that in itself is supremely important,

12. But also because the consciousness of a well-spent life and the recollection of many virtuous actions are exceedingly delightful.

13. There is a quiet, pure and cultivated life which produces a calm and gentle old age, such as we have been told Plato’s was, who died at his writing desk in his eighty-first year;

14. Or like that of Isocrates, who says that he wrote the book called
The Panegyric
in his ninety-fourth year, and who lived for five years afterwards;

15. While his master Gorgias of Leontini lived a hundred and seven years without ever relaxing his diligence or giving up work.

16. When someone asked Gorgias why he consented to remain alive so long, he replied, ‘I have no fault to find with old age.’

17. That was a noble answer, and worthy of a scholar. But fools impute their own frailties and guilt to old age, instead of to themselves.

Chapter 17

  1. There are four reasons for old age being thought unhappy: first, that it withdraws us from active employments;

  2. Second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures;

  3. Fourth, that it is the next step to death. Let us examine each separately.

  4. From which active employments does age withdraw us? Do you mean from those carried on by youth and bodily strength?  

  5. Are there then no old men’s employments to be conducted by the intellect, even when bodies are weak?

  6. The great affairs of life are not performed by physical strength, or activity, or nimbleness of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion.

  7. Of these old age is not only not deprived, but, as a rule, has them in a greater degree.

  8. Those who say that old age takes no part in public business are like men who would say that a steersman does nothing in sailing a ship,

  9. Because, while some of the crew are climbing the masts, others hurrying along the gangways, others pumping out the bilge water, he sits quietly   in the stern holding the tiller.  

10. He does not do what young men do; nevertheless he does what is much more important and better.  

11. For rashness is the note of youth, prudence of old age.

Chapter 18

  1. But it is said that memory dwindles. For some it does, but we can seek to retain it by practice and use.

  2. Old men might retain their intellects well enough, if they will keep their minds active and employed.

  3. Nor is that the case only with men of high position and great office; it applies equally to private life and peaceful pursuits.

  4. Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age; and being believed to neglect the care of his property owing to his devotion to his art,

  5. His sons brought him into court to get a judicial decision depriving him of the management of his estate on the ground of weak intellect.

  6. Thereupon the old poet is said to have read to the judges the play he had just composed – the
Oedipus at Colonnus
– and was acquitted by the jury.  

  7. Did old age then compel this man to become silent in his particular art, or Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, or Isocrates and Gorgias whom I mentioned before,

  8. Or the founders of schools of philosophy, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Xenocrates, or later Zeno and Cleanthus, or Diogenes the Stoic?

  9. Is it not rather the case with all these that the active pursuit of study only ended with life?

10. Nor need one regret the loss of youth’s bodily strength, any more than, when young, we regretted not having the strength of a bull or elephant.

11. We must use what we have, and whatever we may chance to be doing, do it with all our might.  

12. What could be weaker than Milo of Croton’s exclamation? When in his old age this famous wrestler was watching some athletes practising,

13. And he is said to have looked at his arms and to have exclaimed with tears in his eyes: ‘Ah well! these are now as good as dead.’

14. To this one might say: ‘Yes, in your case, Milo, for at no time were you made famous by your mind or real self, but by your chest and biceps alone.’

15. Shall we not allow old age the strength to teach the young, to train and equip them for all the duties of life? And what can be a nobler employment?

16. Nor should we think any teachers of the fine arts otherwise than happy, however much their bodily forces may have decayed and failed.  

17. And yet that same failure of the bodily forces is more often brought about by the vices of youth than of old age;

18. For a dissolute and intemperate youth bequeaths a body to old age in a worn-out state.

19. Xenophon’s Cyrus, for instance, in the discourse he delivered on his death-bed at a very advanced age,

20. Says that he never perceived his old age to have become weaker than his youth had been.  

Chapter 19

  1. To reminisce and speak of himself is often an old man’s way, but it is generally allowed at that time of life.  

  2. We see in Homer how frequently old Nestor talked of his own good qualities. He was living through a third generation;

  3. Nor had he any reason to fear that upon saying what was true about himself he should appear either over-vain or talkative.

  4. For, as Homer says, ‘From his lips flowed discourse sweeter than honey,’ for which sweet breath he wanted no bodily strength.

  5. And yet, after all, the famous leader of the Greeks nowhere wishes to have ten men like that giant of strength Ajax, but rather like Nestor:

  6. If he could get one Nestor, he feels no doubt of Troy shortly falling.

  7. Would one not rather be an old man a somewhat shorter time than an old man before one’s time?

  8. Accordingly, let there be only a proper husbanding of strength, and let each man proportion his efforts to his powers.