Essays. Michel de Montaigne
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Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes
Aspicient.
[Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.
—Manilius, i. 529.]
“And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing:
Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.
[We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.
—Lucretius, iii. 1093.]
Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.
[The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.
—Virgil, Georgics, ii. 402.]
“I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:
Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque
Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper’
[I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: it is the same thing over and over again.
—Lucretius iii. 957]
“Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; it is all to no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much fear, as if you had died at nurse:
Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,
Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.
[Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will remain eternal.
—Lucretius, iii. 1103]
“And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason to be displeased.
In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,
Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,
Stansque jacentem.
[Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to lament you dead, standing on your grave.
—Idem., ibid., 898.]
“Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:
‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.
Nec desiderium nostril nos afficit ullum.
“Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing.
Multo … mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,
Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.
“Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you.
Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas
Temporis aeterni fuerit.
[Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.
– Lucretius iii. 985]
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?
Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.
[All things, then, life over, must follow thee.
—Lucretius, iii. 981.]
“Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die:
Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,
Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris
Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.
[No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of death and funerals.
—Lucretius, v. 579.]
“To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no possibility to evade it? You have seen examples enough of those who have been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must, therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why do you complain of me and of destiny? Do we do you any wrong? Is it for you to govern us, or for us to govern you? Though, peradventure, thy age may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell. Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have tempered the one and the other between pleasure and pain. It was I that taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, “Why then he did not die?” “Because,” said he, “it is indifferent.” [Diogenes Laertius, i. 35.] Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why do you fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution, than everyone of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.” These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches.
I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others, should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines;