The Complete Essays (178 page)

[C] I rarely read in my history books about the disorders in other States without regretting that I could not have been there to study them more closely: so, too, my desire for knowledge leads me to find at least some satisfaction in being able to see with my own eyes this remarkable spectacle of the death of our institutions, the manner of it and its symptoms. Since I cannot retard it, I am happy to be destined to be present and to learn from it. After all, we make great efforts so that we can eagerly witness performances of fictional portrayings of the tragedies of human fortune; it is not that we lack sympathy for what we hear there but that we
delight in awakening our grief by the exceptional nature of those pitiable events. Nothing thrills without hurting. Good historians avoid telling of calm events – still waters and dead seas – in order to sail again into wars and seditions, to which (as they know) we summon them.

I doubt whether I can properly admit how little it has cost me in terms of my life’s repose and tranquillity to have passed more than a half of my days during the collapse of my country. Faced with misfortunes which do not concern me directly, I buy my resignation a little too cheaply; as for lamenting on my own behalf, I have regard not so much for what has been taken from me but for what still remains to me, both within and without. There is some consolation in dodging, one after another, the successive evils which have us in their sights, only to strike elsewhere around us. Moreover, where public misfortunes are concerned, the more my compassion is spread overall the weaker it becomes. To which add that it is certainly more or less true that
‘tantum ex publicis malis sentimus, quantum ad privatas res pertinet’
[from public ills we feel only as much as touches us directly],
³⁸
and that our original health was such as to diminish any sorrow we ought to have felt for its loss. It was indeed ‘health’, but only by comparison with the malady which followed it. We did not have far to fall; least tolerable of all, it seems to me, are honoured corruption and institutionalized brigandry: there is less wrong in stealing from us in a forest than in a place of safety. The ‘health’ of our State concerned a body entirely composed of organs each rivalling one another in corruption, and (for the most part) of aged sores, no longer being cured nor wanting to be cured.

[B] This shaking of the foundations stimulated me rather than flattened me, thanks to my sense of right and wrong which acted not merely peaceably but proudly, and I found nothing to reproach myself with. And since God never sends us pure evils any more than pure blessings, my own health held out better than usual throughout this period: and just as without health I can achieve nothing, with health there are few things which I cannot achieve. It provided me with the means of quickening my store of wisdom and of stretching forth my hand to parry blows which would readily have wounded more deeply. And in bearing my afflictions I found some means of withstanding Fortune and found that it would take some great shock to throw me from the saddle. (I do not say that to provoke her into making a more vigorous attack on me! I am her ‘most obedient servant’: my hands are raised in supplication: let her be satisfied, for God’s sake!)

Do I feel her assaults? Of course I do. As
³⁹
those who are overwhelmed and obsessed by grief yet allow some pleasure to fondle them from time to time and to release a smile, so too I have enough hold over myself to make my usual state a peaceful one, free from the burden of painful reflections; yet I can allow myself occasionally to be surprised by those biting and unpleasant thoughts which, while I am arming myself to drive them off or struggle against them, come along and batter me.

Following hard upon the others a worse calamity befell me: the plague, of unique virulence, raged both inside my home and around it; for, just as healthy bodies fall prey only to the most serious of illnesses, which alone can get a hold on them, similarly the air around my estates (which in human memory had never given a foothold to contagion, even when it came very close) once it was corrupted produced strange effects
⁴⁰
indeed:

Mista senum et juvenum densantur funera, nullum
Sœva caput Proserpina fugit
.

[Young and old come in crowds to be buried: cruel Proserpine spares no one’s head.]

I had to put up with a fine state of affairs: the very sight of my house was terrifying. Everything inside lay unprotected, left to anyone who wanted it. I, who am so hospitable myself, had to go in painful quest of a refuge for my family – a family of castaways, a source of fear to those who loved us and to itself, and of terror wherever it sought to settle, having to change quarters as soon as one of us got a slightly sore finger. All illnesses are then taken to be the plague: no time is allowed to probe them. And (best of all!) according to the rules of the Art, every time you are exposed to risk, you spend your quarantine in an ecstatic dread of that illness; your imagination meanwhile has its own way of agitating you, making your very health sweat with fever.

All of which would have touched me far less if I did not have to worry about others, spending six wretched months acting as guide for that caravan: for I myself bear within me my own prophylactics, namely determination and long-suffering. I am not much bothered by dread (which is particularly to be feared in this illness): and so, if I alone had sought to make an escape, it would have been a merrier and more distant one. It is not, I think, the worst of deaths: it is normally short, marked by numbness and lack of pain, comforted by being shared by many, without ritual and without a crowd of mourners.

As for those who dwelt around us, not one in a hundred escaped:

videos desertaque regna
Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes
.

[you may see the abandoned realms of the shepherds and, far and wide, the deserted pastures.]
⁴¹

Down here my income is mainly from farm-labour; now, the land which once had a hundred men on it working for me has long lain fallow. At that time what exemplary resignation did we see among all those simple folk. In general each one gave up worrying about his life. The grapes, the principal produce of the region, remained hanging on the vines, since everybody without exception was ready, awaiting death that night or next morning with voices and faces so little terrified that it seemed they had all made a pact with that unavoidable evil, and that the sentence upon them was universal and inevitable. That sentence always is! Yet our resolution in death hangs on so little: its being delayed by a few hours, or the mere factor of our having companions, make us [C] conceive of death [B] differently.
⁴²
But just look at these folk: they are no longer amazed that, babes, children and old men, they are all to die the same month: they no longer weep for themselves. I saw some who were afraid that they would be left behind as in some ghastly wilderness; the only worry that I know they had concerned their burial: it disturbed them to see corpses scattered over the fields at the mercy of the beasts, which at once started to thrive there. [C] (How incompatible human notions are! The Neorites, a people subjugated by Alexander, abandon the bodies of their dead deep in their forests, there to be eaten – for them it is the only blessed form of sepulture.)
⁴³
[B] One man, in good health, was already digging his grave: others would lie down in theirs while there was still life in them. And one of my day-labourers pulled the earth over himself as he lay dying, using his hands and feet. Was he not donning his own shroud so as to lay himself more comfortably at rest – [C] a deed in some ways as sublime as that of those Roman soldiers who, after the Battle of Cannae, were discovered to have dug holes in the ground, thrust in their heads, drawn in the soil and suffocated themselves?
⁴⁴

[B] In short, an entire people, at a stroke and pragmatically, were brought to a state which yielded nothing in firmness of purpose to any studied philosophical steadfastness. Most of the teachings which schooling supplies us with to give us courage have more ostentation than fortitude, and are cultivated more for decoration than for profit. We have abandoned Nature and want to teach her own lessons to her who used to guide us so happily and surely. And yet such traces of her teachings and whatever little of her image remain by favour of ignorance stamped on the life of that crowd of uncultured country-folk, Erudition is compelled to go and beg from them, day in, day out, in order to supply patterns of constancy, simplicity and tranquillity for its own pupils. Fine it is to see the latter, full as they are of fair learning, having to imitate that untutored simplicity – imitating it moreover in the most basic acts of virtue; fine too that our wisdom must learn from the very beasts the lessons most useful for the greatest and most necessary aspects of our life: how we should live and die, manage our goods, love and educate our offspring and maintain justice. That is a singular witness that humanity is sick and that our reason (which we mould as we will, ever finding some novelty or some different approach) leaves behind in us no manifest trace of Nature. Men have done to Nature what makers of perfume have done to their essential oil: they have adulterated her with so many arguments and extraneous reasonings that she has become varied, different for each man,
⁴⁵
having lost her own unchanging universal visage and so making us seek her testimony from the beasts, which are not subject to bias, corruption or diversity of opinion. For while it is indeed true that even they do not always exactly follow the path of Nature, yet they stray so little from it that you can always see Nature’s rut. It is as with horses: when you lead them along they jump about, making little rebellions which extend no further than their leading-reins, meanwhile always following the steps of the man who is guiding them; and like the hawk which takes to flight, but always under the control of its string.

[C]
‘Exilia, tormenta, bella, morbos, naufragia meditate, ut nullo sis mala tiro.’
[Practise banishments, torments, wars, diseases and shipwrecks, so that you may not be a tyro in any misfortune.]
⁴⁶
– [B] What is the use of
that curious desire to anticipate all the ills that can befall human nature and to prepare ourselves even against those which may perhaps never touch us? [C]
‘Parent passis tristiam facit, pati posse’
[The possibility of suffering makes one as sad as actual suffering]:
⁴⁷
we are hit not only by the bullet but by its bang and its wind! [B] Or why, like the most fevered minds (for fever it is) do we ask to be whipped right now, just because it may be that Fortune will, perhaps, make you suffer a whipping some day? [C] Or why do you not don your fur coat on Midsummer’s Day, because you will need it at Christmas!

[B] ‘Cast yourself into experiencing such ills as
may
befall you, [C] especially [B] the more extreme ones:
⁴⁸
test yourself against them,’ men say, ‘make absolutely certain.’

On the contrary; it would be more easy and more natural to free your very thoughts of such a burden. They will not come quick enough! Their true essence does not last long enough for us! And so, as though they did not weigh sufficiently upon our senses, our minds must go and extend them and prolong them, incorporating them within us beforehand. [C] ‘They will weigh on us enough once they are there,’ said one of the leaders, not of the tenderest school but the toughest. ‘Meanwhile decide in your own favour: believe what suits you best. What use is it to you to go welcoming and anticipating your ill fortune, losing the present because of fear of the future, and being miserable now because you must be so eventually?’
⁴⁹
Those are his very words.

[B] ‘Learning certainly does us a good service by instructing us very precisely about the dimensions of all evils’:

Curis acuens mortalia corda
.
[Sharpening with cares the minds of men.]
⁵⁰

What a pity if a little of their size should escape our sensations and our knowledge! It is certain that most preparations for death have caused more torment than undergoing it. [C] It was said in former times, most freely, by a most judicious author,
‘minus afficit sensus fatigatio quam cogitatio.’
[Our senses are less affected by hardships than by hard thinking.]
⁵¹

The feeling that death is present is, of itself, sometimes enough to stir us to a quick resolve no longer to seek to avoid the inevitable. Several gladiators in former times were seen, after putting up a cowardly fight, to accept death most courageously, offering their throats to their opponents’ swords and welcoming them; but contemplating a future death requires a more leisurely steadfastness, one more difficult therefore to supply.
⁵²

[B] If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do this job for you most punctiliously: do not worry about it:

Incertain frustra, mortales, funeris horam
Quœrtis, et qua sit mors aditura via
.

[In vain, O mortals, do you strive to know the uncertain hour of your death and by which road it will come.]
⁵³