The Complete Essays (179 page)

Pœna minor certam subito perferre ruinant,
Quod timeas gravius sustinuisse diu
.

[It is less painful to have to undergo sudden and sure destruction than long to anticipate what you fear the most.]

We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. [C] One torments us: the other terrifies us. [B] We are not preparing ourselves to die: that is too momentary a matter. [C] A quarter of an hour of pain, without after-effects, without annoyance, has no need of precepts of its own. [B] To speak truly, we prepare ourselves against our preparations for death! Philosophy first commands us to have death ever before our eyes, to anticipate it and to consider it beforehand, and then she gives us rules and caveats in order to forestall our being hurt by our reflections and our foresight! Thus do doctors tip us into illnesses in order that they may have the means of employing their drugs and their Art.

[C] If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way. They may bluster as much as they like, saying that
‘tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est’
[the entire life of philosophers is a
preparation for death];
⁵⁴
but my opinion is that death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its End: it puts an end to it; it is its ultimate point; but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself. Numbered among its other duties included under the general and principal heading,
How to live
, there is the sub-section,
How to die
. If our fears did not lend it weight, dying would be one of our lighter duties.

[B] Judging from their usefulness and naïve truth, the teachings of Simple-mindedness are not much inferior to those contrary ones which are lectured upon by Erudition. Men differ in tastes and fortitude: they must each be brought, by differing routes, to what is good for them, each according to his nature:

[C]
Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes
.
[Wherever the storm may drive me, there I land and find a welcome.]
⁵⁵

[B] I have never known even one of my neighbouring peasants embark upon thoughts about what countenance and steadfastness he will show in his final hour. Nature teaches him never to reflect on death except when he lies a–dying. Then he does it with better grace than Aristotle, who is doubly oppressed by death: by death itself and by his long [C] anticipation. [B] That is why Caesar opined that the happiest and least burdensome of deaths was the one least [C] thought about.
⁵⁶
‘Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet qu am necesse est.’
[He who suffers before he needs to, suffers more than he needs to.]

The painfulness of such thoughts is born of our excessive interest. We
are always getting in our own way, wishing to forestall and overmaster Nature’s prescriptions. Only dons ought to die more badly when they are well, glowering at the thought of death. Common folk need no remedy nor consolation save when the blow falls; and then they reflect on it all the more justly since they are feeling it. [B] We assert (do we not) that what gives the common folk their power to endure [C] present ills, [B] as well as their profound indifference towards inauspicious future events, is their insensitivity and [C] lack of [B] understanding
⁵⁷
[C] and the fact that their souls, being crass and obtuse, are less open to penetration and disturbance. [B] If that is so, then for God’s sake let us adhere, from now on, to that School of animal stupidity! It leads its pupils to the ultimate profit promised by the sciences; and does it gently. We shall not lack good professors to interpret that natural simplicity. Socrates for one. For, as far as I can recall, he says more or less the following to the judges who were deliberating about his life:

Gentlemen: I am afraid that if I were to beseech you not to put me to death I should impale myself on the denunciation of my accusers: namely that I claim to know more than everyone else, because I have some more [C] secret [B] knowledge
⁵⁸
of things above us and of things below. I know that I have neither frequented death nor reconnoitred it; nor do I know anyone who, having assayed what it is like, can teach me about it. Those who fear death presuppose that they know it. As for me, I know neither what death is nor what the world to come is like. Death may be something indifferent or something desirable. [C] (We may believe, however, that it is a migration, a crossing from one place to another, and that there is some improvement in going to live among so many great men who have crossed that divide – and to be free from having to deal with wicked and corrupt judges! If death be a reduction of our being to nothingness, it is still an improvement to enter upon a long and peaceful night. We know of nothing in life sweeter than quiet rest and deep dreamless sleep.) [B] That which I know to be wicked, such as harming one’s neighbour and disobeying a superior, be it God
or man, I scrupulously avoid. I cannot go in fear of things when I do not know whether they be good or evil.
⁵⁹

[C] If I go off to my death and leave you here alive, the gods alone know whether you or I will have the better of it. So, as far as it concerns me, you will please give such a sentence as suits yourselves. But following my way of giving just and useful counsel, I do say that, unless you can see more deeply into my case than I can, you would do better for your consciences’ sake to set me free; and also that, having made your judgement in keeping with my past deeds (both public and private), and also in keeping with my intentions and in keeping with the profit which so many of our citizens, both young and old, daily derive from my conversation and the advantages I bring to you, to all of you: you cannot properly release yourselves of your debt towards my merit except by issuing an order that I be maintained in the Prytaneum – at public expense, given my poverty – something which I have often seen you grant, with less reason, to others.

Do not take it as stubbornness or contempt if I do not follow precedent and become a suppliant moving you to pity.

Being no more than anyone else ‘engendered by sticks and stones’, as Homer puts it, I have friends and relations well able to appear before you in tears and grief; and I have three weeping children who can move you to pity. But I would bring shame on our city if, at my age, and having that reputation for wisdom (with which I am now charged) I were to sink to such cowardly behaviour. What would people say about the other Athenians! I have always counselled those who listened to me never to ransom their life by a dishonourable deed. And in my country’s wars, at Amphipolis, at Potidaea, at Delium, as well in others in which I played a part, I showed in practice how far I was from ensuring my safety by my shame.

Moreover I would be compromising your sense of duty and soliciting you to do something ugly: it is not for any supplications of mine to persuade you, but for pure and solid reasons of justice to do so. You have sworn to the gods to bear yourselves thus: it would seem that I were wishing to bring a counter-indictment, suspecting
you
of not believing that there are any gods! And I too would bear witness against myself, showing that I did not believe in them as I ought to, either, since I distrusted their governance and did not entrust my case entirely to their hands. I have complete trust in them, convinced as I am that they will act in this matter as will be best for me and for you.

Good men, whether living or dead, have nothing to fear from the gods.
⁶⁰

[B] As a plea is that not [C] crisp and sensible, yet naïve and lowly,
⁶¹
[B] unimaginably sublime, [C] true, frank and incomparably right [B] – and made in such an hour of need! [C] It was reasonable indeed of Socrates to prefer it to the one which the great orator Lysias had written out for him, excellently couched in lawyers’ language but unworthy of so noble an accused.
⁶²
Should one ever hear a word of supplication from the lips of Socrates! Should such proud virtue strike sail precisely when it was being most vigorously displayed! Should his nature, noble and puissant, have entrusted his defence to art, and when it was being most highly assayed have renounced truth and simplicity, which were the ornaments of his speech, in order to bedizen itself with the cosmetic figures and fictions of a prepared address?

He acted most wisely and in keeping with himself by not corrupting the tenor of an incorruptible life, or so august a concept of the form of humankind, in order to prolong his old age by a year and so betray the immortal memory of that glorious end.

His duty in life was not to himself but to be an example to the world: would it not have been a public catastrophe if he had ended his life in some idle obscure manner?

[B] Indeed such a detached and quiet way of rating his death deserved that posterity should rate it more highly for him. And it did so. In the whole of justice nothing is more just than what Fortune ordained for its glory. The Athenians held those who were responsible for it in such loathing that they shunned them as persons accursed: anything which they
touched was held to be polluted; no one would bathe in the public baths with them; no one greeted them; no one approached them; so that, finally, no longer able to bear such public opprobrium, they went and hanged themselves.
⁶³

If anyone reckons that I chose a bad example from among so many of Socrates’ speeches which could have served my purpose, and if he judges that Socrates’ reasoning here is far above the opinion of common men, well, I chose it on purpose. For I judge otherwise and maintain that his reasoning here holds a more modest rank than even common opinions and that its naïve simplicity is less elevated; [C] within an unspoiled boldness quite without artifice, and with a childlike assurance, [B] it exhibits Nature’s pure and primary [C] stamp and simplicity.
⁶⁴
[B] While it is credible that we should have a natural fear of pain, it is not credible that we should fear dying as such, which is a part of the essence of our being, no less than living is. For what purpose would Nature have engendered within us a loathing and horror of dying, seeing that dying rates as something extremely useful, in that it ensures succession and substitution within Nature’s works and also, within the [C] commonwealth [B] of this world,
⁶⁵
serves birth and increase more than loss and destruction.

Sic return summa novatur

[Thus is totality renewed]

[C]
Mille animas una necata dedit
.

[One death gives rise to a thousand lives.]

[B] The failing of one life is the gate to a thousand other lives.
⁶⁶
[C] Nature has stamped on the beasts a concern for themselves and their own conservation. They can get as far as being afraid of harm from knocking against things and so hurting themselves and of our tying them up and beating them – things which are within their sensations and experience. What they cannot fear is that we may kill them: they do not have the faculty of imagining death or thinking about it. In addition it is said that [B] one can see them not merely suffering death gladly (most
horses whinny when dying, while swans [C] sing at [B] their deaths)
⁶⁷
but even seeking it when necessary, as is shown by several examples of elephants.
⁶⁸

Moreover is not the style of argument which Socrates uses here one which stuns us equally by its simplicity and its ecstatic force? In truth it is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than both to talk like Socrates and live like Socrates. In him is lodged the highest degree of perfection and of difficulty. Art cannot reach it. Moreover our own faculties are not trained that way. We neither assay them nor understand them: we clothe ourselves in those of others and allow our own to lie unused – and some may say that about me, asserting that I have merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the string to hold them together.

I have indeed made a concession to the taste of the public with these borrowed ornaments which accompany me. But I do not intend them to cover me up or to hide me: that is the very reverse of my design: I want to display nothing but my own – what is mine by nature. If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may. [C] Yet despite my projected design and my original concept (but following the whim of the age and the exhortation of others) I burden myself with more and more of them every day. That may not become me well: I think it does not, but never mind: it might be useful to somebody else.

[B] There are men who quote Plato and Homer without ever setting eyes on them. (I too have often taken my quotations not from the originals but from elsewhere.) Since in the place where I write I am surrounded by one thousand volumes, I could easily, if I wanted to, now borrow without trouble or scholarship, from a dozen of the kind of botchers whose pages I hardly ever turn, quite enough to [C] put an enamel gloss on [B] this treatise
⁶⁹
about physiognomy. To cram myself full of quotations all I would need would be the preliminary epistle of some German! And that is the way we go seeking tidbits of glory with which to diddle this foolish world!