The Good Book (15 page)

13. ‘If a man’s ears are so closed to plain speaking that he cannot bear to hear the truth from a friend, we may give him up in despair.

14. ‘There are people who owe more to bitter enemies than to apparently pleasant friends: the former often speak the truth, the latter never.

15. ‘It is a strange paradox that people are not at all vexed at having committed a fault, but very angry at being reproved for it.  

16. ‘For on the contrary, they ought to be grieved at the crime and glad of the correction.

17. ‘If it is true that to give and receive advice – to give it with freedom and yet without bitterness, receive it with patience and without irritation – is peculiarly appropriate to friendship,

18. ‘It is no less true that there can be nothing more subversive of friendship than flattery, adulation and base compliance.  

19. ‘I use as many terms as possible to brand this vice of light-minded, untrustworthy people, whose sole object is to please without regard to truth.

20. ‘In everything false pretence is bad, for it negates our power of discerning the truth.

21. ‘But to nothing is it so hostile as friendship; for it destroys that frankness without which friendship is an empty name.

22. ‘For if the essence of friendship lies in the closeness of two minds, how can friendship exist if the two minds are in reality at variance?

23. ‘Fannius, if we take reasonable care it is as easy to distinguish a genuine from a specious friend

24. ‘As it is to distinguish what is coloured and artificial from what is sincere and genuine.

25. ‘Fewer people are endowed with virtue than wish to be thought to be so. It is such people that take delight in flattery.  

26. ‘When they are flattered they take it as testimony to the truth of their own self-praises.  

27. ‘It is not then properly friendship at all when the one will not listen to the truth, and the other is prepared to lie.’

Chapter 16

  1. ‘And so I repeat: it is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship.  

  2. ‘On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.

  3. ‘When virtue has shewn the light of her countenance, and recognised the same light in another,

  4. ‘She gravitates towards it, and in turn welcomes what the other has to show;

  5. ‘And from it springs up a flame which you may call either love or friendship. Both words are from the same root;

  6. ‘And love is just the cleaving to one whom you love without the prompting of need or any view to advantage,

  7. ‘Though advantage blossoms spontaneously in friendship, little as you may have looked for it.

  8. ‘It is with such warmth of feeling, Fannius, that I cherished my friends. For it was their virtue that I loved, and even death has not taken that love away.  

  9. ‘I declare that of all the blessings which either fortune or nature has bestowed upon me, I know none to compare with friendship.

10. ‘In it I found sympathy in public business, counsel in private business; in it too I found a means of spending my leisure with unalloyed delight.

11. ‘Why speak of the eagerness with which I and my friends always sought to learn something new,

12. ‘Spending our leisure hours in the quest for knowledge, far from the gaze of the world?

13. ‘If the recollection and memory of these things had   perished with my friends, I could not possibly endure the regret for those so closely united with me in life and affection.

14. ‘But these things have not perished; they are rather fed and strengthened by reflection and memory.

15. ‘This is everything I have to say on friendship. One piece of advice on parting; make up your minds to this:

16. ‘To seek the good is the first demand we should make upon ourselves;

17. ‘But next to the good, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is friendship.’

Lamentations

Chapter 1

  1. When I was without comfort, and sorrowing; when the grief of life was present to me, and afflictions common to man were upon me, then I lamented, and said:

  2. We are born to suffer and die, and the days of our laughter are few in the land.

  3. Every joy we foresee has its cost in the loss that must follow, for nothing survives its hour, and the first to fade is the season of pleasantness.

  4. To love is to contract for sorrow, since one of two must depart first, and affections diminish and vanish.

  5. To love what is made of nature is to love what changes and passes; and yet we must love, and so we must suffer.

  6. Likewise to strive is to fail; even the taste of victory grows rank in the mouth, and success is fleeting;

  7. And yet we must strive, for what is man if he does not strive; and so we must suffer.

  8. To make and hold anything of value is to give hostages to the thieves of time, who owe us nothing in return but the promise to steal us too.

  9. At the road’s side lie possibilities of accident, disaster and disease;

10. At the road’s end lie certainties of age and death; even from our first setting out we are beset.

11. What is the life of man and woman, but labour and vexation, and an ever-uncertain future?

12. What is the truth that accompanies life, other than that we must endure if we make no end before the end?

13. By hope we live, and by reliefs: best in the conversation of a friend, worst in a pot of liquor; but only the ultimate relief of death relieves all.

14. What is hope, but the illusion of possible good: for hope prolongs torments, yet offers itself as their only medicine.

15. No one would be sick, or captive, bereft or bereaved, unloved or a failure, a victim or a scapegoat, lonely or afraid:

16. Yet how rare is he who is not one or more of these at some time, passing as mankind must between the millstones of the months and years?

17. It is vain to comfort the grieving, for grief must have its fill;

18. Like the ashes of roses, or the roses’ shadows, that alone remain when their petals have blown, and litter the path behind.

Chapter 2

  1. All that seems new is nothing but what the past has forgotten.

  2. All things have been tossed on the seas of time; some submerge, then are cast up again as novelty,

  3. Some drown and are lost for ever that were for mankind’s good, and some whose loss is for mankind’s benefit.

  4. So it is that envy and malice, and the cruelty and rapine of human to human, always seem of the times, but have been the coin of their exchange for ever.

  5. Sects and factions, divisions and quarrels, unforgiving separations of brother and brother, appear as today’s problems: but are older than amity.

  6. What is it that troubles our sleep, but the pangs of bitterness for what happened yesterday, and the fear that tomorrow will bring the same.

  7. It is the weight on the heart that presses out an acid lees, tainting all we drink for our burning thirst.

  8. Nothing begins or ends without this: that life starts in another’s pain, and ends in our own.

  9. Nothing is understood for its worth, until stolen away; making us poor, and the world a wilderness.

10. The brief, effortful, confused span of existence between two nothings, burdened with care and trial, is a tale traced on water, a story written in dust.

11. It is a wild theme, rife with sorrow, an empty theme, deformed with grief,

12. A dark theme, full of falsehood, under a biting and bitter sky.

13. Why live? Why live on? What is there that tomorrow promises so faithfully that yesterday has not hurt us with already?

14. And they give answer who say: deceitful hope, that makes us continue into the narrowing corridor of the windowless future, as if it led to a garden.

Chapter 3

  1. I have followed the bier to that opened oblong of earth, have heard the small rain fall on it, and felt my tears choking my throat and stinging my eyes,

  2. Even in the cold and grey of the funeral day I have felt the tears coursing on my cheeks.

  3. Why? Why? There are holes in the world, where she was, and where the unspoken words of kindness and love wait still to be said, but to the vacancy of the unretrievable past.

  4. Now the anger and silences, the misunderstandings and missed opportunities, grow so large that they overshadow the larger seasons of happiness, and blight them;

  5. At the last there was no time to undo the wrongs that were left, and with a final kiss to forgive, and establish the best parts of our love as its monument.

  6. The threnody of all loves devoured by ravenous time is ‘I wish, I wish’; yet this inevitability makes no difference to what we do beforehand:

  7. It is as if we say, in our folly and our ignorance or forgetfulness, ‘We have eternity, therefore I will be angry.’

  8. But there are no eternities other than grief while it lasts, no certainties other than that grief must come, no escape other than from life itself and what it asks us to endure.

  9. I have followed the bier to opened oblongs of earth more than once now, as the years accumulate and the tired travellers fall aside one by one.

10. I see that rapacious death is a respecter neither of age nor of condition, though it best likes to choose those the good loved, to punish the goodness of the living.

11. For they, living on, alone or deprived, with the thorn of memory, the abyss of mourning, the unfair demand to remake their world out of ruins of sorrow: they are death’s chief victims.

12. At night, and in the still stretches of day, at waking, at lying down to wearying half-sleep, the black bat of grief closes its wings over us and stifles our breath;

13. How unbearable, how inextinguishable by silence or utterance, is the weight of this stifling; how unlimited the horizon of suffering then, at its worst period.

14. To live is to wait for grief, or to be the occasion for it, or to witness it, or cause it, or be changed by it, or die of it.

Chapter 4

  1. My prime of youth is a frost of cares, my feast of joy but a dish of pain,

  2. My crop of corn is a field of tares, my wealth no more than dreams of gain;

  3. My day is fled, yet I saw no sun; and though I live, my life is done.

  4. My spring is past, but not yet sprung; the fruit is dead, with leaves still green;

  5. My youth is past, though I still young; I saw the world, myself unseen.

  6. My thread is cut, though not yet spun; and though I live, my life is done.

  7. I sought for death, it was the womb; I looked for life, it was a shade;

  8. I tread the ground, which is my tomb; and now I die, though just new made.

  9. The glass is full, yet my glass is run; and though I live, my life is done.

Chapter 5

  1. Is nature spiteful, that we live such a brief span? Life hastens by, and ends just as we learn how to live it.

  2. Maybe the wise can make one lifetime into many, but the many make one lifetime into less;

  3. For so much of it is wasted, and wasted moreover on the trivial and passing, the momentary and empty.

  4. One person is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless;

  5. One person is besotted with wine, another is paralysed by sloth;

  6. One person is exhausted by ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others,

  7. Another, driven by the greed of the trader, hastens wearily over lands and seas in hope of gain;

  8. Some are tormented by passion for war and are bent either on inflicting danger or preserving their own safety;

  9. Some are worn out by servitude in thankless attendance upon the great;

10. Many are kept busy in pursuit of other men’s fortunes or in complaining of their own;

11. Many again, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new;

12. Some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but events take them unawares while they laze and yawn.

13. So surely does all this happen that we cannot doubt the poet who says, ‘The part of life we really live is small­­.’

14. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time, wasted time.

15. Vices beset us and surround us on every side, and do not permit us to rise anew and lift up our eyes for the discernment of truth;

16. Rather, they keep us low when once they have overwhelmed us and we are chained to lust for gain, reputation, position and indulgence.

17. Their victims are never allowed to return to their true selves; if ever they chance to find some release,