On the Shortness of Life

ere all the brightest intellects of all time to employ
themselves on this one subject, they never could sufficiently express
their wonder at this blindness of men’s minds: men will not allow
any one to establish himself upon their estates, and upon the most
trifling dispute about the measuring of boundaries, they betake
themselves to stones and cudgels: yet they allow others to encroach
upon their lives, nay, they themselves actually lead others
in to take possession of them. You cannot find any one who wants
to distribute his money; yet among how many people does every one
distribute his life? men covetously guard their property from waste,
but when it comes to waste of time, they are most prodigal of that
of which it would become them to be sparing. Let us take one of the
elders, and say to him, “We perceive that you have arrived at the
extreme limits of human life: you are in your hundredth year, or
even older. Come now, reckon up your whole life in black and white:
tell us how much of your time has been spent upon your creditors,
how much on your mistress, how much on your king, how much on your
clients, how much in quarrelling with your wife, how much in keeping
your slaves in order, how much in running up and down the city on
business. Add to this the diseases which we bring upon us with our
own hands, and the time which has laid idle without any use having
been made of it; you will see that you have not lived as many years
as you count. Look back in your memory and see how often you have
been consistent in your projects, how many days passed as you
intended them to do when you were at your own disposal, how often
you did not change colour and your spirit did not quail, how much
work you have done in so long a time, how many people have without
your knowledge stolen parts of your life from you, how much you
have lost, how large a part has been taken up by useless grief,
foolish gladness, greedy desire, or polite conversation; how little
of yourself is left to you: you will then perceive that you will
die prematurely.” What, then, is the reason of this? It is that
people live as though they would live for ever: you never remember
your human frailty; you never notice how much of your time has
already gone by: you spend it as though you had an abundant and
overflowing store of it, though all the while that day which you
devote to some man or to some thing is perhaps your last. You
fear everything, like mortals as you are, and yet you desire
everything as if you were immortals. You will hear many men say,
“After my fiftieth year I will give myself up to leisure: my sixtieth
shall be my last year of public office”: and what guarantee have
you that your life will last any longer? who will let all this go
on just as you have arranged it? are you not ashamed to reserve
only the leavings of your life for yourself, and appoint for the
enjoyment of your own right mind only that time which you cannot
devote to any business? How late it is to begin life just when we
have to be leaving it! What a foolish forgetfulness of our mortality,
to put off wholesome counsels until our fiftieth or sixtieth year,
and to choose that our lives shall begin at a point which few of
us ever reach.