On the Shortness of Life

an anything be mentioned which is more insane than the ideas
of leisure of those people who boast of their worldly wisdom? They
live laboriously, in order that they may live better; they
fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast
their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest
waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the
present by promising something hereafter: there is no such obstacle
to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it is depending
on the morrow. You dispose of that which is in the hand of Fortune,
and you let go that which is in your own. Whither are you looking,
whither are you stretching forward? everything future is uncertain:
live now straightway. See how the greatest of bards cries to you
and sings in wholesome verse as though inspired with celestial
fire:—

“The best of wretched mortals’ days is that Which is the first
to fly.”

Why do you hesitate, says he, why do you stand back? unless you
seize it it will have fled: and even if you do seize it, it will
still fly. Our swiftness in making use of our time ought therefore
to vie with the swiftness of time itself, and we ought to drink of
it as we should of a fast-running torrent which will not be always
running. The poet, too, admirably satirizes our boundless thoughts,
when he says, not “the first age,” but “the first day.” Why are you
careless and slow while time is flying so fast, and why do you
spread out before yourself a vision of long months and years, as
many as your greediness requires? he talks with you about one day,
and that a fast-fleeting one. There can, then, be no doubt that the
best days are those which fly first for wretched, that is, for busy
mortals, whose minds are still in their childhood when old age comes
upon them, and they reach it unprepared and without arms to combat
it. They have never looked forward: they have all of a sudden
stumbled upon old age: they never noticed that it was stealing upon
them day by day. As conversation, or reading, or deep thought
deceives travellers, and they find themselves at their journey’s
end before they knew that it was drawing near, so in this fast and
never-ceasing journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether
we are asleep or awake, busy people never notice that they are
moving till they are at the end of it.