Letter 12

Wherever I turn, I see the proofs of my old age. I had come to my place in the suburbs and was complaining of the expense of the building, which was falling to ruin. The steward told me it was no fault of his own neglect—he was doing everything—but the house was old. This house grew up under my own hands; what is to become of me, if stones of my own age are so crumbling?

Angry with him, I seized the nearest occasion for venting my spleen. "It is plain," I said, "that these plane-trees are neglected; they have no leaves. How knotted and shrivelled the branches are, how dismal and unkempt the trunks! This would not happen if someone dug round them, if someone watered them." He swears, by my own guardian spirit, that he is doing everything, that his care fails in nothing, but that they are old. Between ourselves, I had planted them, I had seen their first leaf.

Turning to the door, "Who is that fellow," I said, "that decrepit creature, rightly set near the doorway? For he is looking outward. Where did you get him? What pleased you in carrying off another man's corpse?" But he said: "Do you not recognize me? I am Felicio, to whom you used to bring little images. I am the son of Philositus the steward, your little pet." "The fellow is downright raving," I said. "Has my little pet become a child again?" It is altogether possible: his teeth are at this very moment falling out.

I owe it to my place in the suburbs that my old age was made plain to me wherever I turned. Let us embrace it and love it; it is full of pleasure, if you know how to use it. Apples are most delightful when they are about to be gone; boyhood has its greatest charm at its close; to the lovers of wine, the last cup is the most delightful—the one that drowns them, that sets the final touch upon drunkenness.

What is most pleasant in every pleasure it puts off to its very end. The most delightful season of life is the one now on the decline, but not yet on the brink. And even that age which stands upon the last tile, I judge, has its own pleasures—or this very thing takes the place of pleasures, the needing of none.

"It is troublesome," you say, "to have death before one's eyes." First, that ought to be before the eyes of the old man as much as of the young; for we are not summoned by our census ranking. Next, no man is so old that he may not without impropriety hope for one more day. But one day is a step in the stairway of life. The whole of our span is made up of parts, and has greater circles drawn round the lesser. There is one that embraces and girds all the rest; this reaches from the day of birth to the last day. There is another that shuts in the years of youth. There is one that gathers all of boyhood within its compass. Again, there is the year itself, containing within it all the times of which life is composed when they are multiplied. The month is bound by a narrower ring; the day by the narrowest of all—yet even this proceeds from a beginning to an end, from sunrise to sunset.

Therefore Heraclitus, whose surname came from the obscurity of his speech, said: "One day is equal to every day." This one man understood one way, another another. For one said it was equal in hours, and lies not; for if a day is a span of four-and-twenty hours, all days must of necessity be equal among themselves, since the night gains what the day has lost. But another said that one day is equal to all days in its likeness; for even in the longest stretch of time there is nothing you will find that is not also found in a single day—light and darkness; and the round of the world makes these alternations more numerous in eternity, but not different, now more compressed, now more drawn out.

And so every day should be ordered as though it brought up the rear of the column and rounded off and filled up our life. Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by long possession, when he had performed his own funeral rites with wine and those funeral feasts, used to have himself borne from dinner to his chamber in such a way that, amid the applause of his minions, this was chanted to music: "He has lived, he has lived."

There was no day on which he did not carry himself out to burial. What he did from a bad conscience, let us do from a good one, and, as we go to sleep, let us say, glad and cheerful: "I have lived, and the course that Fortune gave I have run." If God adds the morrow, let us receive it gladly. That man is the happiest, and the untroubled owner of himself, who awaits the morrow without anxiety. Whoever has said "I have lived" rises each day to a clear gain.

But now I must close the letter. "So," you say, "will it come to me without any pocket-money?" Do not fear; it carries something with it. Why did I say "something"? Much. For what is more glorious than this saying, which I give it to bring to you? "It is an evil to live under necessity; but to live under necessity is no necessity at all." Why should it be none? On every side lie open many roads to liberty, short and easy. Let us give thanks to God that no one can be held fast in life. We may trample upon the very necessities.

"Epicurus said it," you say. What have you to do with another man's property? What is true is mine. I shall persist in pressing Epicurus upon you, that those men who swear by the words of a master and weigh not what is said but by whom, may know that the best things are common property. Farewell.