Letter 54

Ill health had granted me a long furlough; then it suddenly attacked me. "With what kind of attack?" you ask. You ask with perfect right; there is indeed no kind unknown to me. Yet to one disease I am, so to speak, assigned, which I do not know why I should call by a Greek name; for it can fitly enough be called "the gasping." Its onset is very brief and like a squall; within the hour or so it usually ends. For who can be drawing his last breath for long?

Every discomfort and every danger of the body has passed through me; none seems to me more troublesome than this. And why not? For to suffer anything else is to be ill; but this is to breathe out one's life. And so the doctors call it "the rehearsal of death." For that breath will one day do what it has so often attempted.

Do you think I write you this in good cheer because I have escaped? I should be as absurd as that man, whoever he is, who thinks he has won his case because he has put off the day of trial, if I took pleasure in this respite as though it were sound health. Yet even in the very choking I did not cease to find rest in cheerful and brave thoughts.

"What is this?" I said. "Does death so often make trial of me? Let it. I have made trial of it long since." "When?" you ask. Before I was born. Death is not-being; what that is like, I already know. After me there will be what there was before me. If there is any torment in this matter, then there must have been torment too before we came forth into the light; yet at that time we felt no distress at all.

I ask you, would you not call a man most foolish who thought a lamp was worse off when it was put out than before it was lit? We too are both put out and lit; in that middle time we suffer something, but on either side of it there is deep security. For in this, my dear Lucilius, unless I am mistaken, we go wrong — that we judge death to follow, when it has both gone before and is to come after. Whatever was before us is death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin or whether you cease, when the result of either is the same — not to be?

With these exhortations and others of the kind — silent ones, of course, for there was no room for words — I did not cease to address myself. Then little by little that gasping, which had already begun to be a mere panting, made longer intervals, slowed, and subsided. And even now, although it has stopped, my breath does not yet flow from its natural source; I feel a certain catching and hesitation in it. Let it be as it will, provided I do not gasp from the soul.

Take this assurance of me concerning myself: I shall not tremble at the last, I am already prepared, I give no thought to any whole day. Praise and imitate that man whom it does not irk to die, though it pleases him to live. For what virtue is there in going out when you are thrown out? And yet there is virtue even here: I am thrown out indeed, but as though I were going out of my own accord. And for that reason the wise man is never thrown out, because to be thrown out is to be driven from a place you leave against your will; the wise man does nothing against his will — he escapes necessity, because he wills what necessity is going to compel. Farewell.