The span of a life

Theophrastus, comparing wrongdoing—the kind of comparison one makes by ordinary human standards—says, like a genuine philosopher, that offenses committed through desire are more blameworthy than those committed through anger. For the man roused by anger seems to turn away from reason with a kind of pain and unconscious contraction; but the man who offends through desire, overpowered by pleasure, seems somehow more unrestrained and more womanish in his offenses. He was right, then, and spoke in a way worthy of philosophy, in saying that the offense committed with pleasure is more blameworthy than the one committed with pain. And on the whole, the angry man is more like someone first wronged, who is driven by pain into anger, while the other is moved by his own impulse to do wrong, carried toward the act by desire.

Since it's possible that you might leave life this very moment, let that govern every act and thought. But to depart from among men—if there are gods—is nothing to fear, for the gods will not involve you in evil. And if they don't exist at all, or if they take no interest in human affairs, then what does it matter to me to live in a universe without gods or without providence? But in truth they do exist, and they do care about human things, and they have put it entirely within a person's power not to fall into real evils. And as for the rest, if there were anything evil, they would have provided for that too, so that it would be entirely within a person's power not to fall into it. Now, how can something that doesn't make a person worse make his life worse? The nature of the universe couldn't have overlooked these things, whether through ignorance or through knowing but lacking the power to guard against or correct them; nor could it have made so great a mistake, from lack of power or lack of skill, that good and evil should fall on the good and the bad without distinction. But death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure—all these things happen equally to the good and the bad, and they make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

How quickly everything vanishes—the bodies themselves in the universe, and in time the memory of them. What is the nature of all things that fall under the senses, especially those that lure with the bait of pleasure or frighten with pain or are trumpeted about by empty fame—how worthless, contemptible, filthy, perishable, and dead they all are: it belongs to the intellect to see this. To see too who these people are whose opinions and voices make reputations; what death is, and that if a man looks at it by itself, and by the power of abstraction resolves into their parts all the things that present themselves to the imagination in it, he will see it as nothing but an operation of nature—and if anyone is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not merely an operation of nature but also something that serves nature's purposes. To see too how man makes contact with the divine, and by what part of himself, and in what condition that part must be.

Nothing is more pitiful than a man who goes around everything in circles and, as the poet says, pries into what's beneath the earth, and hunts by guesswork into the minds of his neighbors, without realizing that it's enough to attend to the guiding spirit within him and revere it sincerely. Reverence for that spirit consists in keeping it free from passion and thoughtlessness, and from dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men. For what comes from the gods deserves reverence because of its excellence, and what comes from men should be dear to us because of kinship—and sometimes too, in a way, it stirs our pity, because of people's ignorance of good and bad, a blindness no less than the one that would deprive us of the power to tell white from black.

Even if you were going to live three thousand years, or as many times ten thousand, still remember: no one loses any life other than the one he is living now, and lives none other than the one he is now losing. The longest life and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present moment is the same for everyone, even though what perishes is not the same—so what is lost turns out to be a mere instant. No one can lose the past or the future; how can someone be deprived of what he doesn't have? So keep these two things in mind: first, that all things from eternity are of the same recurring forms, circling around, and it makes no difference whether one watches them for a hundred years, or two hundred, or forever; and second, that the longest-lived and the one who dies soonest lose exactly the same thing. The present is the only thing anyone can be deprived of—since that is the only thing he has, and no one can lose what he doesn't have.

Remember that everything is opinion. What was said by Monimus the Cynic is plain enough—and plain too is the use of what he said, if one takes from it what is true.

The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes, as far as it can, an abscess or a tumor on the universe. For to be vexed at anything that happens is to cut oneself off from nature, which contains within it the natures of everything else. Next, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any person, or even moves against him meaning to injure him, as happens with the souls of those who are angry. Third, the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain. Fourth, when it play-acts, and does or says anything insincerely and falsely. Fifth, when it lets any act or impulse of its own go without a purpose, and does something thoughtlessly, without considering what it is—when even the smallest things ought to be done with reference to an end, and the end for rational beings is to follow the reason and the law of the oldest city and community there is.

Of human life, the time is a point, its substance in flux, its perception dim, the whole body prone to decay, the soul a whirl, fortune hard to read, and fame devoid of judgment. In a word: everything belonging to the body is a river; everything belonging to the soul is a dream and a vapor; life is a war and a sojourn far from home; and fame afterward is forgetting. What, then, can guide a person? One thing, and one thing only: philosophy. Philosophy means keeping the guiding spirit within untouched by violence and unharmed, above pains and pleasures. It means doing nothing without purpose, falsehood, or pretense, and needing nothing from another person's action or inaction. It means accepting everything that happens and everything allotted as coming from the same source as oneself. And it means waiting for death cheerfully, as nothing more than the dissolution of the elements from which every living thing is composed. If there's no harm to the elements themselves as each continually changes into another, why should anyone fear the change and dissolution of all of them together? This is according to nature, and nothing is evil that is according to nature. Written at Carnuntum.