made from death to life, without suffering and without fear, make it again from life to death. Your death is one of the parts of the order of the universe; it is a part of the life of the world”;
(b) inter se mortales mutua vivunt
Et quasi cursores vitaī lampada tradunt.[1]
(a) “Shall I change for you the admirable arrangement of things?[2] Death is the condition of your creation, it is a portion of yourself; you fly from yourself.[3] This existence of yours, which you have the enjoyment of, is equally divided between death and life. The day of your birth starts your steps toward dying as well as toward living.”
(c) All the time you live you purloin from life; it is at its expense. The continual work of your life is to build up death. You are in death while you are in life, for death has passed when you have ceased to be in life. Or, if you like it better in this way, you are dead after life; but during life you are dying; and death treats the dying much more roughly than the dead, and more acutely and essentially.[6]
(b) If you have profited by your life, you have had enough of it;[7] go hence content.
If you have not known how to make use of it, if it was use-
- ↑ Mortals live mutually dependent, and like runners pass on the torch of life. — Lucretius, II, 76, 79.
- ↑ The text here is of peculiar grammatical construction: Changeray-je pas pour vous cette belle contexture des choses.
- ↑ That is, in shunning it.
- ↑ The first hour that gave us life shortened our life. — Seneca, Hercules Furens, Act III, 874.
- ↑ From our birth we die, and our end hangs upon our beginning. — Manilius, Astronomica, IV, 16.
- ↑ The phrase Et ne mouriez jamais trop tost stood here in 1580, but was dropped in 1588.
- ↑ See Lucretius, III, 935.
- ↑ Why do you not depart like a guest who has had enough of life? — Idem, 938.
