Dying every day. Seneca, Epistles 3.24.19-21
Seneca
reminds Lucilius of something the latter once wrote about what makes
us fear death. We are always dying, always losing time on the way to
meet our mortality, but we don't notice until the very end, and that
sudden realization is what terrifies us. If we see death constantly,
it ceases to frighten.
Permitte
mihi hoc loco referre versum tuum, si prius admonuero ut te iudices
non aliis scripsisse ista sed etiam tibi. Turpe est aliud loqui,
aliud sentire: quanto turpius aliud scribere, aliud sentire! Memini
te illum locum aliquando tractasse, non repente nos in mortem
incidere sed minutatim procedere. Cotidie morimur; cotidie enim
demitur aliqua pars vitae, et tunc quoque cum crescimus vita
decrescit. Infantiam amisimus, deinde pueritiam, deinde
adulescentiam. Usque ad hesternum quidquid transit temporis perit;
hunc ipsum quem agimus diem cum morte dividimus. Quemadmodum
clepsydram non extremum stilicidium exhaurit sed quidquid ante
defluxit, sic ultima hora qua esse desinimus non sola mortem facit
sed sola consummat; tunc ad illam pervenimus, sed diu venimus. Haec
cum descripsisses quo soles ore, semper quidem magnus, numquam tamen
acrior quam ubi veritati commodas verba, dixisti,
mors
non ultima (‡) venit, sed quae rapit ultima mors est.
Malo
te legas quam epistulam meam; apparebit enim tibi hanc quam timemus
mortem extremam esse, non solam.
Let
me here call to mind your own verse, with a request that you consider
it written not for others, but for yourself. It is base to say what
you don't feel: how much baser to write contrary to your feeling!
Remember that you've already grappled with this insight: the fact
that our approach to death is not a sudden fall, but a constant
advance, gradual and inexorable. Each day we are dying. Each day
another piece of our life is cast aside, and thus, as we grow, our
life shrinks. Infancy we've lost, then childhood, and our youth.
Whatever time has passed on before the present has perished: right
now we divide even this very day with death, handing each moment over
to her as it ends. As it is not the final drip that empties a
water-clock (†), so the last hour of our lives does not bring death
all by herself: she merely consummates what previous ones have
wrought. We arrive at her threshold in a moment, but our approach is
building for a long time. You've always expressed this insight well,
with a power that does you credit, but you never uttered a keener
line than this one, which fits words right to truth:
Death
does not arrive at the end. Instead, our final death is merely the
one that succeeds in taking us.
Read
those words from yourself rather than this letter of mine. In them
you will see that what we fear is not death herself, but the final
death, the one that snatches us last.
---
(‡) I have followed the MSS rather than Muretus (who emends ultima to una, perhaps metri causa?).
(†) Ancient Mediterraneans poured water into vessels designed to release it slowly, from a hole in the bottom, allowing bystanders to mark time. One very ancient exemplar is Egyptian, from the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak, in the era of Amenhotep III, the father of Akhenaten (cf. Cotterell et al, Journal of Archaeological Science 13.1). We also find evidence of such clocks outside the Mediterranean, in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China.
(†) Ancient Mediterraneans poured water into vessels designed to release it slowly, from a hole in the bottom, allowing bystanders to mark time. One very ancient exemplar is Egyptian, from the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak, in the era of Amenhotep III, the father of Akhenaten (cf. Cotterell et al, Journal of Archaeological Science 13.1). We also find evidence of such clocks outside the Mediterranean, in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China.