13. On experience

[The end of Montaigne’s quest. See the Introduction, pp. xix ff.]

[B] No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge.fn1 We assay all the means that can lead us to it. When reason fails us we make use of experience –

[C] Per varios usus artem experientia fecit:

Exemplo monstrante viam.

[By repeated practice, and with example showing the way, experience constructs an art.]fn2

Experience is a weaker and [C] less dignified means: [B] but truthfn3 is so great a matter that we must not disdain any method which leads us to it. Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has no fewer. The induction which we wish to draw from the [C] likeness [B] between events is unsure since they all show unlikenesses.fn4 When collating objects no quality is so universal as diversity and variety.fn5 As the most explicit example of likeness the Greeks, Latins and we ourselves allude to that of eggs, yet there was a man of Delphi among others who recognized the signs of difference between eggs and never mistook one for another;fn6 [C] when there were several hens he could tell which egg came from which. [B] Of itself, unlikeness obtrudes into anything we make. No art can achieve likeness. Neither Perrozet nor anyone else can so carefully blanch and polish the backs of his playing-cards without at least some players being able to tell them apart simply by watching them pass through another player’s hands. Likeness does not make things ‘one’ as much as unlikeness makes them ‘other’: [C] Nature has bound herself to make nothing ‘other’ which is not unlike.

[B] That is why I am not pleased by the opinion of that fellow who sought to rein in the authority of the judges with his great many laws, ‘cutting their slices for them’.fn7 He was quite unaware that there is as much scope and freedom in interpreting laws as in making them. (And those who believe that they can assuage our quarrels and put a stop to them by referring us to the express words of the Bible cannot be serious: our minds do not find the field any less vast when examining the meanings of others than when formulating our own – as though there were less animus and virulence in glossing than inventing!)

We can see how wrong that fellow was: in France we have more laws than all the rest of the world put together – more than would be required to make rules for all those worlds of Epicurus; [C] ‘ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus’ [we were once distressed by crimes: now, by laws].fn8 [B] And, even then, we have left so much to the discretion and opinion of our judges that never was there liberty so licentious and powerful. What have our legislators gained by isolating a hundred thousand categories and specific circumstances, and then making a hundred thousand laws apply to them? That number bears no relationship to the infinite variations in the things which humans do. The multiplicity of our human inventions will never attain to the diversity of our cases. Add a hundred times more: but never will it happen that even one of all the many thousands of cases which you have already isolated and codified will ever meet one future case to which it can be matched and compared so exactly that some detail or some other specific item does not require a specific judgement. There is hardly any relation between our actions (which are perpetually changing) and fixed unchanging laws.

The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general. I think moreover that it would be better to have none at all than to have them in such profusion as we do now. Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves. Witness that Golden Age portrayed by the poetsfn9 and the circumstances in which we see those peoples live who have no other laws. There is a nation who take as the judge of their disputes the first traveller who comes journeying across their mountains; another which chooses one of their number on market-days and he judges their cases there and then.fn10 Where would be the danger if the wisest men among us were to decide our cases for us according to the details which they have seen with their own eyes, without being bound by case-law or by established precedent? For every foot its proper shoe.

When King Ferdinand sent colonies of immigrants to the Indies he made the wise stipulation that no one should be included who had studied jurisprudence, lest lawsuits should pullulate in the New World – law being of its nature a branch of learning subject to faction and altercation: he judged with Plato that to furnish a country with lawyers and doctors is a bad action.fn11

Why is it that our tongue, so simple for other purposes, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts? Why is it that a man who expresses himself with clarity in anything else that he says or writes cannot find any means of making declarations in such matters which do not sink into contradictions and obscurity? Is it not that the ‘princes’ of that art,fn12 striving with a peculiar application to select traditional terms and to use technical language, have so weighed every syllable and perused so minutely every species of conjunction that they end up entangled and bogged down in an infinitude of grammatical functions and tiny sub-clauses which defy all rule and order and any definite interpretation? [C] ‘Confusum est quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est.’ [Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.]fn13

[B] Have you ever seen children making assays at arranging a pile of quicksilver into a set number of segments? The more they press it and knead it and try to make it do what they want the more they exasperate the taste for liberty in that noble metal: it resists their art and proceeds to scatter and break down into innumerable tiny parts. It is just the same here: for by subdividing those subtle statements lawyers teach people to increase matters of doubt; they start us off extending and varying our difficulties, stretching them out and spreading them about. By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels, [C] just as the soil is made more fertile when it is broken up and deeply dug: ‘difficultatem facit doctrina’ [it is learning which creates the difficulty].fn14

[B] We have doubts on reading Ulpian: our doubts are increased by Bartolo and Baldus.fn15 The traces of that countless diversity of opinion should have been obliterated, not used as ornaments or stuffed into the heads of posterity. All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up. Aristotle wrote to be understood: if he could not manage it, still less will a less able man (or a third party) manage to do better than Aristotle, who was treating his own concepts. By steeping our material we macerate it and stretch it. Out of one subject we make a thousand and sink into Epicurus’ infinitude of atoms by proliferation and subdivision. Never did two men ever judge identically about anything, and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same men at different times. I normally find matter for doubt in what the gloss has not condescended to touch upon. Like certain horses I know which miss their footing on a level path, I stumble more easily on the flat.

Can anyone deny that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, when there can be found no book which men toil over in either divinity or the humanities whose difficulties have been exhausted by exegesis? The hundredth commentator dispatches it to his successor prickling with more difficulties than the first commentator of all had ever found in it. Do we ever agree among ourselves that ‘this book already has enough glosses: from now on there is no more to be said on it’? That can be best seen from legal quibbling. We give force of law to an infinite number of legal authorities, an infinite number of decisions and just as many interpretations. Yet do we ever find an end to our need to interpret? Can we see any progress or advance towards serenity? Do we need fewer lawyers and judges than when that lump of legality was in its babyhood?

On the contrary we obscure and bury the meaning: we can no longer discern it except by courtesy of those many closures and palisades. Men fail to recognize the natural sickness of their mind which does nothing but range and ferret about, ceaselessly twisting and contriving and, like our silkworms, becoming entangled in its own works: ‘Mus in pice.’ [A mouse stuck in pitch.]fn16 It thinks it can make out in the distance some appearance of light, of conceptual truth: but, while it is charging towards it, so many difficulties, so many obstacles and fresh diversions strew its path that they make it dizzy and it loses its way. The mind is not all that different from those dogs in Aesop which, descrying what appeared to be a corpse floating on the sea yet being unable to get at it, set about lapping up the water so as to dry out a path to it, [C] and suffocated themselves.fn17 And that coincides with what was said about the writings of Heraclitus by Crates: they required a reader to be a good swimmer, so that the weight of his doctrine should not pull him under nor its depth drown him.fn18

[B] It is only our individual weakness which makes us satisfied with what has been discovered by others or by ourselves in this hunt for knowledge: an abler man will not be satisfied with it. There is always room for a successor – [C] yes, even for ourselves – [B] and a different way to proceed. There is no end to our inquiries: our end is in the next world.fn19

[C] When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; [B] its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in [C] amazement, the hunt and [B] uncertainty,fn20 as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied.fn21 It is an irregular activity, never-ending and without pattern or target. Its discoveries excite each other, follow after each other and between them produce more.

Ainsi voit l’on, en un ruisseau coulant,

Sans fin l’une eau apres l’autre roulant,

Et tout de rang, d’un etemel conduict,

L’une suit l’autre, et l’une l’autre fuyt.

Par cette-cy celle-là est poussée,

Et cette-cy par l’autre est devancée:

Tousjours l’eau va dans l’eau, et tousjours est-ce

Mesme ruisseau, et toujours eau diverse.

[Thus do we see in a flowing stream water rolling endlessly on water, ripple upon ripple, as in its unchanging bed water flees and water pursues, the first water driven by what follows and drawn on by what went before, water eternally driving into water – ever the same stream with its waters ever-changing.]fn22

It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the texts, and there are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. [C] All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth. Is not learning to understand the learned the chief and most celebrated thing that we learn nowadays! Is that not the common goal, the ultimate goal, of all our studies?

Our opinions graft themselves on to each other. The first serves as stock for the second, the second for a third. And so we climb up, step by step. It thus transpires that the one who has climbed highest often has more honour than he deserves, since he has only climbed one speck higher on the shoulders of his predecessor.

[B] How often and perhaps stupidly have I extended my book to make it talk about itself: [C] stupidly, if only because I ought to have remembered what I say about other men who do the same: namely that those all-too-pleasant tender glances at their books witness that their hearts are a-tremble with love for them, and that even those contemptuous drubbings with which they belabour them are in fact only the pretty little rebukes of motherly love (following Aristotle for whom praise and dispraise of oneself often spring from the same type of pride).fn23 For I am not sure that everyone will understand what entitles me to do so: that I must have more freedom in this than others do since I am specifically writing about myself and (as in the case of my other activities) about my writings.

[B] I note that Luther has left behind in Germany as many – indeed more – discords and disagreements because of doubts about his opinions than he himself ever raised about Holy Scripture.fn24 Our controversies are verbal ones. I ask what is nature, pleasure, circle or substitution. The question is about words: it is paid in the same coin. – ‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ – ‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another, often for one less known. I know what ‘Man’ is better than I know what is animal, mortal or reasonable.fn25 In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it is a Hydra’s head.fn26 Socrates asked Meno what virtue is. ‘There is,’ said Meno, ‘the virtue of a man, a woman, a statesman, a private citizen, a boy and an old man.’ ‘That’s a good start,’ said Socrates. ‘We were looking for a single virtue and here is a swarm of them.’fn27 We give men one question and they hand us back a hive-full.

Just as no event and no form completely resembles another, neither does any completely differ. [C] What an ingenious medley is Nature’s: if our faces were not alike we could not tell man from beast: if they were not unalike we could not tell man from man.fn28 [B] All things are connected by some similarity; yet every example limps and any correspondence which we draw from experience is always feeble and imperfect;fn29 we can nevertheless find some corner or other by which to link our comparisons. And that is how laws serve us: they can be adapted to each one of our concerns by means of some [C] twisted, [B] forcedfn30 or oblique interpretation.

Since the moral laws which apply to the private duties of all individuals are so difficult to establish (as we see that they are), not surprisingly those laws which govern collections of all those individuals are even more so. Consider the form of justice which has ruled over us: it is a true witness to the imbecility of Man, so full it is of contradiction and error. Wherever we find favouritism or undue severity in our justice – and we can find so much that I doubt whether the Mean between them is to be found as frequently – they constitute diseased organs and corrupt members of the very body and essence of Justice. Some peasants have just rushed in to tell me that they have, at this very moment, left behind in a wood of mine a man with dozens of stab-wounds; he was still breathing and begged them of their mercy for some water and for help to lift him up. They say that they ran away fearing that they might be caught by an officer of the law and (as does happen to those who are found near a man who has been killed) required to explain this incident; that would have ruined them, since they had neither the skill nor the money to prove their innocence. What ought I to have said to them? It is certain that such an act of humanity would have got them into difficulties.

How many innocent parties have been discovered to have been punished – I mean with no blame attached to their judges? And how many have never been discovered? Here is something which has happened in my time: some men had been condemned to death for murder; the sentence, if not pronounced, was at least settled and determined. At this juncture the judges were advised by the officials of a nearby lower court that they were holding some prisoners who had made a clean confession to that murder and thrown an undeniable light on to the facts. The Court deliberated whether it ought to intervene to postpone the execution of the sentence already given against the first group. The judges considered the novelty of the situation; the precedent it would constitute for granting stays of execution, and the fact that once the sentence had been duly passed according to law they had no powers to change their minds. In short those poor devils were sacrificed to judicial procedures. Philip or somebody provided for a similar absurdity in the following manner.fn31 He had condemned a man to pay heavy damages to another and the sentence had been pronounced. Some time afterwards the truth was discovered and he realized that he had made an unjust judgement. On one side there were the interests of the case as now proven: on the other, the interests of judicial procedure. To some extent he satisfied both, allowing the sentence to stand while reimbursing from his own resources the expenses of the condemned man. But he was dealing with a reparable situation: those men of mine were irreparably hanged. [C] How many sentences have I seen more criminal than the crime …

[B] All this recalls to my mind certain opinions of the Ancients: that a man is obliged to do retail wrong if he wants to achieve wholesale right, committing injustices in little things if he wants to achieve justice in great things; that human justice is formed on the analogy of medicine, by which anything which is effective is just and honourable;fn32 that, as the Stoics held, Nature herself acts against justice in most of her works;fn33 [C] or, what the Cyrenaics hold, that nothing is just per se, justice being a creation of custom and law; and what the Theodorians hold: that the wise man, if it is useful to him, may justifiably commit larceny, sacrilege and any sort of lechery.fn34

[B] It cannot be helped. My stand is that of Alcibiades: never, if I can help it, will I submit to be judged by any man on a capital charge, during which my life or honour depend more on the skill and care of my barrister than on my innocence.fn35

I would risk the kind of justice which would take cognizance of good actions as well as bad and give me as much to hope for as to fear: not to be fined is an inadequate reward to bestow on a man who [C] has achieved better than simply doing no wrong. [B] Our justicefn36 offers us only one of her hands, and her left one at that. No matter who the man may be, the damages are against him. [C] In China (a kingdom whose polity and sciences surpass our own exemplars in many kinds of excellence without having had any contact with them or knowledge of them and whose history teaches me that the world is more abundant and diverse than either the ancients or we ever realized), the officials dispatched by the prince to inspect the condition of his provinces do punish those who act corruptly in their posts but also make ex gratia rewards to those who have behaved above the common norm and beyond the obligations of duty. You appear before them not simply to defend yourself but to gain something, and not simply to receive your pay but to be granted bounties.fn37

[B] Thank God no judge has ever addressed me qua judge in any case whatsoever, my own or a third party’s, criminal or civil. No prison has had me inside it, not even to stroll through it. Thinking about it makes the very sight of a prison even from the outside distressing to me. I so hunger after freedom that if anyone were to forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I would to some extent live less at ease. And as long as I can find earth or sky open to me elsewhere I will never remain anywhere cowering in hiding. My God, how badly would I endure the conditions of those many people I know of who, for having had an altercation with our laws, are pinned to one region of this Kingdom, banned from entering our main cities or our courts or from using the public highways. If the laws that I obey were to threaten me only by their finger-tips I would be off like a shot looking for other laws, no matter where they might be. All my petty little wisdom during these civil wars of ours is applied to stop laws from interfering with my freedom to come and go.

Now laws remain respected not because they are just but because they are laws. That is the mystical basis of their authority. They have no other. [C] It serves them well, too. Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality:fn38 but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.

No person commits crimes more grossly, widely or regularly than do our laws. If anyone obeys them only when they are just, then he fails to obey them for just the reason he must!fn39 [B] Our French laws, by their chaotic deformity, contribute not a little to the confused way they are applied and the corrupt way in which they are executed. The fact that their authority is so vague and inconsistent to some extent justifies our disobeying them and our faulty interpretation, application and enforcement of them.

Whatever we may in fact get from experience, such benefit as we derive from other people’s examples will hardly provide us with an elementary education if we make so poor a use of such experience as we have presumably enjoyed ourselves; that is more familiar to us and certainly enough to instruct us in what we need.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.fn40

Qua Deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum,

Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit, unde coactis

Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit;

Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet

Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua?

[By what artifice God governs this world, our home; where the moon comes from, where she does go and how she does bring her horns together month after month and so grow full; whence the gales spring which rule the salty sea, and what dominion does the South Wind enjoy; whence come those waters which are ever in the clouds?]fn41

[C] Sit ventura dies mundi quæ subruat arces?

[And will there come a day when our hills shall be made low?]

[B] Quaerite quos agitat mundi labor.

[It is for those who are worried by problems about how the world works to inquire into that.]

I, unconcerned and ignorant within this universe, allow myself to be governed by this world’s general law, which I shall know sufficiently when I feel it. No knowledge of mine will bring it to change its course: it will not take a different road for my sake. It is madness to wish it to; greater madness to be upset by that fact, since such law is, of necessity, unvarying, generic and applied to all. The goodness and sway of the Ruler should purely and utterly free us from any weight of anxiety about His rule. Scientific investigations and inquiries serve merely to feed our curiosity. They have nothing to do with knowledge so sublime: the philosophers are very right to refer us to the laws of Nature, but they pervert them and present Nature’s face too sophistically, painted in colours which are far too exalted, from which arise so many diverse portraits of so uniform a subject. As Nature has furnished us with feet to walk with, so has she furnished us with wisdom to guide us in our lives. That wisdom is not as clever, strong and formal as the one which they have invented, but it is becomingly easy and beneficial; in the case of the man who is lucky enough to know how to use it simply and ordinately (that is, naturally) it does – very well – what the other says it will. The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern! [B] I would rather be an expert on me than on [C] Cicero.fn42

[B] Were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of choler and the excesses to which that fevered passion brought him sees the ugliness of that distemper better than in Aristotle and conceives even more just a loathing for it. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. (Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.) We tell ourselves all that we chiefly need: let us listen to it. Is a man not stupid if he remembers having been so often wrong in his judgement yet does not become deeply distrustful of it thereafter?

When I find that I have been convicted of an erroneous opinion by another’s argument, it is not so much a case of my learning something new he has told me nor how ignorant I was of some particular matter – there is not much profit in that – as of my learning of my infirmity in general and of the treacherous ways of my intellect. From that I can reform the whole lump.

With all my other mistakes I do the same, and I think this rule is of great use to me in my life. I regard neither a class of error nor an example of it as one stone which has made me stumble: I learn to distrust my trot in general and set about improving it. [C] To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.

[B] The slips by which my memory so often trips me up precisely when I am most sure of it are not vainly lost: it is no use after that its swearing me oaths and telling me to trust it: I shake my head. The first opposition given to its testimony makes me suspend judgement and I would not dare then to trust it over any weighty matter nor to stand warrant for it when another is involved. Were it not thatfn43 others do even more frequently from lack of integrity what I do from lack of memory, I would on matters of fact as readily accept that truth is to be found on another’s lips not mine.

If each man closely spied upon the effects and attributes of the passions which have rule over him as I do upon those which hold sway over me, he would see them coming and slow down a little the violence of their assault. They do not always make straight for our throat: there are warnings and degrees:

Fluctus uti primo cæpit cum albescere ponto,

Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas

Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad æthera fundo.

[At first the gale whips up the foam-topped wavelets, then little by little the sea begins to heave, the billows roll and the sea surges from the deep to the very heavens.]fn44

Within me judgement holds the rector’s chair, or at least it anxiously strives to do so. It permits my inclinations to go their own way, including hatred and love (even self-love) without itself being worsened or corrupted. Though it cannot reform those other qualities so as to bring them into harmony with itself, at least it does not let itself be deformed by them: it plays its role apart.

It must be important to put into effect the counsel that each man should know himself, since that god of light and learning had it placed on the tympanum of his temple as comprising the totality of the advice which he had to give us.fn45 [C] Plato too says that wisdom is but the executing of that command, and Socrates in Xenophon proves in detail that it is true.fn46 [B] The difficulties and obscurities of any branch of learning can be perceived only by those who have been able to go into it; for we always need some degree of intelligence to become aware that we do not know: if we are to learn that a door is shut against us we must first give it a shove. [C] From which springs that Platonic paradox: those who know do not have to inquire since they know already: neither do those who do not know, since to find out you need to know what you are inquiring into.fn47 [B] And so it is with this knowing about oneself: the fact that each man sees himself as satisfactorily analysed and as sufficiently expert on the subject are signs that nobody understands anything whatever about it – [C] as Socrates demonstrates to Euthydemus in Xenophon.fn48 [B] I who make no other profession but getting to know myself find in me such boundless depths and variety that my apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know how much there remains to learn.

It is to my inadequacy (so often avowed) that I owe my tendency to moderation, to obeying such beliefs as are laid down for me and a constant cooling and tempering of my opinions as well as a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth. Just listen to them acting the professor: the very first idiocies which they put forward are couched in the style by which religion and laws are founded: [C] ‘Nil hoc est turpius quam cognitioni et perceptioni assertionem approbationemque praecurrere.’ [There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception.]fn49

[B] Aristarchus said that in olden days there were scarcely seven wise men to be found in the whole world whereas in his own days there were scarcely seven ignoramuses.fn50 Have we not more reason to say that than he did? Assertion and stubbornness are express signs of animal-stupidity. This man over here has bitten the ground a hundred times a day: but there he is strutting about crowing ergo, as decided and as sound as before: you would say that some new soul, some new mental vigour has been infused into him, and that he was like that Son of Earth of old who, when thrown down, found fresh resolve and strength:

cui, cum tetigere parentem,

Jam defecta vigent renovato robore membra.

[whose failing limbs, when they touched the earth, his Mother, took on new strength and vigour.]fn51

The unteachable, stubborn fool! Does he believe that he assumes a new mind with each new dispute? It is from my own experience that I emphasize human ignorance which is, in my judgement, the most certain faction in the school of the world. Those who will not be convinced of their ignorance by so vain an example as me – or themselves – let them acknowledge it through Socrates. [C] He is the Master of masters; the philosopher Antisthenes said to his pupils, ‘Let us all go to hear Socrates: you and I will all be pupils there.’ And when he was asserting the doctrine of his Stoic school that, to make a life fully happy, virtue sufficed without need of anything else, he added, ‘except the strength of Socrates’.fn52

[B] This application which I have long devoted to studying myself also trains me to judge passably well of others: there are few topics on which I speak more aptly or acceptably. I often manage to see and to analyse the attributes of my friends more precisely than they can themselves. There is one man to whom I told things about himself which were so apposite that he was struck with amazement. By having trained myself since boyhood to see my life reflected in other people’s I have acquired a studious tendency to do so; when I give my mind to it, few things around me which help me to achieve it escape my attention: looks, temperaments, speech, I study the lot for what I should avoid or what I should imitate.

I similarly reveal to my friends their innermost dispositions by what they outwardly disclose. I do not however classify such an infinite number of diverse and distinct activities within genera and species, sharply distributing my sections and divisions into established classes or departments,

sed neque quam multæ species, et nomina quæ sint,

Est numerus.

[for there is no numbering of their many categories nor of the names given to them.]fn53

[C] The learned do arrange their ideas into species and name them in detail. I, who can see no further than practice informs me, have no such rule, presenting my ideas in no categories and feeling my way – as I am doing here now; [B] I pronounce my sentences in disconnected clauses, as something which cannot be said at once all in one piece. Harmony and consistency are not to be found in ordinary [C] basefn54 [B] souls such as ours. Wisdom is an edifice solid and entire, each piece of which has its place and bears its hallmark: [C] ‘Sola sapientia in se tota conversa est.’ [Wisdom alone is entirely self-contained.]fn55

[B] I leave it to the graduates – and I do not know if even they will manage to bring it off in a matter so confused, intricate and fortuitous – to arrange this infinite variety of features into groups, pin down our inconsistencies and impose some order. I find it hard to link our actions one to another, but I also find it hard to give each one of them, separately, its proper designation from some dominant quality; they are so ambiguous, with colours interpenetrating each other in various lights.

[C] What is commented on as rare in the case of Perses, King of Macedonia (that his mind, settling on no particular mode of being, wandered about among every kind of existence, manifesting such vagrant and free-flying manners that neither he nor anyone else knew what kind of man he really was), seems to me to apply to virtually everybody.fn56 And above all I have seen one man of the same rank as he was to whom that conclusion would, I believe, even more properly apply: never in a middle position, always flying to one extreme or the other for causes impossible to divine; no kind of progress without astonishing side-tracking and backtracking; none of his aptitudes straightforward, such that the most true-to-life portrait you will be able to sketch of him one day will show that he strove and studied to make himself known as unknowable.fn57 [B] You need good strong ears to hear yourself frankly judged; and since there are few who can undergo it without being hurt, those who risk undertaking it do us a singular act of love, for it is to love soundly to wound and vex a man in the interests of his improvement. I find it harsh to have to judge anyone in whom the bad qualities exceed the good. [C] Plato requires three attributes in anyone who wishes to examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, daring.fn58

[B] Once I was asked what I thought I would have been good at if anyone had decided to employ me while I was at the right age:

Dum melior vires sanguis dabat, æmula necdum

Temporibus geminis canebat sparsa senectus.

[When I drew strength from better blood and when envious years had yet to sprinkle snow upon my temples.]

‘Nothing,’ I replied; ‘and I am prepared to apologize for not knowing how to do anything which enslaves me to another. But I would have told my master some blunt truths and would, if he wanted me to, have commented on his behaviour – not wholesale by reading the Schoolmen at him (I know nothing about them and have observed no improvement among those who do), but whenever it was opportune by pointing things out as he went along, judging by running my eyes along each incident one at a time, simply and naturally, bringing him to see what the public opinion of him is and counteracting his flatterers.’ (There is not one of us who would not be worse than our kings if he were constantly [C] corrupted by that riff-raff as they are.) [B] How elsefn59 could it be, since even the great king and philosopher Alexander could not protect himself from them?fn60 I would have had more than enough loyalty, judgement and frankness to do that. It would be an office without a name, otherwise it would lose its efficacity and grace. And it is a role which cannot be held by all men indifferently, for truth itself is not privileged to be used all the time and in all circumstances: noble though its employment is, it has its limits and boundaries. The world being what it is, it often happens that you release truth into a Prince’s ear not merely unprofitably but detrimentally and (even more) unjustly. No one will ever convince me that an upright rebuke may not be offered offensively nor that considerations of matter should not often give way to those of manner.

For such a job I would want a man happy with his fortune –

Quod si esse velit, nihilque malit

[Who would be what he is, desiring nothing extra]fn61

– and born to a modest competence. And that, for two reasons: he would not be afraid to strike deep, lively blows into his master’s mind for fear of losing his way to advancement; he would on the other hand have easy dealings with all sorts of people, being himself of middling rank. [C] And only one man should be appointed; for to scatter the privilege of such frankness and familiarity over many would engender a damaging lack of respect. Indeed what I would require above all from that one man is that he could be trusted to keep quiet.fn62

A king [B] is not to be believed if he boasts of his steadfastness as he waits to encounter the enemy in the service of his glory if, for his profit and improvement, he cannot tolerate the freedom of a man who loves him to use words which have no other power than to make his ears smart, any remaining effects of them being in his own hands. Now there is no category of man who has greater need of such true and frank counsels than kings do. They sustain a life lived in public and have to remain acceptable to the opinions of a great many on-lookers: yet, since it is customary not to tell them anything which makes them change their ways, they discover that they have, quite unawares, begun to be hated and loathed by their subjects for reasons which they could often have avoided (with no loss to their pleasures moreover) if only they had been warned in time and corrected. As a rule favourites are more concerned for themselves than for their master: and that serves them well, for in truth it is tough and perilous to assay showing the offices of real affection towards your sovereign: the result is that not only a great deal of good-will and frankness are needed but also considerable courage.

In short all this jumble that I am jotting down here is but an account of the assays of my life: it is, where the mind’s health is concerned, exemplary enough – if you work against its grain. But where the body’s health is concerned no one can supply more useful experience than I, who present it pure, in no wise spoiled or adulterated by science or theory. In the case of medicine, experience is on its own proper dung-heap, where reason voids the field.fn63 Tiberius said that anyone who had lived for twenty years ought to be able to tell himself which things are harmful to his health and which are beneficial and to know how to proceed without medicine.fn64 [C] Perhaps he learned that from Socrates who when advising his followers to devote themselves assiduously, with a most particular devotion, to their health added that if a man of intelligence was careful about his eating, drinking and exercise, it would be difficult for him not to discern what was good or bad for him better than his doctor could.fn65

[B] Certainly medicine professes always to have experience as the touchstone of its performance. Plato was therefore right to say that to be a true doctor would require that anyone who would practise as such should have recovered from all the illnesses which he claimed to cure and have gone through all the symptoms and conditions on which he would seek to give an opinion.fn66 If doctors want to know how to cure syphilis it is right that they should first catch it themselves! I would truly trust the one who did; for the others pilot us like a man who remains seated at his table, painting seas, reefs and harbours and, in absolute safety, pushing a model boat over them. Pitch him into doing the real thing and he does not know where to start. They give the kind of description of our maladies as the town-crier announcing a lost horse or hound: this colour coat, so many span high, this kind of ears: but confront him with it, and for all that he cannot identify it. By God let medicine provide me with some good and perceptible help some day and I will proclaim in good earnest,

Tandem efficaci do manus scientiæ!

[At last I yield to thy effective Art!]fn67

Those disciplines which promise to maintain our bodies in health and our souls in health promise a great deal:fn68 yet none keeps their promises less than they do; and those who profess those Arts in our own time show the effects of them less than any other men. The most you can say of them is that they trade in the materia medica of those healing Arts: that they are healers you cannot say. I have lived long enough now to give an account of the regimen which has got me thus far. Should anyone want to try it, I have assayed it first as his taster. Here are a few items as memory supplies them. [C] (There is no practice of mine which has not been varied according to circumstances, but I note here those which, so far, I have most often seen at work and which are rooted in me.)

[B] My regimen is the same in sickness as in health: I use the same bed, same timetable, same food and same drink. I add absolutely nothing except for increasing and decreasing the measure depending on my strength and appetite. Health means for me the maintaining of my usual route without let or hindrance. I can see that my illness has blocked one direction for me: if I put trust in doctors they will turn me away from the other, so there I am off my route either by destiny or their Art; there is nothing that I believe so certainly as this: that carrying on with anything to which I have so long been accustomed cannot do me harm. It is for custom to give shape to our lives, such shape as it will – in such matters it can do anything. It is the cup of Circe which changes our nature as it pleases. How many peoples are there, not three yards from us, who think that our fear of the cool evening air – which ‘so evidently’ harms us – is ludicrous; and our boatsmen and our peasants laugh at us too.

You make a German ill if you force him to lie in bed on a straw mattress, as you do an Italian on a feather one, or a Frenchman without bed-curtains or a fire. The stomach of a Spaniard cannot tolerate the way we eat: nor can ours the way the Swiss drink. I was amused by a German in Augsburg who attacked our open hearths, emphasizing their drawbacks with the same arguments which we normally use against their stoves! And it is true that those stoves give out an oppressive heat and that the materials of which they are built produce when hot a smell which causes headaches in those who are not used to them: not however in me. On the other hand since the heat they give out is even, constant and spread over-all, without the visible flame, the smoke and the draught produced for us by our chimneys, it has plenty of grounds for standing comparison with ours. (Why do we not imitate the building methods of the Romans, for it is said that in antiquity their house-fires were lit outside, at basement level; from there hot air was blown to all the house through pipes set within the thickness of the walls which surrounded the areas to be heated. I have seen that clearly suggested somewhere in Seneca, though I forget where.)fn69 That man in Augsburg, on hearing me praise the advantages and beauties of his city (which indeed deserved it) started to pity me because I had to leave it; among the chief inconveniences he cited to me was the heavy head I would get ‘from those open hearths yonder’. He had heard somebody make this complaint and linked it with us, custom preventing him from noticing the same thing at home.

Any heat coming from a fire makes me weak and drowsy. Yet Evenus maintained that fire was life’s condiment.fn70 I adopt in preference any other way of escaping the cold.

We avoid wine from the bottom of the barrel; in Portugal they adore its savour: it is the drink of princes. In short each nation has several customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.

What shall we do with those people who will receive only printed testimony, who will not believe anyone who is not in a book, nor truth unless it be properly aged? [C] We set our stupidities in dignity when we set them in print. [B] For these people there is far more weight in saying, ‘I have read that …’ than if you say, ‘I have heard tell that …’ But I (who have the same distrust of a man’s pen as his tongue; who know that folk write with as little discretion as they talk and who esteem this age as much as any other former one) as willingly cite a friend of mine as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius, and what I have seen as what they have written. [C] And just as it is held that duration does not heighten virtue,fn71 I similarly reckon that truth is no wiser for being more ancient.

[B] I often say that it is pure silliness which sets us chasing after foreign and textbook exemplars. They are produced no less abundantly nowadays than in the times of Homer and Plato. But are we not trying to impress people by our quotations rather than by the truth of what they say? – as though it were a [C] greater thing [B] to borrow our proofs from the bookshops of Vascosan and Plantin than from our village?fn72 Or is it that we do not have wit enough to select and exploit whatever happens in front of us or to judge it so acutely as to draw examples from it? For if we say that we lack the requisite authority to produce faith in our testimony we are off the point: in my opinion the most ordinary things, the most commonplace and best-known can constitute, if we know how to present them in the right light, the greatest of Nature’s miracles and the most amazing of examples, notably on the subject of human actions.fn73

Now on this topic of mine (leaving aside any examples I know from books [C] and what Aristotle said of Andros the Argive who traversed the arid sands of Lybia without once drinking),fn74[B] a nobleman who has acquitted himself with honour of several charges stated in my presence that he had journeyed without drinking from Madrid to Lisbon in the height of summer. He is vigorous for his age and there is nothing in his way of life which goes beyond the normal Order except that he can, so he told me, do without drinking for two or three months or even a year. He feels a little thirsty but lets it pass: he maintains that it is a craving which can easily weaken by itself. He drinks more on impulse than from necessity, or for enjoyment.

Here is another. Not long ago I came across one of the most learned men in France – a man of more than moderate wealth; he was studying in a corner of his hall which had been partitioned off with tapestries; around him were his menservants making the most disorderly racket. He told me – [C] and Seneca said much the same of himselffn75 – [B] that he found their hubbub useful: it was as though, when he was being battered by that din, he could withdraw and close in on himself so as to meditate, and that those turbulent voices hammered his thoughts right in. When he was a student at Padua his work-room was for so long subject to the clatter of wagons and the tumultuous uproar of the market-place that he had trained himself not merely to ignore the noise but to exploit it in the service of his studies. [C] When Alcibiades asked in amazement how Socrates could put up with the sound of his wife’s perpetual nagging, he replied: ‘Just like those who get used to the constant grating of wheels drawing water from the well.’fn76 [B] I am quite the opposite: I have a mind which is delicate and easy to distract: when it withdraws aside to concentrate, the least buzzing of a fly is enough to murder it!

[C] When Seneca was a young man, having been keenly bitten by the example of Sextius, he ate nothing that had been slaughtered. For a whole year he did without meat – with great pleasure as he relates. He did give up that diet, but only to avoid the suspicion of being influenced by certain new religions which were disseminating it. He had adopted at the same time one of the precepts of Attalus: never to lie on soft mattresses; until his death he continued to use the kinds which do not yield to the body.fn77 That which the customs of his day led him to count as an austerity our own make us think of as an indulgence.

[B] Consider the diversity between the way of life of my farm-labourers and my own. Scythia and the Indies have nothing more foreign to my force or my form. And this I know: I took some boys off begging into my service: soon afterwards they left me, my cuisine and their livery merely to return to their old life. I came across one of them gathering snails from the roadside for his dinner: neither prayer nor menace could drag him away from the sweet savour he found in poverty. Beggars have their distinctions and their pleasures as do rich men, and, so it is said, their own political offices and orders.

Such are the effects of Habituation: she can not only mould us to the form which pleases her (that is why, say the wise, we must cling to the best form, which she will straightway make easy for us)fn78 but also mould us for change and variation (which are the noblest and most useful of her crafts). Of my own physical endowments the best is that I am flexible and not stubborn: some of my inclinations are more proper to me than others, more usual and more agreeable, but with very little effort I can turn away from them and glide easily into an opposite style. A young man ought to shake up his regular habits in order to awaken his powers and stop them from getting lazy and stale. And there is no way of life which is more feeble and stupid than one which is guided by prescriptions and instilled habit:fn79

Ad primum lapidem vectari cum placet, hora

Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli

Angulus, inspecta genesi collyria quærit.

[Does he want to be borne as far as the first milestone? Then he consults his almanack to find out the best time. Has he got a sore in the corner of an eye? Then he consults his horoscope before buying some ointment.]fn80

If he trusts me a young man will often jump to the other extreme: if he does not, the least excess will undermine him: he makes himself disagreeable and clumsy in society. The most incompatible quality in a gentleman is to be over-nicely bound to one fixed idiosyncratic manner: and idiosyncratic it is, if it is not pliable and supple. There is disgrace in being incapable or afraid of doing what your companions are up to. Such men should stay in their kitchens! Unbecoming it is, in everyone else: in a warrior it is vile and not to be endured; he, as Philopoemen said, must get accustomed to all kinds of this life’s changes and hardships.fn81

Although I was brought up, as much as is humanly possible, for freedom and flexibility, nevertheless as I grow older I am becoming through indifference more fixed in certain forms (I am past the age for elementary schooling; now old age has no other concern than to look after itself); without my noticing it, custom has imprinted its stamp on me so well where some things are concerned that any departure from it I call excess; and I cannot, without turning it into an assay of myself, sleep by day, eat snacks between meals, nor eat breakfast, nor go to bed after supper without having a considerable gap, [C] say three hours or more, [B] nor have sexual intercourse except before going to sleep, nor do it standing up, nor remain soaking with sweat, nor drink either water or wine unmixed, nor remain for long with my head uncovered, nor have my hair cut after dinner. I would feel just as ill at ease without gloves or shirt, or without a wash on leaving the table and when getting up in the morning, or lying in a bed without canopy and curtains, as I would if forced to do without things which really matter.

I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin as the Germans do. I dirty my napkins more than they or the Italians and rarely seek the aid of spoon or fork. I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins like plates with each course.

We are told that as Marius grew older, tough old soldier though he was, he became choosy about his wine and would only drink it out of his own special goblet. [C] I too inclinefn82 towards glasses of a particular shape and I no more like drinking out of a common cup than I would like eating out of common fingers; and I dislike all metals compared with clear transparent materials. Let my eyes too taste it to the full.

[B] Several such foibles I owe to habit: on the other hand Nature has contributed her own, such as my not being able to stand more than two proper meals a day without overloading my stomach, nor to go without a meal altogether without filling myself with wind, parching my mouth and upsetting my appetite; nor can I stand a long exposure to the evening dew. During these last few years when a whole night has to be spent (as often happens) on some military task, my stomach begins to bother me after five or six hours; I have splitting headaches and can never get through to morning without vomiting. Then, while the others go to breakfast, I have a sleep; after which I am quite happy again.

I had always been taught that evening dew formed only after night-fall, but upon frequenting a nobleman who was imbued with the belief that such dew is more dangerous and severe two or three hours before sunset (when he scrupulously avoids going out) he made such an impression on me that I almost not so much believed it as felt it. Well now, that very doubt and concern for our health can hammer our thought-process and change us. Those who slide precipitously down slopes such as that bring disaster upon themselves. There are several gentlemen for whom I feel pity: through the stupidity of their doctors they shut themselves up indoors while still young and healthy; it would be better to put up with a chill rather than forever to forgo joining in common everyday life outdoors. [C] What a grievous skill medicine is, disparaging for us the more delightful hours of the day. [B] Let us extend our hold on things by every means we possess. Usually if you stubborn things out you toughen yourself up, correcting your complexion by despising it and seducing it, as Caesar did his epilepsy. We should give ourselves, but not enslave ourselves, to the best precepts, except in such cases (if there be any) in which constraint and slavery serve a purpose.

Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.fn83 The lives of public figures are devoted to etiquette: my life, an obscure and private one, can enjoy all the natural functions: moreover to be a soldier and to come from Gascony are both qualities given to forthrightness. And so of that activity I shall say that it needs to be consigned to a set hour – not daytime – to which we should subject ourselves by force of habit, as I have done, but not (as applies to me now that I am growing old) subject to the pleasures of a particular place and seat for this function, nor to making it uncomfortable by prolonging it or by being fastidious. All the same, is it not to some extent pardonable to require more care and cleanliness for our dirtiest functions? [C] ‘Natura homo mundum et elegans animal est.’ [By Nature Man is a clean and neat creature.]fn84 Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being interrupted. [B] I have known many a soldier put out by the irregularity of his bowels. My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous, which is (unless some urgent business or illness disturbs us) when I jump out of bed.

So, as I was saying, I can give no judgement about how the sick can be better looked after except that they should quietly hold to the pattern of life in which they have been schooled and brought up. Change of any kind produces bewilderment and trauma. Convince yourself if you can that chestnuts are harmful to the men of Périgord or Lucca, or milk and cheese to folk in the highlands! Yet the sick are constantly prescribed not merely a new way of life but an opposite one – such a revolution as could not be endured by a healthy man. Prescribe water for a seventy-year-old Breton; shut a sailorman up in a vapour-bath; forbid a Basque manservant to go for walks! They are deprived of motion and finally of breath and the light of day:

An vivere tanti est?

[Is life worth that much?]fn85

Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,

Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus.

Hos superesse rear, quibus et spirabilis aer

Et lux qua regimur redditur ipsa gravis?

[We are compelled to deprive our souls of what they are used to; to stay alive we must cease to live! Should I count among the survivors those men for whom the very air they breathe and the light which lightens them have become a burden?]

If doctors do nothing else, they do at least in plenty of time prepare their patients to die, sapping and retrenching their contacts with life.

Sound or sick I willingly let myself follow such appetites as become pressing. I grant considerable authority to my desires and predispositions. I do not like curing one ill by another; I loathe remedies which are more importunate than the sickness: being subjected to colic paroxysms and then made to abstain from the pleasure of eating oysters are two ills for the price of one. On this side we have the illness hurting us, on the other the diet. Since we must risk being wrong, let us risk what gives us pleasure, rather. The world does the reverse, thinking that nothing does you good unless it hurts: pleasantness is suspect. In many things my appetite, of its own volition, has most successfully accommodated and adapted itself to the well-being of my stomach. When I was young I liked the tartness and sharp savour of sauces: my stomach being subsequently troubled by them, my taste for them at once followed its lead.

[C] Wine is bad for the sick: it is the first thing I lose my taste for, my tongue finding it unpleasant, invincibly unpleasant. [B] Anything the taste of which I find unpleasant does me harm: nothing does me harm if I swallow it hungrily and joyfully. I have never been bothered by anything I have done in which I found great pleasure. And that is why I have, by and large, made all medical prescriptions give way to what pleases me.

When I was young –

Quem circumcursans huc atque huc sæpe Cupido

Fulgebat, crocina splendidus in tunica,

[when shining Cupid flew here and there about me, resplendent in his saffron tunic,]fn86

– I yielded as freely and as thoughtlessly as anyone to the pleasure which then seized hold of me:

Et militavi non sine gloria,

[and I fought not without glory,]

making it last and prolonging it, however, rather than making sudden thrusts.

Sex me vix memini sustinuisse vices.

[I cannot recall managing it more than six times in a row.]fn87

There is indeed some worry and wonder in confessing at what tender an age I happened to fall first into Cupid’s power – ‘happened’ is indeed right, for it was long before the age of discretion and awareness – so long ago that I cannot remember anything about myself then. You can wed my fortune to that of Quartilla, who could not remember ever having been a virgin.fn88

Inde tragus celeresque pili, mirandaque matri

Barba meæ.

[My armpits had precocious hairs and stank like a goat: Mother was astonished by my early beard.]

The doctors usually bend their rules – usefully – before the violence of the intense cravings which surprise the sick: such a great desire cannot be thought of as so strange or vicious that Nature is not at work in it. And then, what a great thing it is to satisfy our imagination. In my opinion that faculty concerns everything, at least more than any other does: the most grievous and frequent of ills are those which imagination loads upon us. From several points of view I like that Spanish saying: ‘Defienda me Dios de my.’ [God save me from myself.] When I am ill what I lament is that I have no desire then which gives me the satisfaction of assuaging it: Medicine would never stop me doing so! It is the same when I am well: I have scarcely anything left to hope or to wish for now. It is pitiful to be faint and feeble even in your desires.

The art of medicine has not reached such certainty that, no matter what we do, we cannot find some authority for doing it. Medicine changes according to the climate, according to the phases of the moon, according to Fernel and according to Scaliger. If your own doctor does not find it good for you to sleep, to use wine or any particular food, do not worry: I will find you another who does not agree with his advice. The range of differing medical arguments and opinions embraces every sort of variety. I knew one wretched patient, weak and fainting with thirst as part of his cure, who was later laughed at by another doctor who condemned that treatment as harmful. Had his suffering been to some purpose? Well there is a practitioner of that mystery who recently died of the stone and who had used extreme abstinence in fighting that illness: his fellow-doctors say that, on the contrary, such deprivation had desiccated him, maturating the sand in his kidneys.

I have noted that when I am sick or wounded talking excites me and does me as much harm as any of my excesses. Speaking takes it out of me and tires me, since my voice is so strong and booming that when I have needed to have a word in the ear of the great on a matter of some gravity I have often put them to the embarrassment of asking me to lower it.

The following tale is worth a digression: there was in one of the schools of the Greeks a man who used to talk loudly as I do. The Master of debate sent to tell him to speak lower: ‘Let him send and tell me what volume he wants me to adopt,’ he said. The Master replied that he should pitch his voice to the ears of the man he was addressing.fn89 Now that was well said, provided that he meant, ‘Speak according to the nature of your business with your hearer.’ For if he meant, ‘It is enough if people can catch what you say,’ or, ‘Let yourself be governed by your hearer,’ then I do not believe that he was right. Volume and intonation contribute to the expression of meaning: it is for me to control them so that I can make myself understood. There is a voice for instructing, a voice for pleasing or for reproving. I may want my voice not simply to reach the man but to hit him or go right through him. When I am barking at my footman with a rough and harsh voice, a fine thing it would be if he came and said to me, ‘Speak more softly, Master. I can hear you quite well.’ [C] ‘Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata, non magnitudine sed proprietate.’ [There is a kind of voice which impresses the hearer not by its volume but its own peculiar quality.]fn90 [B] Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer. The latter must prepare himself to receive them according to such motion as they acquire, just as among those who play royal-tennis the one who receives the ball steps backwards or prepares himself, depending on the movements of the server or the form of his stroke.

Experience has also taught me that we are ruined by impatience. Illnesses have their life and their limits,fn91 [C] their maladies and their good health. The constitution of illnesses is formed on the pattern of that of animals: from birth their lot is assigned limits, and so are their days. Anyone who makes an assay at imperiously shortening them by interrupting their course prolongs them and makes them breed, irritating them instead of quietening them down. I am of Crantor’s opinion that we should neither resist illnesses stubbornly and rashly nor succumb to them out of weakness but yield to them naturally, according to our own mode of being and to theirs.fn92 [B] We must afford them right-of-passage, and I find that they stay less long with me, who let them go their way; and through their own decline I have rid myself of some which are held to be the most tenacious and stubborn, with no help from that Art and against its prescriptions. Let us allow Nature to do something! She understands her business better than we do. – ‘But so-and-so died of it!’ – So will you, of that illness or some other. And how many have still died of it with three doctors by their arses? Precedent is [C] an uncertain looking-glass, [B] all-embracing, [C] turning all ways.fn93 [B] If the medicine tastes nice, take it: that is so much immediate gain at least. [C] I will not jib at its name or colour if it is delicious and whets my appetite for it. One of the principal species of profit is pleasure. [B] Among the illnesses which I have allowed to grow old and die of a natural death within me are rheums, fluxions of gout, diarrhoeas, coronary palpitations and migraines, which I lost just when I was half-resigned to having them batten on me. You can conjure them away better by courtesy than by bravado. We must quietly suffer the laws of Man’s condition. Despite all medicine, we are made for growing old, growing weaker and falling ill. That is the first lesson which the Mexicans teach to their children when, on leaving their mother’s womb, they greet them thus: ‘Child: thou hast come into this world to suffer: suffer, endure and hold thy peace.’

It is unfair to moan because what can happen to any has happened to one: [C] ‘indignare si quid in te inique proprie constitutum est’ [if anything is unjustly decreed against you alone, that is the time to complain].fn94

[B] Here you see an old man praying God to keep him entirely healthy and strong – that is to say, to make him young again:

Stulte, quid hæc frustra votis puerilibus optas?

[You fool. What do you hope to gain by such useless, childish prayers?]fn95

Is it not madness? His mode of being does not allow it. [C] Gout, gravel and bad digestion go with long years just as heat, wind and rain go with long journeys. Plato does not believe that Aesculapius should trouble to provide remedies to prolong life in a weak and wasted body, useless to its country, useless to its vocation and useless for producing healthy robust sons: nor does he find such a preoccupation becoming to the justice and wisdom of God who must govern all things to a useful purpose.fn96 [B] It is all over, old chap: nobody can put you back on your feet; they will [C] at most [B] bandage and prop you up for a bit, [C] prolonging your misery an hour or so:

[B] Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,

Diversis contra nititur obicibus,

Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,

Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.

[As a man, desiring to keep a building from collapsing, shores it up with various props until there comes the day when all the scaffolding shatters and the props collapse together with the building.]fn97

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life. Without such blending our being cannot be: one category is no less necessary than the other. To assay kicking against natural necessity is to reproduce the mad deed of Ctesiphon who, to a kicking-match, challenged his mule.fn98

I do not go in much for consultations over such deterioration as I feel: once those medical fellows have you at their mercy they boss you about: they batter your ears with their prognostics. Once, taking advantage of me when I was weak and ill, they abused me with their dogmas and their masterly [C] frowns,fn99 [B] threatening me with great suffering and then with imminent death. They did not succeed in knocking me down or dislodging me from my fortress, but I was jolted and jostled: my judgement was neither changed nor troubled by them but it was at least preoccupied, and that means so much agitation and strife. I treat my imagination as gently as I am able, freeing it if I can from the load of any pain and conflict. Anyone who can should help it, stroke it, mislead it. My wit is well suited to such service: it never runs out of specious arguments about anything. If it could convince as well as it preaches its help would be most welcome.

Would you like an example? It tells me: that it is for my own good that I have the gravel; that structures as old as I am are naturally subject to seepage (it is time they began to totter apart and decay; that is a common necessity, otherwise would not some new miracle have been performed just for me? I am paying the debt due to old age and could not get off more lightly); that I should be consoled by the fact that I have company, since I have fallen into the most routine illness for men of my age (on all sides I can see men afflicted by a malady of the same nature as mine and their companionship honours me since that malady willingly strikes the aristocracy: its essence is noble and dignified); and that, of the men who are stricken with it few get off more lightly – and even then it is at the cost of having the bother of following a nasty diet and of taking troublesome daily doses of medicine, whereas I owe everything to my good fortune. (As for the few routine concoctions of eryngo or burstwortfn100 which I have swallowed twice or thrice thanks to those ladies who gave me half of their own to drink (their courtesy exceeding in degree the pain of my complaint) they seemed to me to be as easy to take as they were ineffectual in practice.) For that easy and abundant discharge of gravel which I have often been vouchsafed by the bounty of Nature, those men had to pay a thousand vows to Aesculapius and as many crowns to their doctor. [C] (In normal company my comportment remains decorous, even, and is untroubled by my illness; and I can hold my urine for ten hours at a time – as long as the next man.)

[B] ‘The fear of this illness,’ (to go on), ‘used to terrify you: that was when it was unknown to you; the screams and distress of those who make the pain more acute by their unwillingness to bear it engendered a horror of it in you. This illness afflicts those members of yours by which you have most erred. You are a man with some sense of right and wrong:

Quæ venit indigne pæna, dolenda venit.

[Only punishment undeserved comes with cause for anger.]fn101

Reflect on this chastisement: it is mild indeed compared with others and shows a Fatherly kindness.fn102 Reflect on how late it appeared: having first made a compact by which it gave free-play to the excesses and pleasures of your youth, it occupies with its vexations only that season of your life which, willy-nilly, is sterile and forlorn. The fear and pity felt by people for this illness gives you something to glory about (you may have purged your judgement and cured your reason of such glorying, but those who love you still recognize some stain of it within your complexion). There is pleasure in hearing them say about you: “There’s fortitude for you! There’s long-suffering!” They see you sweating under the strain, turning pale, flushing, trembling, sicking up everything including blood, suffering curious spasms and convulsions, sometimes shedding huge tears from your eyes, excreting frightening kinds of urine, thick and black, or finding that they are retained by some sharp stone, bristling with spikes which cruelly jab into the neck of your prick and skin it bare: you, meanwhile, chat with those about you, keeping your usual expression, occasionally clowning about with [C] your servants,fn103 [B] defending your corner in a tense argument, apologizing for any sign of pain and understating your suffering.

‘Do you remember those men of yore who greatly hungered after ills so as to keep their virtue in trim and practise it? Supposing Nature is pushing and shoving you into that [C] proud [B] Sectfn104 into which you would never have entered on your own! If you tell me that yours is a dangerous, killing affliction, which of the others is not? For it is medical hocus-pocus to pick out some and say that they do not follow a direct line towards death: what does it matter if they only lead there incidentally, floundering along by-ways in the same direction as the road which leads us thither? [C] You are not dying because you are ill: you are dying because you are alive;fn105 Death can kill you well enough without illness to help her. In some cases illnesses have postponed death, the sick living longer precisely because they thought they were a-dying; besides, just as there are some wounds which cure you or make you better, so too there are some illnesses. [B] Your colic is often no less tenacious of life than you are: we know of men in whom it has lasted from childhood to extreme old age: and it would have gone along with them further if they themselves had not deserted its company. Men kill the stone more than it kills men. And if it did present you with the idea of imminent death, would it not be doing a good turn to a man of your age to bring him to meditate upon his end?

[C] ‘And the worst of it is you have nobody left to be cured for. As soon as she likes, whatever you do, our common Fate is summoning you. [B] Reflect on how skilfully and gently your colic makes you lose your taste for life and detaches you from the world – not compelling you by some tyrannous subjection as do so many other afflictions found in old men which keep them continually fettered to weakness and unremittingly in pain but with intermittent warnings and counsels interspersed with long periods of respite, as if to give you the means to meditate on its lesson and to go over it again at leisure. And so as to give you the means to make a sound judgement and to be resolved like a sensible man, it shows you the state of the whole human condition, both good and bad, shows you, during one single day, a life at times full of great joy, at times unbearable. Although you may not throw your arms about Death’s neck, you do, once a month, shake her by the hand. [C] That gives you more reason to hope that Death will snatch you one day without warning and that, having so often brought you as far as the jetty, one morning, unexpectedly, when you are trusting that you are still on the usual terms, you and your trust will have crossed the Styx. [B] You have no need to complain of illnesses which share their time fairly with health.’

I am obliged to Fortune for the fact that she so often uses the same sort of weapons to assail me: she forms me and schools me for them by habit, hardens me and makes me used to them: I more or less know now what it will cost me to be released from what I owe them. [C] (Lacking a natural memory I forge one from paper: whenever some new feature occurs in my affliction, I jot it down. And so by now, when I have gone through virtually every category of examples of such symptoms, whenever some appalling crisis threatens me I can without fail, by flipping through my notes (which are as loose as the leaves of the Sibyls), find grounds for consolation in some favourable prognosis based on past experience.) [B] Such habituation helps me to hope for better things in the future: this way of voiding the stone has continued for such a long time now that it is probable that Nature will not change the way of it and that nothing worse will happen than what I already know.

Moreover the properties of this Affliction of mine are not ill-suited to my complexion, which is quick and sudden. It is when she makes mild assaults on me that she frightens me, for that means a long spell: yet she is by nature a thing of violent and audacious bouts, giving me a thorough shaking up for a day or two. My kidneys held out for [C] an age [B] without deterioration: it will soon be [C] another age, now, [B] sincefn106 they changed their condition. Ills as well as blessings run their courses. Perhaps this misfortune is near its end. Old age reduces the heat of my stomach, which therefore digests things less perfectly and dispatches waste matter to my kidneys: so why should the heat of my kidneys, after a stated period has rolled by, not similarly be reduced, rendering them unable to continue to petrify my phlegm and obliging Nature to find some other means of purging it? It is clear that the passing years have exhausted some of my discharges: why not then those excretions which furnish the raw material for my gravel?

But is there anything so delightful as that sudden revolution when I pass from the extreme pain of voiding my stone and recover, in a flash, the beauteous light of health, full and free, as happens when our colic paroxysms are at their sharpest and most sudden? Is there anything in that suffered pain which can outweigh the joy of so prompt a recovery? Oh how much more beautiful health looks to me after illness, when they are such close neighbours that I can study both, each in her full armour, each in each other’s presence, defying each other as though intending to stubborn it out and hold their ground! The Stoics say that the vices were introduced for a purpose – to second virtue and make her prized: we can say, with better justification and less bold conjecture, that Nature has lent us suffering in order that it may honour and serve the purposes of pleasure and of mere absence of pain. When Socrates was freed from the load of his fetters he enjoyed the delicate tingling in his legs that their pressure had produced and he delighted in thinking about the close confederacy that there is between pain and pleasure, so bound together in fellowship as they are by bonds of necessity that they succeed each other and mutually produce each other; and he exclaimed that that excellent man Aesop ought to have drawn from such factors the substance of a beautiful fable.fn107

For the worst feature of other maladies is that they are less grievous in what they do at the time than in what comes later: you spend a whole year convalescing, all the time full of fear and debility. There is so much hazard in recovery, so many levels involved, that there is no end to it all: before they let you strip off your scarves and then your nightcaps, before they have allowed you to avail yourself again of fresh air, wine, your wife – and of melons – it is quite something if you have not had a relapse into some new wretchedness. My illness is privileged to make a clean break: the others lend each other a hand: they always leave some dent and weakness in you which render your body susceptible to some fresh woe. We can condone such illnesses as are content with their own rights-of-possession over us without introducing their brood: but those whose journey through us produces some useful result are courteous and gracious. Since my stone I find that I have been freed from the load of other ailments and that I seem to feel better than I did before. I have not had a temperature since! I reason that the frequent and extreme vomiting which I suffer purges me and that, from another aspect, the losses of appetite and bizarre fastings which I go through disperse my offending humours, Nature voiding with those stones all her noxious superfluities. And do not tell me that such medicine is bought at too high a price. What about those stinking possets, those cauterizations, incisions, sweat-baths, drainings of pus, diets and those many forms of treatment which often bring death upon us when we cannot withstand their untimely onslaught! So when I suffer an attack I consider it to be a cure: when freed from it, I consider that to be a durable and complete deliverance.

Another specific blessing of my illness is that it all but gets on with its own business and (unless I lose heart) lets me get on with mine. I have withstood it, at the height of an attack, for ten hours at a time in the saddle. ‘Just put up with it, that’s all! You need no other prescription: enjoy your sports, dine, ride, do anything at all if you can: your indulgences will do you more good than harm.’ Try saying that to a man with syphilis, the gout or a rupture! The constraints of other illnesses are more all-embracing: they are far more restricting on our activities, upsetting our normal ways of doing anything and requiring us to take account of them throughout the entire state of our lives. Mine does no more than pinch the epidermis: it leaves you free to dispose of your wit and your will as well as of your tongue, your hands and your feet. Rather than battering you numb, it stimulates you. It is your soul which is attacked by a burning fever, cast to the ground by epilepsy, dislodged by an intense migraine and, in short, struck senseless by those illnesses which attack all the humours and the nobler organs. Such are not attacked in my case: if things go ill for my soul, too bad for her! She is betraying, surrendering and disarming herself. Only fools let themselves be persuaded that a solid, massy substance concocted within our kidneys can be dissolved by draughts of medicine. So, once it starts to move, all you can do is to grant it right-of-passage: it will take it anyway.

There is another specific advantage that I have noticed: it is an illness which does not leave us guessing. It dispenses us from the turmoil into which other ills cast us because of uncertainties about their causes, properties and development – an infinitely distressing turmoil. We need have nothing to do with consulting specialists and hearing their opinions: our senses can show us what it is and where it is.

With such arguments, both strong and feeble, I try, as Cicero did with that affliction which was his old age, to benumb and delude my power of thought and to put ointment on its wounds. And tomorrow, if they grow worse, we will provide other escape-routes for them.

[C] To show that that is true, since I wrote that, the slightest movements which I make have begun to squeeze pure blood from my kidneys again. Yet because of that I do not stop moving about exactly as I did before and spurring after my hounds with a youthful and immoderate zeal. And I find that I have got much the better of so important a development, which costs me no more than a dull ache and heaviness in the region of those organs. Some great stone is compressing the substance of my kidneys and eating into it: what I am voiding drop by drop – and not without some natural pleasure – is my life blood, which has become from now on some noxious and superfluous discharge.

[B] Can I feel something disintegrating? Do not expect me to waste time having my pulse and urine checked so that anxious prognostics can be drawn from them: I will be in plenty of time to feel the anguish without prolonging things by an anguished fear. [C] Anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid. And then the hesitation and ignorance of those who undertake to explain the principles by which Nature operates and her inner progression (as well as the false prognoses of their Art) oblige us to recognize that she keeps her processes absolutely unknown. In her promises and threats there is great uncertainty, variability and obscurity. With the exception of old age (which is an undoubted prognostic of the approach of death), in all our other maladies I can find few prognostics of the future on which we should base our predictions. [B] Judgements about myself I make from true sensation not from argument: what else? since all I intend to bring to bear are patience and endurance. ‘What do I gain from that?’ do you ask? Look at those who act otherwise and who rely on all that contradictory counsel and advice. How often does their imagination assail them, independently of the body! When safely delivered from a dangerous bout, I have often found pleasure in consulting doctors about it as though it were just starting. Fully at ease I would put up with the formulation of their terrifying diagnoses, and would remain that much more indebted to God for his mercy and better instructed in the vanity of that Art.

There is nothing which ought to be commended to youth more than being active and energetic. Our life is but motion: I am hard to budge and sluggish about everything, including getting up, going to bed and eating. For me, seven o’clock is early morning! And where I head the household I never lunch before eleven nor have supper after six. The causes of those feverish ailments which I formerly used to fall into I once ascribed to the heaviness and sluggishness brought on by prolonged sleep; and I have always regretted falling back to sleep again of a morning. [C] Plato is harder against excessive sleep than excessive drink.fn108

[B] I like a hard bed all to myself, indeed (as kings do) without my wife, with rather too many blankets. I never use a warming-pan, but, since I have grown old, whenever I need them they give me coverlets to warm my feet and stomach. The great Scipio was criticized for being a slug-abed, for no other reason, if you ask me, than that it irritated people that in him alone there was nothing to criticize.fn109 If I am fastidious about an item in my regimen it is more about bed than anything else: but on the whole I yield to necessity as well as anyone [C] and adjust to it. [B] Sleeping has taken up a large slice of my life and even at my age I can sleep eight or nine hours at a stretch. I am finding it useful to rid myself of this propensity towards laziness and am clearly the better for it. I am feeling the shock of such a revolution, but only for two or three days. And I know hardly anyone who can do with less sleep when the need arises, who can keep on working more continuously or feel less than I do the weight of the drudgery of war. My body is capable of sustained exertions but not of sudden, violent ones. I avoid nowadays all violent activities including those which bring on sweat: before my limbs get hot they feel exhausted. I can be on my feet all day, and I never tire when walking. Over paved roads however, [C] since my earliest childhood [B] I have always preferred to go by horse:fn110 when on foot I splatter mud right up to my backside; and in our streets little men are liable to being jostled [C] and elbowed aside, [B] for want of an imposing appearance. And I have always liked to rest, lying or seated, with my legs at least as high as the bench.

No occupation is as enjoyable as soldiering – an occupation both noble in its practice (since valour is the mightiest, most magnanimous and proudest of the virtues) and noble in its purpose: there is no service you can render more just nor more complete than protecting the peace and greatness of your country. You enjoy the comradeship of so many men who are noble, young and active, the daily sight of so many sublime dramas, the freedom of straightforward fellowship as well as a manly, informal mode of life, the diversions of hundreds of different activities, the heart-stirring sound of martial music which fills your ears and enflames your soul, as well as the honour of this activity,fn111 its very pains and hardships, [C] which Plato rates so low in his Republic that he allocates a share in it to women and children. [B] You urge yourself to accept specific tasks or hazards, depending upon your judgement of their splendour or importance; [C] you are a volunteer [B] and can see when your life itself may justifiably be sacrificed to them:

pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.

[it is indeed beautiful, I think, to die in battle.]fn112

It is for a mind [C] weak [B] and base beyond all measure to be afraid of risks shared in common with a crowd of others, or not to dare to do what men of so many kinds of soul may dare. The comradeship gives confidence to the very boys. Others may surpass you in knowledge, grace, force or fortune: in that case you can put the responsibility for it on to a third party: but if you yield to them in fortitude of soul you alone are responsible. Death is more abject, lingering and painful in bed than in combat: fevers and catarrhs are as painful and as mortal as volleys from harquebuses. Any man who could bear with valour the mischances of ordinary life would have no need to be more courageous on becoming a soldier. [C] ‘Vivere, mi Lucili, militare est.’ [To live, my dear Lucilius, is to do battle.]fn113

I cannot recall ever having had scabies, but scratching is one of the most delightful of Nature’s bounties: and it is always ready to hand! But its neighbour, inconveniently close, is regret for having done it. I mainly practise it on my ears, which from time to time itch inside.

[B] I was born with all my sensesfn114 intact and virtually perfect. My stomach is as sound as you could wish; my head is, too: both usually remain so during my bouts of fever. The same applies to my respiration. I have exceeded [C] recently, by six years, that fiftieth birthday [B] whichfn115 some peoples have not unreasonably laid down as termination of life, one so just that nobody was permitted to go beyond it: yet I still have periods of reprieve which, despite being short and variable, are so flawless that they lack nothing of that pain-free health of my youth. I am not referring to liveliness and vigour: it is not reasonable that they should accompany me beyond their limits:

Non hæc amplius est liminis, aut aquæ

Cælestis, patiens latus.

[No longer can I endure waiting on my mistress’s doorstep in the pouring rain.]fn116

It is my face which gives the game away first; [C] so do my eyes: [B] all changes in me begin there, appearing rather more grim than they are in practice. I often find my friends pitying me before I am aware of any cause. My looking-glass never strikes me with terror, because even in my youth I would often take on a turbid complexion and a look which boded ill without much happening, with the result that the doctors, who could find no cause in my body which produced that outward deterioration, attributed it to my mind and to some secret passion gnawing away within me. They were in error. My body and I would have got on rather better if it had behaved secundum me, as did my Soul which was then not only free from turbidity but, better still, full of joy and satisfaction – as she usually is, half because of her complexion and half by design.

Nec vitiant artus ægræ contagia mentis.

[The illnesses of my mind do not affect my joints.]fn117

I maintain that this disposition of my Soul has repeatedly helped up my body after its falls: my body is often knocked low whereas she, even when not merry, is at least calm and tranquil. I once had a quartan fever for four or five months which put me right out of countenance, yet my mind still went not merely peacefully but happily on her way. Once the pain has gone I am not much depressed by weakness or lassitude. I know of several bodily afflictions which are horrifying even to name but which I fear less than hundreds of current disturbances and distresses of the mind. I have decided never again to run: it is enough for me if I can drag myself along. Nor do I lament the natural decline which has me in its grip:

Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?

[In the Alps is anyone surprised to find goitres?]fn118

– no more do I lament that my lifespan is not as long and massive as an oak’s. I have no cause to complain of my thought-processes: few thoughts in my life have ever disturbed even my sleep, except when concerned with desire (which woke me up without distressing me). I do not dream much: when I do it is of grotesque things and of chimeras usually produced by pleasant thoughts, more laughable than sad. And although I maintain that dreams are loyal interpreters of our inclinations, there is skill in classifying them and understanding them.

[C] Res quæ in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident

Quæque agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea sicut in somno accidunt

Minus mirandum est.

[It is no miracle that men should find again in their dreams things which occupy them in their lives, things which they think about, worry about, gaze upon and do when they are awake.]fn119

Plato further adds that it is wisdom’s task to extract from them information telling of future events. I know nothing about that except the wondrous experiences related by Socrates, Xenophon and Aristotle – great men of irreproachable authority.fn120 The history books tell us that the Atlantes never dream;fn121 they add that they never eat anything which has been slaughtered, a fact which I mention because it may explain why they do not dream, since Pythagoras prescribed a certain preparatory diet designed to encourage dreams.fn122 My dreams are weak things: they occasion no twitching of the body, no talking in my sleep. I have known in my time some who have been astonishingly troubled by them. Theon the philosopher walked while he dreamed (as did the manservant of Perides, on the tiles of the very roof-ridge of his house).fn123

[B] At table I rarely exercise a choice, tackling the first and nearest dish; I do not like shifting about from one taste to another. I dislike a multitude of dishes and courses as much as any other multitude. I can be easily satisfied with a few items and loathe the opinion of Favorinusfn124 that during a feast any dish you are enjoying should be whipped away from you and a new one always brought in instead, and also that it is a wretched supper at which the guests are not stuffed with rumpsteaks exclusively taken from a variety of birds – only the fig-pecker bird being worth eating whole. I frequently eat salted meats but prefer my bread unsalted: the baker in my own kitchen (contrary to local custom) serves no other at my table. When I was a boy I often had to be punished for refusing precisely those things which are usually best liked at that age: sweets, jams and pastries. My tutor opposed this hatred of fancy foods as being itself a kind of fancy. And indeed, no matter what it applies to, it is nothing but finicking over your food: rid a boy of a fixed private love of coarse-bread, bacon or garlic and you rid him of self-indulgence. There are men who groan and suffer for want of beef or ham in the midst of partridge! Good for them: that is to be a gourmet among gourmets: it is a weak ill-favoured taste which finds insipid those ordinary everyday foods, [C] ‘per quae luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit’ [by the which luxury escapes from the boredom of riches].fn125 [B] The essence of that vice consists in failing to enjoy what others do and in taking anxious care over your diet,

Si modica cœnare times olus omne patella.

[If you jib at an herb salad on a modest platter].

There is certainly a difference, in that it is better to shackle your appetite to whatever is easier to obtain: but such shackling is still a vice. I once called a relation of mine self-indulgent because he had forgotten, during a period in our galleys, how to undress at night and sleep in our beds.

If I had any sons I would readily wish them a fate like mine: God gave me a good father (who got nothing from me apart from my acknowledgement of his goodness – one cheerfully given); from the cradle he sent me to be suckled in some poor village of his, keeping me there until I was weaned – longer in fact, training me for the lowliest of lives among the people: [C] ‘Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter. ’ [Freedom consists, for a large part, in having a good-humoured belly.]fn126

[B] Never assume responsibility for such upbringing yourself and even less allow your wives to do so: let boys be fashioned by fortune to the natural laws of the common people; let them become accustomed to frugal and severely simple fare, so that they have to clamber down from austerity rather than scrambling up to it. My father’s humour had yet another goal: to bring me closer to the common-folk and to the sort of men who need our help; he reckoned that I should be brought to look kindly on the man who holds out his hand to me rather than on one who turns his back on me and snubs me. And the reason why he gave me godparents at baptism drawn from people of the most abject poverty was to bind and join me to them. His plan has not turned out too badly. I like doing things for lowly people, either because there is more glory in it or else from innate sympathy (which can work wonders with me). [C] The party I condemn in these wars of ours I would condemn more severely when it is flourishing and successful: it can almost reconcile me to it when I see it [B] wretched and overwhelmed.fn127 How I love to reflect on that beautiful humour of Chelonis who was both daughter and wife of Kings of Sparta: while her husband Cleombrotus had the edge over her father Leonidas she was a good daughter, rallying to her father in his wretched exile and defying the victor. Then fortune veered about, did it not? Whereupon, as fortune changed she changed her mind, ranging herself courageously beside her husband, whom she followed no matter where his downfall drove him, having, it seems, no preference between them but leaping to the support of whichever party needed her more and to whom she could better show pity.fn128 My nature is to follow the example of Flaminius (who lent his support to those who needed him, not to those who could help him) rather than that of Pyrrhus (who had the characteristic of being humble before the great and arrogant before the common-folk).

Long sittings at table [C] irritate me and [B] disagree with me, since, lacking restraint (doubtless because I formed the habit as a boy), I go on eating as long as I am there. That is why at home [C] (even though our meals are among the shorter ones) [B] I like to come in [C] a little [B] after the others, following the fashion of Augustus, although I do not imitate him in leaving before the others. On the contrary: I like to stay on a long time afterwards listening to the conversation, provided that I do not join it since I find it as tiring and painful to talk on a full stomach as I find it a healthy and pleasant exercise to argue and bellow before a meal. [C] The ancient Greeks and Romans were more reasonable than we are: unless some other quite unusual task intervened they assigned to eating (which is one of the chief activities of our lives) several hours a day and the best part of the night, eating and drinking less hurriedly than we do who gallop through everything; they extended both the leisureliness of this natural pleasure and its conviviality by interspersing it with various social duties both useful and pleasant.

[B] Those who [C] ought to take care of me could, [B] at little costfn129 to themselves, cheat me of whatever they think harmful to me, for in such matters I neither want what is not there nor notice its absence: but they also waste their breath if they lecture me on abstaining from whatever is served. The result is that when I resolve to diet you have to put me apart from the other diners, serving me precisely what is sufficient for a moderate snack; for if I sit down at table I forget my resolution. When I order my servants to change the way they are serving up a dish they know that that means my appetite is gone and that I will not touch any. I prefer to eat rare any flesh that lends itself to it. I like it to be well-hung, even in many cases until it starts to smell high. Generally speaking toughness is the only quality which irritates me (towards all others I am as indifferent and long-suffering as anyone), so much so that, contrary to the usual whim, I find even some fish too fresh and firm. That is nothing to do with my teeth which have always been exceedingly good and which only now are starting to be threatened by old age. Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on rising and before and after meals.

God shows mercy to those from whom he takes away life a little at a time: that is the sole advantage of growing old; the last death which you die will be all the less total and painful: it will only be killing off half a man, or a quarter. Look: here is a tooth which has just fallen out with no effort or anguish: it had come to the natural terminus of its time. That part of my being, as well as several other parts, is already dead: others are half-dead, including those which were, during the vigour of my youth, the most energetic and uppermost. That is how I drip and drain away from myself. What animal-stupidity it would be if my intellect took for the whole of that collapse the last topple of an already advanced decline. I hope that mine will not.

[C] To tell the truth the principal consolation I draw from thoughts of my death is that it will be right and natural: from this day forth I could not beg or hope from Destiny any but a wrongful favour. People convince themselves that in former times man’s lifespan, like his height, was bigger. Yet Solon, who belongs to those times, cuts off our extreme limit at three score years and ten.fn130 I, who have in all things so greatly honoured that [img]ριστον μέτρον [excellent Mean] of former ages and who have taken moderation as the most perfect measure, should I aspire to an immoderate and enormously protracted old age? Anything which goes against the current of Nature is capable of being harmful, but everything which accords with her cannot but be pleasant: ‘Omnia quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis.’ [Everything that happens in accordance with Nature must be counted among the things which are good.]fn131 That is why Plato says that deaths caused by wounds and illnesses may be termed violent, but the death which, as Nature leads us toward her, takes us by surprise is of all deaths the lightest to bear and to some extent enjoyable. ‘Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas.’ [Life is wrenched from young men: from old men it comes from ripeness.]

[B] Everywhere death intermingles and merges with our life: our decline anticipates its hour and even forces itself upon our very progress. I have portraits of myself aged twenty-five and thirty-five. I compare them with my portrait now: in how many ways is it no longer me! How far, far more different from them is my present likeness than from what I shall be like in death. It is too much an abuse of Nature to [C] flogfn132 [B] her along so far that she is, for us, compelled to give up and abandon our guidance, our eyes, teeth, legs and so on to the mercy of remedies not our own but such as we can beg, relinquishing us, since she is weary of following us, into the hands of that ‘Art’.

I am not over-fond of salads nor of any fruit except melons. My father loathed all kinds of sauces: I love them all. Overeating distresses me, but I am not aware that any food as such definitely disagrees with me, any more than I take note of full or crescent moons or of spring or autumn. There are fickle inexplicable changes which occur in us: for example I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again. I have found my stomach and my tastes varying like this over several foods: I have replaced white wine by red, then red by white. I delight in fish, so that my days of abstinence are days of plenty and my fast-days are feast-days. I believe what some say: that fish is more easily digestible than flesh. It goes against my conscience to eat flesh on fish-days and against my preference to mix fish and flesh: there seems to be too wide a difference between them.

Since I was a young man I have occasionally gone without my dinner, either to whet my appetite for the next day (for, while Epicurus went without food or ate little in order to accustom his sense of enjoyment to do without abundance, I on the contrary do so in order to train it to profit from abundance and to make merry with it); or so as to husband my strength in the service of some physical or mental activity (since both grow cruelly sluggish within me through repletion: and I loathe above all that silly yoking together of so sane and merry a goddess as Venus with that little belching dyspeptic Bacchus, all blown up by the fumes of his wine);fn133 or else to cure a sick stomach, or for want of appropriate company (since with that same Epicurus I say that we should be less concerned with what we eat than with whom we eat,fn134 and I approve of Chilo’s refusal to promise to come to a banquet at Periander’s before finding out who the other guests were). No recipe is so pleasing to me, no sauce so appetizing, as those which derive from the company.

I believe it is healthier to eat more leisurely, less and at shorter intervals. But I would give precedence to appetite and hunger: I would find no pleasure in dragging through three or four skimped meals a day on doctor’s orders: [C] who could assure me that at suppertime I would find again that frank appetite I have this morning? Especially we old men should seize the first opportune moment which comes along. Let us leave the prognostics of propitious times to the scribblers of almanacks and to the doctors.fn135 [B] The ultimate benefit of my feeling well is pleasure: let us cling to the first pleasure which is present and known. I refuse to stick for long to any prescriptions limiting my diet. A man who wants a regimen which serves him must not allow it to go on and on; for we become conditioned to it; our strength is benumbed by it; after six months you will have so degraded your stomach that it will have profited you nothing: you will merely have lost your freedom to do otherwise without harm.

My legs and thighs I cover no more in winter than in summer, wearing simple silken hose. I did let myself go, keeping my head warmer to help my rheum and my stomach warmer to help my stone, but within a day or two my ailments grew used to this and showed contempt for such routine provisions: so I moved on from a cap to a head-scarf and then from a bonnet to a fur hat. The padding of my doublet now only serves as decoration: it is pointless unless I add a layer of rabbit-fur or vulture-skinfn136 and wear a skull-cap under my hat. Follow that gradation and you will go a long way! I will not do so and would willingly countermand what I have already done if only I dared. ‘Are you feeling some fresh discomfort? Well, then, that reform of yours did you no good: you have grown used to it. Find another.’ Thus are men undermined when they allow themselves to become encumbered with restricted diets and to cling to them superstitiously. They need to go farther and farther on, and then farther still. There is no end to it.

For both work and pleasure’s sake it is far more convenient to do as the ancients did: go without lunch and, so as not to break up the day, put off the feast until the time comes to return home and rest. I used to do that once, but I have subsequently found from experience that, on the contrary, it is better for my health’s sake to eat at lunchtime, since digestion is better when you are awake.

I rarely feel thirsty when I am in good health – nor when ill, though I do get a dry mouth then, yet without a thirst. Normally I drink only for the thirst which comes as I eat, well on into the meal. For a man of the ordinary sort I drink quite enough: even in summer and during an appetizing meal I not only exceed the limits set by Augustus (who drank exactly three glasses, no more), but so as not to infringe the rule of Democritus (who forbade you to stop at four as being an unlucky number) I down up to five if the occasion arises (that is about a pint and a quarter: for I favour smaller glasses and like draining them dry, something which others avoid as unseemly).fn137 I water my wine, sometimes half and half, sometimes one-third water. When I am home I follow an ancient custom which my father’s doctor prescribed for him (and for himself): I have what I need mixed for me in the buttery two or three hours before serving. [C] It is said that this custom of mixing wine and water was invented by Cranaus, King of Athens – I have heard arguments both for and against its usefulness. I think it more proper and more healthy that boys should not drink any wine until they are sixteen or eighteen. [B] The finest custom is the one most current and common: in my view all eccentricity is to be avoided; I would hate a German who put water in his wine as much as a Frenchman who drank it neat. The law in such things is common usage.

I am afraid of stagnant air and go in mortal fear of smells (the first repairs I hastened to make in my place were to the chimneys and lavatories – the usual flaws in old buildings and quite intolerable) and among the hardships of war I count those thick clouds of dust under which we are buried in summer during a long day’s ride. My breath comes easily and freely and my colds usually clear away without affecting my lungs or giving me a cough.

The rigours of summer are more inimical to me than those of winter, for (apart from the inconvenience of the heat, less easy to remedy than the cold, and apart from sunstroke from the sun beating down on your head) my eyes are affected by any dazzling light: I could not lunch now facing a bright and flaming fire. At the time when I was more in the habit of reading I used to place a piece of glass over my book to soften the glare of the paper and found it quite a relief. Up till nowfn138 I have no acquaintance with spectacles and can see as well at a distance as ever I did or as anyone can. It is true that towards nightfall I begin to be aware that when reading my vision is weak and hazy: reading has strained my eyes at all times, but especially in the evening. [C] Though barely noticeable, that constitutes one step backwards. I shall take another step back, the second followed by a third, the third by a fourth, so gently that, before I am aware that my ageing sight is failing, I shall have become quite blind – so skilfully do the Fates spin the thread of our lives.

I am similarly unwilling to admit that I am on the point of becoming hard of hearing, and you will find that when I am half-deaf I shall still be blaming it on the voices of those who are speaking to me. If we want our Soul to be aware of how she is draining away we must keep her on the stretch.

[B] My walk is quick and steady and I do not know whether I have found it harder to fix my mind in one place or my body. Any preacher who can hold my attention throughout an entire sermon must be a good friend of mine! In the midst of ceremonial, where everyone else maintains a fixed expression and where I have seen ladies keep their very eyes still, I have never succeeded in stopping at least one of my limbs from jigging about: seated I may be, but sedate, never. [C] Just as the chambermaid said of her master the philosopher Chrysippus that only his legs were drunkfn139 (for he had this same habit of fidgeting them about, no matter what position he sat in, and she said it of him when the wine was exciting the others while he alone felt none the worse for it), so too people have been able to say of me since boyhood that I have ‘mad’ or ‘quicksilver’ feet: no matter where I put them, they are restless and never still.

[B] To eat ravenously as I do is not only unseemly: it is bad for your health, and indeed for your pleasure. In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally bite my fingers. When Diogenes came across a boy who was eating like that he slapped his tutor.fn140 – [C] There were instructors in Rome who taught how to masticate and perambulate graciously. – [B] By eating thus I lose an occasion for talking, which is such a fine [C] seasoningfn141 [B] at table – provided that both the meal and the topics are pleasant and brief. There is jealousy and rivalry among our pleasures: they clash and get in each other’s way. Alcibiades was a man who well understood good living: he specifically banished music from his table so that it should not interfere with the conversation, [C] justifying this with the reason which Plato ascribes to him, that it is the practice of commonplace men to invite musicians and singers to their feasts since they lack that good talk and those pleasant discussions with which intelligent men understand how to delight each other.fn142

[B] The following are Varro’s prescription for a banquet: an assembly of people of handsome presence who are agreeable to frequent and neither dumb nor talkative; clean and delightful food in a clean and delightful place; serene weather.fn143 [C] An enjoyable dinner is a feast requiring no little skill and affording no little pleasure: neither great war-leaders nor great philosophers have declined to learn how to arrange one. My mind has entrusted to my memory three such feasts: they occurred at different times during the flower of my youth and chanced to give me sovereign pleasure (guests contributing to such sovereign delight according to the degree of good temper of body and soul in which each man chances to be). My present circumstances exclude me from such things.

[B] I who am always down-to-earth in my handling of anything loathe that inhuman wisdom which seeks to render us [C] disdainful and [B] hostile towards the care of our bodies.fn144 I reckon that it is as injudicious to set our minds against natural pleasures as to allow them to dwell on them. [C] Xerxes was an idiot to offer a reward to anyone who could invent some new pleasure for him when he was already surrounded by every pleasure known to Man:fn145 but hardly less idiotic is the man who lops back such pleasures as Nature has found for him. [B] We should neither hunt them nor run from them: we should accept them. I do so with a little more zest and gratitude than that, and more readily follow the slope of Nature’s own inclining. [C] There is no need for us to exaggerate their emptiness: that makes itself sufficiently known and sufficiently manifest, thanks to our morbid spoilsport of a mind which causes them all to taste as unpleasant to us as it does itself, treating both itself and everything it absorbs, no matter how minor, according to its own insatiable, roaming and fickle condition:

Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acessit.

[If the jug is not clean, all you pour into it turns sour.]fn146

I who boast that I so sedulously and so individually welcome the pleasures of this life find virtually nothing but wind in them when I examine them in detail. But then we too are nothing but wind. And the wind (more wise than we are) delights in its rustling and blowing, and is content with its own role without yearning for qualities which are nothing to do with it such as immovability or density.

Some say that the greatest pleasures and pains are those which, as was shown by the Balance of Critolaus, belong exclusively to the mind.fn147 No wonder: the mind fashions them as it wills and tailors them for itself from the whole cloth. Everyday I see noteworthy and doubtless desirable examples of it. But I, whose constitution is composite and coarse, cannot so totally get a bite on such an indivisible single object that I do not tend heavily towards the immediate pleasures of that law of humans and their genus: things are sensed through the understanding, understood through the senses.fn148

The Cyrenaic philosophers held that the most intense pleasures and pains are those of the body, virtually double and more right.fn149 [B] There are [C] those who, from an uncouth insensibility, hold (as Aristotle says) bodily pleasures in disgust.fn150 I know some who do it from ambition. [B] Why do they not also give up breathing, so as to live on what is theirs alone,fn151 [C] rejecting the light of day because it is free and costs them neither ingenuity nor effort? [B] Just to see, let Mars, Pallas or Mercury sustain them instead of Venus, Ceres and Bacchus.fn152 [C] I suppose they think about squaring the circle while lying with their wives! [B] I hate being told to have our minds above the clouds while our bodies are at the dinner-table. It is not that I want the mind to be nailed to it or wallowing in it but I do want it to apply itself to it, [C] to sit at table, not to lie on it. Aristippus championed only the body, as though we had no soul: Zeno embraced only the soul, as though we had no body. Both were flawed.fn153 They say that Pythagoras practised a philosophy which was pure contemplation: Socrates one which was all deeds and morals; between them both Plato found the Mean. But they are pulling our legs. The true Mean is to be found in Socrates; Plato is far more Socratic than Pythagorean, and it better becomes him.fn154

[B] When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.

When, in the thick of their great endeavours, I see Caesar and Alexander so fully enjoying pleasures which arefn155 [C] natural and consequently necessary and right, [B] I do not say that their souls are relaxing but giving themselves new strength, by force of mind compelling their violent pursuits and burdensome thoughts to take second place to the usages of everyday life, [C] wise if they were to believe that to be their normal occupation and the other one abnormal.

What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done a thing today.’ – ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’ – ‘I would have shown them what I can do, if they had set me to manage some great affair.’ – If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquillity for the conduct of our life. Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories. [B] I delight in coming across a general in the field, at the foot of a breach which he means soon to attack, giving himself whole-heartedly to his dinner while chatting freely with his friends, [C] or across Brutus, with heaven and earth conspiring against him and the liberty of Rome, stealing an evening hour from his rounds of duty to jot down notes on his Polybius as he read him with complete composure.fn156 [B] It is for petty souls overwhelmed by the weight of affairs to be unable to disentangle themselves for them completely, not knowing how to drop them and then take them up again:

O fortes pejoraque passi

Mecum sæpe viri, nunc vino pellite curas;

Cras ingens iterabimus æquor.

[O ye strong men who have often undergone worse trials with me, banish care now with wine: tomorrow we will sail again over the vast seas.]fn157

Whether as a joke or in earnest, ‘theological wine’ and [C] ‘Sorbonne [B] wine’ have become proverbial, as have their gaudies;fn158 but I find that the fellows are right to dine all the more indulgently and enjoyably in that they have seriously and usefully used their mornings for the concerns of their college: the shared awareness of having used those other hours well is a proper and piquant condiment for their table. That is how the sages lived. Thus too did the inimitable eager striving towards virtue which amazes us in both the Catos, as well as their severity of humour to the point of rudeness, mildly and happily submit to the laws of our human condition, to Venus and to Bacchus,fn159 [C] following the precepts of their School which required the perfect sage to be as experienced and knowledgeable about the use of the natural pleasures as about all the rest of life’s duties: ‘Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus’ [To a discriminating mind let him ally a discriminating palate.]fn160

[B] In a strong and great-souled man it is, it seems to me, wondrously honourable to be relaxed and approachable, and it is most befitting. Epaminondas never thought that to join in the dance with the young men of his city, [C] to sing and strum with them, [B] and to bother to do it properly, in any way detracted from the honour of his glorious victories nor from the [C] perfect [B] reformation of morals [C] which was within him.fn161 [B] And among all the remarkable actions of Scipio [C] – the grandfather, that great man worthy of having been thought to descend from the godsfn162 – [B] none is more gracious than his having been seen idling along, unperturbed, choosing and collecting shells like a schoolboy, playing Quick! Quick! Pick up sticks with Laelius along the seashore and, when the weather was bad, passing his time enjoyably by writing comedies about the most plebeian and realistic activities of men;fn163 [C] and, while his mind was full of that marvellous African campaign of his against Hannibal, visiting the philosophy schools in Sicily and attending the lectures, so providing his enemies at Rome with something to snap at in their blind envy.fn164

[B] Nor is there anything more striking about Socrates than his finding the time when he was old to learn how to dance and to play instruments, maintaining that it was time well spent. He was seen standing in an ecstatic trance for a day and a night in view of all the Grecian army, surprised and caught up by some deep thought. He was seen [C] to be the first of many brave men in that army to dash to the help of Alcibiades when he was overwhelmed by the enemy, shielding him with his body and pulling him out from under the weight of their numbers by the sheer force of his arms; and of all the people of Athens (outraged like him by such a shameful sight) he was the first to stand forth to rescue Theramenes from the Thirty Tyrants, whose henchmen were escorting him to his death and, although he was seconded by only two men, he did not give up that valiant attempt until Theramenes himself urged him to do so. When wooed by a person whose beauty had enthralled him, he was seen to maintain, as was necessary, the strictest continence; he was seen helping up Xenophon at the battle of Delium, saving him when his horse had given him a tumble. He was seen [B] striding undeviatingly to war [C] trampling over the ice [B] in his bare feet; wearing the same gown in winter as in summer; surpassing all his comrades in his endurance of hardships and, at feasts, eating no differently from usual. [C] He was seen, unmoved in countenance, putting up for twenty-seven years with hunger and poverty, with loutish sons, with a cantankerous wife and finally with calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, leg-irons and poison. [B] Yet that very man, when the dictates of courtesy made him a guest at a drinking-match, was, from the entire army, the man who best acquitted himself. Nor did he refuse to play five-stones with the boys nor to run about with them astride a hobby-horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all activities are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honour him. We have the wherewithal, so we should never tire of comparing the ideal of that great man against all patterns and forms of perfection.fn165 [C] There are very few pure and complete exemplars of how to live; those who instruct us do wrong to set before us weak and faulty ones with scarcely a single good habitual quality, ones which are more likely to pull us backwards, corrupting us rather than correcting us.

[B] The many get it wrong: you can indeed, using artifice rather than nature, make your journey more easily along the margins, where the edges serve as a limit and a guide, rather than take the wide and unhedged Middle Way; but it is also less noble, less commendable. [C] Greatness of soul consists not so much in striving upwards and forwards as in knowing how to find one’s place and to draw the line. Whatever is adequate it regards as ample; it shows its sublime quality by preferring the moderate to the outstanding. [B] Nothing is so beautiful, so right, as acting as a man should: nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life [C] naturally and [B] well. And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to [C] despise [B] our being.fn166 If anyone desires to set his soul apart so as to free it from contagion, let him have the boldness to do so (if he can) while his body is unwell: otherwise, on the contrary, his soul should assist and applaud the body, not refuse to participate in its natural pleasures but delight in it as if it were its husband, contributing, if it is wise enough, moderation, lest those pleasures become confounded with pain through want of discernment. [C] Lack of temperance is pleasure’s bane: temperance is not its chastisement but its relish. It was by means of temperance, which in them was outstanding and exemplary, that Eudoxus (who made pleasure his sovereign good) and his companions (who rated it at so high a price) savoured it in its most gracious gentleness.fn167

[B] I so order my soul that it can contemplate both pain and pleasure with eyes equally [C] restrained – ‘eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia quo in dolore contractio’ [for it is as wrong for the soul to dilate with joy as to contract with pain]fn168 – doing so with eyes equally [B] steady, yet looking merrily at one and soberly at the other and, in so far as it can contribute anything itself, being as keen to snuff out the one as to stretch out the other. [C] Look sanely upon the good and it follows that you look sanely upon evils: pain, in its tender beginnings, has some qualities which we cannot avoid: so too pleasure in its final excesses has qualities which we can avoid. Plato couples pain and pleasure together and wants it to be the duty of fortitude to fight the same fight against pain and against the seductive fascinations of immoderate pleasure. They form two springs of water: blessed are they, city, man or beast, that draw what they should, when they should and from the one they should. From the first we should drink more sparingly, as a medicine, as a necessity: from the second to slake our thirst, though not to the point of drunkenness. Pain and pleasure, love and hatred, are the first things a child is aware of: if, after Reason develops, they are guided by her, then that is virtue.fn169

[B] I have a lexicon all to myself: I ‘pass’ the time when tide and time are sticky and unpleasant: when good, I do not want to ‘pass’ time, I [C] savour it and hold on to it.fn170 [B] We must run the gauntlet through the bad and recline on the good. ‘Pastimes’ and ‘to pass the time’ are everyday expressions which correspond to the practice of those clever folk who think that they can use their life most profitably by letting it leak and slip away, by-passing it or avoiding it and (as far as they can manage to do so) ignoring it and fleeing from it as painful and contemptible. But I know life to be something different: I find it to be both of great account and delightful – even as I grasp it now [C] in its final waning; [B] Nature has given it into our hands garnished with such attributes, such agreeable ones, that if it weighs on us, if it slips uselessly from us, we have but ourselves to blame. [C] ‘Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur.’ [It is the life of the fool which is graceless, fearful and entirely sacrificed to the future.]fn171

[B] That is why I so order my ways that I can lose my life without regret, not however because it is troublesome or importunate but because one of its attributes is that it must be lost. [C] Besides, finding it not unpleasant to die can only rightly become those who find life pleasant. [B] To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Others know the delight of happiness and well-being: I know it as they do, but not en passant, as it slips by. We must also study it, savour it, muse upon it, so as to render condign thanksgivings to Him who vouchsafes it to us. Other folk enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure of sleep: with no awareness of them. Why, with the purpose of not allowing even sleep to slip insensibly away, there was a time when I found it worthwhile to have my sleep broken into so that I could catch a glimpse of it. I deliberate with my self upon any pleasure. I do not skim it off: I plumb it, and now that my reason has grown chagrin and squeamish I force it to accept it. Do I find myself in a state of calm? Is there some pleasure which thrills me? I do not allow it to be purloined by my senses: I associate my Soul with it, not so that she will [C] bind herself to itfn172 [B] but take joy in it: not losing herself but finding herself in it; her role is to observe herself as mirrored in that happy state, to weigh that happiness, gauge it and increase it. She measures how much she owes to God for having her conscience and her warring passions at peace, with her body in its natural [C] state, [B] enjoying ordinately and [C] appropriately [B] those sweet and pleasant functions by which it pleases Him, through His grace, to counterbalance the pains with which His justice in its turn chastises us;fn173 she gauges how precious it is to her to have reached such a point that, no matter where she casts her gaze, all around her the heavens are serene – no desire, no fear or doubt bring disturbing gales; nor is there any hardship, [C] past, present or future [B] on which her thoughts may not light without anxiety. This meditation gains a great splendour by a comparison of my condition with that of others. And so I [C] pass in review,fn174 [B] from hundreds of aspects, those whom fortune or their own mistakes sweep off into tempestuous seas, as well as those, closer to my own case, who accept their good fortune with such languid unconcern. Those folk really do ‘pass’ their time: they pass beyond the present and the things they have in order to put themselves in bondage to hope and to those shadows and vain ghosts which their imagination holds out to them –

Morte obita quales fama est volitare figuras,

Aut quæ sopitos deludunt somnia sensus

[Like those phantoms which, so it is said, flit about after death or those dreams which delude our slumbering senses]

– the more you chase them, the faster and farther they run away. Just as Alexander said that he worked for work’s sake –

Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum:

[Believing he had not done anything, while anything remained to be done:]

– so too your only purpose in chasing after them, your only gain, lies in the chase.fn175

As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it as it has pleased God to vouchsafe it to us. I do not go yearning that it should be without the need to eat and drink: [C] indeed to wish that need redoubled would not seem to me a less pardonable error: ‘Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus’ [The wise man is the keenest of seekers after the riches of Nature];fn176 nor [B] that we could keep up our strength by merely popping into our mouths a little of that drug by means of which Epimenides assuaged his appetite and kept alive;fn177 nor that we could, without sensation, produce children by our fingers and our heels [C] but rather, speaking with reverence, that we could also do it voluptuously with our fingers and our heels as well; [B] nor that our body should be without desire or thrills. Such plaints are [C] ungrateful and iniquitous. [B] I accept wholeheartedly [C] and thankfully [B] what Nature has done for me: I delight in that fact and am proud of it. You do wrong to that great and almighty Giver to [C] refuse [B] His gift, to [C] nullify [B] it or disfigure it. [C] Himself entirely Good, he has made all things good: ‘Omnia quae secundum naturam est, aestimatione digna sunt.’ [All things which are in accordance with Nature are worthy of esteem.]fn178

[B] I embrace most willingly those of Philosophy’s opinions which are most solid, that is to say, most human, most ours: my arguments, like my manners, are lowly and modest. [C] To my taste she is acting like a child when she starts crowing out ergo, preaching to us that it is a barbarous match to wed the divine to the earthy, the rational to the irrational, the strict to the permissive, the decent to the indecent; that pleasure is a bestial quality, unworthy that a wise man should savour it; that the only enjoyment he gets from lying with his beautiful young wife is the pleasure of being aware that he is performing an ordinate action – like pulling on his boots for a useful ride! May Philosophy’s followers, faced with breaking their wife’s hymen, be no more erect, muscular nor succulent than her arguments are!fn179

That is not what Socrates says – Philosophy’s preceptor as well as ours. He values as he should the body’s pleasure but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, suppleness, variety and dignity. And, according to him, even that pleasure by no means goes alone (he is not given to such fantasies): it merely has primacy. For him temperance is not the enemy of our pleasures: it moderates them.fn180

[B] Nature is a gentle guide but no more gentle than wise and just: [C] ‘Intrandum est in rerum naturam et penitus quid ea postulet pervidendum.’ [We must go deeply into the nature of things and find out precisely what Nature wants.] [B] I seek her traces everywhere: we have jumbled them together with the tracks of artifice; [C] and thereby that sovereign good of the Academics and Peripatetics, which is to live according to Nature, becomes for that very reason hard to delimit and portray; so too that of the Stoics which is a neighbour to it, namely, to conform to Nature.fn181 [B] Is it not an error to reckon some functions to be less worthy because they are necessities? They will never beat it out of my head anyway that the marriage of Pleasure to Necessity [C] (with whom, according to an ancient, the gods ever conspire) [B] is a most suitable match.fn182 What are we trying to achieve by taking limbs wrought together into so interlocked and kindly a compact and tearing them asunder in divorce? On the contrary let us tie them together by mutual duties. Let the mind awaken and quicken the heaviness of the body: let the body arrest the lightness of the mind and fix it fast: [C] ‘Qui velut summum bonum laudat animae naturam, et tanquam malum naturam carnis accusat, profecto et animam carnaliter appetit et carnem carnaliter fugit, quoniam id vanitate sentit humana, non veritate divina.’ [He who eulogizes the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and who indicts the nature of the flesh as an evil desires the soul with a fleshly desire and flees from the flesh in a fleshly way, since his thought is based on human vanity not on divine truth.]fn183

[B] There is no part unworthy of our concern in this gift which God has given to us; we must account for it down to each hair. It is not a merely [C] formal [B] commission to Man to guide himself according to Man’s [C] fashioning: it is expressly stated, [B] inborn, [C] most fundamental, [B] and the Creator gave it to us seriously [C] and strictly. Commonplace intellects can be persuaded by authority alone, and it has greater weight in a foreign tongue; so, at this point, let us make another charge at it: ‘Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter facere quae facienda sunt, et alio corpus impellere, alio animum, distrahique inter diversissimos motus?’ [Who would not say that it was really foolish to do in a slothful, contumacious spirit something which has to be done anyway, thrusting the body in one direction and the soul in another where it is torn between totally conflicting emotions?]fn184

[B] Go on then, just to see: get that fellow over there to tell you one of these days what notions and musings he stuffs into his head, for the sake of which he diverts his thoughts from a good meal and regrets the time spent eating it. You will find that no dish on your table tastes as insipid as that beautiful pabulum of his soul (as often as not it would be better if we fell fast asleep rather than stayed awake for what we do it for) and you will find that his arguments and concepts are not worth your rehashed leftovers. Even if they were the raptures of Archimedes, what does it matter?fn185

Here, I am not alluding to – nor am I confounding with the [C] scrapings of the pot [B] that we are, and with the vain longings and ratiocinations which keep us musing – those revered souls which, through ardour of devotion and piety, are raised on high to a constant and scrupulous anticipation of things divine; [C] souls which (enjoying by the power of a quick and rapturous hope a foretaste of that everlasting food which is the ultimate goal, the final destination, that Christians long for) scorn to linger over our insubstantial and ambiguous pleasurable ‘necessities’ and easily assign to the body the bother and use of the temporal food of the senses. [B] That endeavour is a privilege.fn186 [C] Among the likes of us there are two things which have ever appeared to me to chime particularly well together – supercelestial opinions: subterranean morals.

That great man [B] Aesop saw his master pissing as he walked along. ‘How now?’ he said. ‘When we run shall we have to shit?’fn187 Let us husband our time; but there still remains a great deal fallow and underused. Our mind does not willingly concede that it has plenty of other hours to perform its functions without breaking fellowship during the short time the body needs for its necessities. They want to be beside themselves, want to escape from their humanity. That is madness: instead of changing their Form into an angel’s they change it into a beast’s; they crash down instead of winding high. [C] Those humours soaring to transcendency terrify me as do great unapproachable heights; and for me nothing in the life of Socrates is so awkward to digest as his ecstasies and his daemonizings, and nothing about Plato so human as what is alleged for calling him divine. [B] And of [C] our [B] disciplines it is those which ascend the highest which, it seems to me, are the most [C] base and [B] earthbound. I can find nothing so [C] abject [B] and so mortal in the life of Alexander as his fantasies about [C] his immortalization. [B] Philotas, in a retort he made in a letter, showed his mordant wit when congratulating Alexander on his being placed among the gods by the oracle of Jupiter Ammon: ‘As far as you are concerned I’m delighted,’ he said, ‘but there is reason to pity those men who will have to live with a man, and obey a man, who [C] trespasses beyond, and cannot be content with, [B] the measure of a man’:fn188

[C] Diis te minorem quod geris, imperas.

[Because you hold yourself lower than the gods, you hold imperial sway.]fn189

[B] The noble inscription by which the Athenians honoured Pompey’s visit to their city corresponds to what I think:

D’autant es tu Dieu comme

Tu te recognois homme.

[Thou art a god in so far as thou recognizest that thou art a man.]

It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. [C] A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

[B] The most beautiful of lives to my liking are those which conform to the common measure, [C] human and ordinate, without miracles though and [B] without rapture.

Old age, however, has some slight need of being treated more tenderly. Let us commend it to that tutelary god of health – and, yes, of wisdom, merry and companionable:

Frui paratis et valido mihi,

Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra

Cum mente, nec turpem senectam

Degere, nec cythara carentem.

[Vouchsafe, O Son of Latona, that I may enjoy those things I have prepared; and, with my mind intact I pray, may I not degenerate into a squalid senility, in which the lyre is wanting.]fn190