Death has two kinds of significance for the Stoics. First it may be considered an external. It is out of our control; we can accelerate death and sometimes delay it, but its eventual arrival is not up to us. It is also the most frightening prospect the mind confronts. An external that is frightening makes a natural topic for Stoic analysis, so death gets their attention at length. Stoics consider death hard to see accurately, and they find the usual attitude toward it irrational; what death is like is unknown to anyone, but it appears to be a painless state that leaves us no worse off than we were before we were born. They also view death as similar to other changes that are familiar to all, and as a continuous process rather than a sudden one: we die every day as our time on earth passes behind us. They make various other arguments as well to drain the terror from mortality. Overcoming the fear of death is considered by the Stoics to be one of the most important of all philosophical achievements, and the gain of an important liberty.
But Stoicism treats death as more than just an external that needs to be laid bare. It is also a source of perspective and inspiration – a valuable aid, not just something to which we overreact. Mortality is the defining feature of our existence; Stoics want the imminence of it to inform their daily lives. The fact that we will soon be gone can induce some of the same changes in mindset as the perspectives considered in the previous chapter. Meditation on death is thus used by the Stoic to stimulate humility, fearlessness, moderation, and other virtues.
1. Fear of death. Before setting out to cure a fear or desire, the Stoics typically analyze the ordinary attitude toward it. They are especially dedicated analysts of the fear of death.
No one doubts that death has in it something that inspires terror, so that it shocks even our souls, which nature has so molded that they love their own existence; for otherwise there would be no need to prepare ourselves, and to whet our courage, to face that towards which we should move with a sort of voluntary instinct, precisely as all men tend to preserve their existence.
Death belongs among those things that are not evils in truth, but still have an appearance of evil; for a love of self is implanted in us, and a desire for existence and survival, and a dread of disintegration. Death seems to rob us of many good things and to remove us from all we have come to know. And there is another element that estranges us from death: we are already familiar with the present, but are ignorant of the future into which we will go, and we shrink from the unknown…. Even if death is something indifferent, then, it is nevertheless a thing that cannot be easily ignored.
As will become clear, death has a deep importance in Stoicism that is not shared by other conditions we fear. But at times the Stoics analyze death simply as an external – a thing that gains its meaning from the ways in which it is costumed by the mind. What we must overcome is not death but the way we think about it.
Neither death nor pain is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death…. Confidence should therefore be our attitude toward death, and caution should be our attitude toward the fear of it. But now we have the opposite: toward death, avoidance; toward our opinions about it, carelessness, indifference, and neglect.
What is death? A mask to frighten children. Turn it and examine it. See, it does not bite. The poor body must be separated from the spirit as it was before, either now or later. Why then are you troubled if it be now? For if not now, later.
The thing itself is trifling; that we fear it is serious. Better that it happen once than that it always be threatening…. Therefore exhort yourself as much as you can, Lucilius, against the fear of death. This is the thing that makes us abject; this is what disturbs and destroys the man whose life itself it has spared; this is what magnifies all those things like earthquakes and lightning.
2. Fearlessness of death. Freedom from the fear of death is regarded by the Stoic as one of the central goals of philosophical work, from which many other liberties and goods follow. One who regards death without fear steps more lightly through life, and is free from many other fears as well; for death is the master fear that lies behind them. From Seneca:
“What then should he study?” That which is helpful against all weapons, against every kind of foe – contempt for death.
He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery. He is above any power, and certainly beyond it. What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him?
Make life as a whole agreeable to yourself, then, by banishing all worry about it. No good thing makes its possessor happy unless his mind is prepared for its loss; and nothing is easier to let go of than that which, once gone, cannot be missed.
We must make ready for death before we make ready for life.
From others:
The whole life of a philosopher … is preparation for death.
A correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live.
After Philip forced his way into the Peloponnesus, someone told Damindas that the Spartans would suffer greatly if they did not get back into Philip’s good graces. “Coward,” he replied; “what can people suffer who do not fear death?” Agis was similarly asked how people could live in freedom; to which he replied, “By holding death in contempt.”
Montaigne took these bits from Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica (Sayings of the Spartans). The passage speaks of the advance toward Sparta by Philip II of Macedon in 346 BC (or thereabouts), and the Spartans’ lack of interest in conciliating him. Philip elected not to seek the conquest of Sparta. Agis was one of the many kings of Sparta by that name.
3. Correctives to fear. The Stoic approach to the fear of death is the same as to other externals: use reason to see the thing clearly and peel away its frightening features.
a. The unknown experience of death.
Does it do any harm to a good man to be smeared by unjust gossip? Then we should not let the same sort of thing do damage to death, either, in our judgment; for death also has a bad reputation, but none of those who malign death have tried it.
To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing else than to think one is wise when one is not; for it is thinking one knows what one does not know. For no one knows whether death be not even the greatest of all blessings to man, but they fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
In dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice is no help. We may use habit and experience to strengthen ourselves against pain, poverty, shame, and other misfortunes, but death we can try only once; we are all apprentices with respect to it. There were some in ancient days so meticulous in the use of their time that they even tried to taste and to savor the moment of their deaths; they bent their faculties of mind to discover what it was to cross over. But they never came back to tell their stories.
b. The painlessness of death. Dying might be painful. So far as we know, death itself is not.
Reflect that there are no ills to be suffered after death, that the reports that make the underworld terrible to us are mere tales, that no darkness threatens the dead, no prison, no blazing streams of fire, no river of Lethe, no seats of judgment, no defendants, nor in that freedom so complete are there any tyrants to meet again. All those things are the sport of the poets, who have stirred us up with terrors that are empty.
Death is coming to you; it would be a thing to dread if it could stay. But necessarily it either doesn’t come, or it comes and is gone.
He who fears death fears either the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if you will have no sensation, you will feel nothing bad; and if you have a different kind of sensation, then you will be a different kind of living being and will not have ceased to live.
The similar view of Epicurus:
Accustom yourself to thinking that death is nothing to us, since every good and evil lies in perception, while death is the deprivation of perception…. Something that causes no trouble when it is present causes pain to no purpose when it is merely expected. Death, the most horrible of evils, is therefore nothing to us – since so long as we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist.
As for dying itself, it doesn’t usually take very long.
It is not against death that we prepare; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter of an hour’s suffering, without aftereffects and without damage, does not require special instruction. In truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.
c. Death as transformation. Stoics view the arrival of death as a transition not so different from others we know.
Do not despise death, but be content with it, since this too is one of those things nature wills. For what it is to be young and grow old, and to increase and reach maturity, and to have teeth and beard and grey hair, and to father children, and to be pregnant and to give birth, and all the other natural operations the seasons of your life bring – so also is dissolution. This, then, is the way of one who is reflective: to be neither careless nor impatient nor arrogant with respect to death, but to wait for it as one of the operations of nature.
Stoicism regards death more specifically as a natural transformation of matter into other forms.
That which has died does not fall out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of your self. And these change, too, and they do not complain.
So I won’t exist anymore? No, you won’t – but something else will, which the universe now needs. For you also came into existence not when you chose, but when the world had need of you.
From the essence of the universe, as if it were wax, nature molds now a little horse; and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a little tree, then for a little man, then for something else; and each of these things exists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.
d. Comparisons to the time before birth. A classic Stoic response to death is to contemplate its similarity to our position before birth, which we have no reason to think was difficult.
“What?” I say to myself; “does death so often test me? Let it do so; I myself have for a long time tested death.” “When?” you ask. Before I was born…. Unless I am mistaken, my dear Lucilius, we go astray in thinking that death follows, when it has both preceded and will follow. Whatever condition existed before our birth, was death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin at all, or whether you end, when the result in either case is non-existence?
“Perhaps I do not yet express what I mean, for I look upon this very circumstance, not to exist after having existed, to be very miserable.” What, more so than not to have existed at all? It follows that those who are not yet born are miserable because they are not; and we ourselves, if we are to be miserable after death, were miserable before we were born: but I do not remember that I was miserable before I was born; and I should be glad to know, if your memory is better, what if anything you recollect of your own situation.
Those who have died return to the same state in which they were before they were born. Just as there was nothing either good or bad for us before we were born, so neither will there be after the end. And just as things before us were nothing to us, so neither will things after us be anything to us.
How ridiculous to worry about passing into freedom from all worry! Just as our birth brought us the birth of all things, so will our death be the death of them all. And so to be sorry we will not be alive a hundred years from now is as foolish as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
e. Comparisons to unreasoning creatures. A recurring line of Stoic argument points to creatures with weak understanding – children, or the foolish, or animals – who avoid the fear of death and other fears that encumber the philosophical type. A kind of inspiration can be drawn from those fearless examples; a larger endowment of reason should not make the philosopher worse off than the person, or pig, who has less of it. Some of these examples involve matters other than death, but all are applicable to it.
Infants, and boys, and those who have gone mad, have no fear of death. It is most shameful if reason cannot give us the same peace of mind to which they are led by their simplicity.
“It is difficult,” you say, “to bring the mind to a point where it can scorn life.” But do you not see that people sometimes do scorn life, and for trifling reasons? One hangs himself in front of the door of his mistress; another hurls himself from a housetop so that he will no longer have to bear the taunts of a bad-tempered master; a third, to be saved from arrest after running away, drives a sword into his vitals. Do you not suppose that virtue will be as effective as overwhelming fear?
The same ills befall another, and either because he does not see that they have happened or because he would make a display of pride, he is firm and remains unharmed. It is a shame, then, that ignorance and the desire to impress should be stronger than wisdom.
Pyrrho the philosopher was once aboard a ship during a very great storm. To those near him who were most frightened, he pointed to a hog that was there and that was not in the least concerned, and sought to encourage them by its example. Do we dare to say that the gift of reason, of which we speak so highly and which we think makes us masters and kings of the rest of creation, was put into us as a source of torment? What good is knowledge if it causes us to lose the peace of mind and the calm we would enjoy without it, and leaves us in a condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s hog?
Pyrrho was a Greek philosopher born in the 4th century BC. He is considered the founder of the school of thought known as skepticism.
f. Relief; the value of mortality. Marcus Aurelius’s view of humanity gave him a reason not to fear death: the human race, seen accurately, is not the sort of company one should be too sorry to leave behind.
If you want a vulgar form of comfort that touches the heart, reconcile yourself to death by observing, above all, the things from which you will be removed, and the morals of those with whom your soul will no longer have to associate. Do not take offense at them – it is your duty, rather, to care for them and to gently put up with them – but nevertheless remember that you will be departing from others who do not have the same opinions you do. That is the one consideration, if any, that would pull the other way and attach us to life – if we could live with those who share our opinions. But when you see how much trouble arises from the discord of all of them living together, it is enough to make you say, “Come quickly, O Death, lest somehow I too forget myself.”
The following passage is in a similar vein; it is not directly linked to death, but urges the same sort of detachment from life, and for the same reasons.
Turn to the habits of those you live with. They are nearly unbearable, even the most accomplished of them; I hesitate to say it, but a man can scarcely bear even himself. In such darkness and filth, then – in such a constantly changing flow of substance and of time, of motion and things moving – what is worth prizing highly or seriously pursuing, I cannot conceive.
Seneca reflected on the suffering that comes with life, and on our eventual decrepitude, and on the shameful things people do to make life a little longer when they can, and he ended with this conclusion: mortality is a gift.
Deny, now, if you can, that Nature is very generous in making death inevitable.
Montaigne elaborated in the guise of speaking for nature:
Just imagine how much less bearable and more painful an immortal life would be for mankind than the life I have given you. If you did not have death, you would curse me forever for depriving you of it. Indeed, I have deliberately mixed death with a little bitterness to prevent the advantages of it from causing you to embrace it too quickly or too rashly. To keep you in the moderate state that I wish, not fleeing either from life or from death, I have tempered each of those states with pleasure and with pain.
4. The progressive character of death. The Stoic seeks to befriend death by removing illusions about it. One is that death is an eventuality in the distance. The Stoics attack that impression in several ways. First, they view death as a continuous process rather than an event. We all are dying; each day that passes is an increment of mortality.
Who can you show me that places any value on their time, who knows the worth of each day, who understands that they are dying daily? For we are mistaken when we see death ahead of us; the greater part of it has happened already. Whatever of our life is behind us is in death’s hands.
We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance toward it by slight degrees. We die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Right up to yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that has flowed out already.
Why fear your last day? It does no more to advance you toward death than any other day did. The last step does not cause your fatigue; it reveals your fatigue. Every day is a step toward death. The last one arrives there.
Compare:
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
5. The availability of death. The Stoic regards death as an option rather than a terror. The option becomes, in turn, a source of courage in life. The ability to end one’s own life is therefore an important freedom. If life is intolerable, as Epictetus puts it, “the doorway out is open.”
What is pain? A scary mask. Turn it around and examine it. The poor flesh is sometimes treated roughly, sometimes smoothly. If this does not profit you, the doorway out is open: if it does, bear it.
Seneca:
The best thing eternal law ever ordained was one entrance into life but many exits. Must I await the cruelty either of disease or of man, when I can depart in the midst of torture and shake off my troubles? This is the one reason why we cannot complain of life; it keeps none of us against our will. Humanity is well situated, in that none are unhappy except by their own fault. Live, if it suits you; if not, you can go back where you came from.
However:
We need to be warned and strengthened in both directions – not to love or to hate life overmuch. Even when reason advises us to make an end of it, the impulse is not to be adopted without reflection or at headlong speed. The brave and wise man should not flee from life but withdraw from it.
Montaigne:
The most voluntary death is the finest. Our life depends on the will of others; our death depends on our own. In nothing should we defer to our own feelings as much as in this. What others think has nothing to do with this business; it is madness to even consider it. Living is slavery if the freedom to die is lacking.
Here are the words of the law on this subject: If chance delivers some great misfortune that you cannot remedy, a haven is always nearby. You can swim away from your body as you would from a leaking boat. Only fools are attached to their bodies by a fear of death rather than a love of life.
6. Duration vs. quality. The impression that death lies in the distance can create a desire to keep it there, or as far away as possible – to treat the length of a life as the most important thing about it. The Stoic, to the contrary, is more concerned with the quality of life than its duration. Virtue and honor are goods not measured in time; the person who has them has lived long enough.
Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.
What matters is not how long you live, but how well; and often living well means that you cannot live long.
A journey will be incomplete if you stop halfway, or anywhere on this side of your destination; but a life is not incomplete if it is honorable. Wherever you leave off, provided you leave off nobly, your life is a whole. Often, it is true, one must leave off bravely, and not necessarily for momentous reasons; for neither are the reasons momentous that hold us here.
One who roams through the universe will never weary of the truth; it is the false things that will bring on disgust. And on the other hand, if death comes near with its summons, even though it be untimely in its arrival, and even if it cuts you off in your prime, you will have had the enjoyment of all that the longest life can give. The universe in great measure will have been known to you. You will understand that honorable things do not depend on time for their growth, while every life must seem short to those who measure its length by pleasures that are empty and for that reason unbounded.
You ask what the finest life span would be? To live until you reach wisdom. The one who gets there has arrived, not at the farthest goal, but at the most important. That man, indeed, may boldly congratulate himself, and give thanks to the gods – and to himself along with them – and count in his reckoning with the universe the fact that he has lived. His account will be in credit: he has given it back a better life than he received.
While commendation is not high on the list of Stoic aims, this comment from Plutarch is in the same spirit as those just considered.
Not the longest life is the best, but the best-lived. For it is not the one who has played the lyre the most, or made the most speeches, or piloted the most ships, who is commended, but the one who has done these things well.
To turn the point around: a life lived trivially is, in effect, short.
There is no reason for you to think anyone has lived long just because he has grey hairs or wrinkles. He has not lived long; he has existed long. For suppose you should imagine that a man had a great voyage when in fact he was caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbor, was swept this way and that by strong winds from different directions, and was driven along the same path in circles. He did not make a great voyage. He was greatly tossed about.
“He didn’t live as long as he might have.” And some books contain few lines, but are admirable and useful in spite of their size. Then there are the Annals of Tanusius – you know how ponderous the book is, and what people say about it. The long life of a certain sort of person is like that – a kind of Annals of Tanusius!
Seneca appears to be referring to Tanusius Geminus, a historian from the 1st century BC who evidently was long-winded, but from whom, for better or worse, very little has survived. Catullus, a Roman poet from around the same era, famously made fun of a historian from that time by referring to his writings as cacata carta (politely translated as toilet paper). One scholarly school of thought holds that Catullus was referring in a veiled way to the Annals of Tanusius, and that this is what Seneca meant when he referred, with a delicate lack of specificity, to “what people say” about that book.
The party whose death is under discussion in that last passage is Metronax, a friend of Seneca’s who will appear again in Chapter 7, Section 8.
7. The manner of death. Fearlessness of death is regarded by the Stoics as a great achievement. And the way one confronts death when it arrives is considered a test of that achievement, and of character – perhaps the true test.
This is what I mean: your debates and learned talks, your maxims gathered from the teachings of the wise, your cultured conversation – all these afford no proof of the real strength of your soul. Bold speech may issue even from the timid. What you have accomplished will only become evident when you draw your last breath. I accept the terms; I do not shrink from the judgment.
It is with life as with a play: what matters is not how long it is, but how good. It makes no difference at what point you stop. Leave off where you choose; just be sure to give it a good ending.
[I can show you] not only brave men who have made light of the moment when the soul breathes its last, but some who, if undistinguished in other respects, matched the spirit of the bravest when it came to this one thing. Consider Scipio, Pompey’s father-in-law, when he was being driven back toward Africa by headwinds and saw his ship being seized by the enemy. He ran himself through with his sword. To the men who were asking “where is the Commander?” he answered, “All is well with the Commander!” That statement made him the equal of his ancestors, and it did not allow the glory of the African Scipios, ordained by destiny, to be interrupted. It was a great deed to conquer Carthage, but a greater deed to conquer death. “All is well with the Commander!”
The Scipio to whom Seneca refers – Metellus Scipio, as he is sometimes known – was a commander who, like Cato the Younger, sided against Cæsar in the Roman civil war, and who, like Cato, took his own life at the end of it. The ancestors of Metellus Scipio that Seneca has in mind most prominently include Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who had defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War against Carthage about 150 years earlier. Metellus was not regarded as one of the more impressive of the Scipios – very much the contrary – but he was felt to have died well.
To return to our theme via Montaigne:
Epaminondas, asked which of the three should be held in highest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself, replied, “You must first see us die before deciding.”
The characters in the anecdote were Greek generals who fought for Athens or Thebes against Sparta in the 4th century BC.
8. Death as a universal and equalizer. The Stoic finds consolation for death in the reflection that it is a fate common to everyone.
We therefore will find the greatest comfort in the thought that what has befallen us was suffered by all who came before and will be suffered by all to come; and Nature has, it seems to me, made universal that which she made hardest to bear, so that the equality of our fate might console us for its cruelty.
What multitudes doomed to death will follow you, what multitudes will accompany you! You would feel more brave, I suppose, if many thousands were to die with you; and yet there are many thousands, both humans and animals, who at this very moment, while you are irresolute about death, are breathing their last in their various ways.
Death equalizes all people, which might encourage magnanimity in life.
When Alexander of Macedon and his mule driver died, they came to the same thing: for either they were absorbed back into the same principles that produced them, or they were scattered alike among the atoms.
Why are you angry with your slave, with your master, with your patron, with your client? Wait a little. Behold, death comes, which will make you equals.
Toward death, at different paces, moves the entire crowd that now squabbles in the forum, that looks on at the theaters, that prays in the temples; both those you love and revere and those you despise, one heap of ashes will make equal.
We are born unequal; we die equal. I say the same thing about cities as about their inhabitants: Ardea was captured, so was Rome. The founder of human law has not distinguished us based on lineage or illustrious ancestry – except while we are alive.
Ardea is an ancient town south of Rome that was once sacked by the Samnites (a group of tribes from southern Italy). By Seneca’s time it was lightly populated and best known for its malarial climate and the imperial elephants kept nearby.
9. The proximity of death. Once the fear of it is subdued, death is regarded by the Stoics as a resource – a remedy for pride and a teacher of wisdom. They therefore pursue a kind of closeness with death rather than distance from it. Stoics observe that the possibility of death is nearer than we usually imagine, a point offered not to cause anxiety but to dispel it; rather than a frightening thing that advances on us, death is next to us all the time. It is best accepted as a reason to live well in the time that remains.
The fatted bodies of bulls fall from a tiny wound, and creatures of great strength are felled by a single stroke of the human hand…. No deep retreat conceals the soul; you need no knife at all to root it out, no deeply driven wound to find the vital parts. Death lies near at hand.
Reflect that a bandit or an enemy can put a knife to your throat; and though he is not your master, every slave has the power of life and death over you. Therefore I declare to you: whoever scorns his own life is master of yours.
You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage is there a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand; yet everywhere he is as near at hand.
In truth, dangers and risks do little or nothing to bring us closer to death. If we think of the millions of threats that hang over us, apart from whichever one now seems to threaten us most, we will realize that death is equally nearby whether we are healthy or feverish, at sea or at home, in battle or at rest.
Melville was a reader of Seneca and Montaigne.
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
Seneca had a related idea to offer: causes for fear are everywhere; oddly enough, this can relieve us from fear about any one of them, or all of them. Anything might kill you anytime, so you might as well forge on without worrying about it.
I say that there is no lasting peace for anything that can perish and cause to perish. But I place this fact in the category of solace, actually a very powerful solace, since fear without remedy is what foolish men have…. If you wish to fear nothing, consider that everything is to be feared.
10. Intimacy with death. The nearness of death as a physical matter is matched by the Stoic’s efforts to keep it nearby in the mind. Stoics recommend thinking about death often, as they find that it helps toward virtue without a need for argument.
Nothing will give you so much help toward moderation as the frequent thought that life is short and that the little we have is uncertain. Whatever you are doing, be mindful of death.
Let death and exile and every other thing that appears dreadful be every day before your eyes, but most of all death; and you will never harbor any low thoughts, nor have an extravagant desire for anything.
No one can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or who believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing. Rehearse this thought every day, so that you may be able to peacefully give up this life to which so many clutch and cling, just as those snatched away by a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.
Montaigne:
Let us strip death of its strangeness; let us spend time with it, let us get used to it, let us have nothing on our minds more often. At every moment let us imagine death in all of its aspects. When a horse stumbles, when a tile falls, when a pin pricks us even slightly, let us immediately turn over this thought: “What if that had been death itself?”
Johnson:
The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears, and to all these, the frequent consideration of death is a certain and adequate remedy.
Epicurus was succinct on the subject.
Think on death.
11. Mortality as inspiration. Reflection on death, as we have seen, is viewed by the Stoic as a way to reduce the fear of it, but also as a cause for urgency in living and a source of inspiration. Some further comments on the latter theme from Marcus Aurelius:
The perfection of moral character consists in this: to spend each day as if it were the last, to be neither agitated nor numb, and not to pretend.
Think of yourself as having died, and as having finished the life you have lived until now. The portion that is allowed to you beyond this, live out according to nature.
You are going to die at any minute, and yet you still are not simple and straightforward, nor do you have peace of mind, nor are you free from suspicion that you will be hurt by external things, nor are you kind to everyone, nor do you see that being wise consists solely in being just.
From Seneca:
We must make it our aim to have already lived long enough.
Let us order our minds as if we had come to the end. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s account every day.
Take as much as Fortune gives, remembering that it comes with no guarantee. Snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you, and drain joy to the dregs without delay; nothing is promised for this night – nay, I have granted too long an extension! – not even for this hour. We must hurry, the enemy is right behind us!