If you will give ear to my advice, ponder and practice this—how to welcome death, or even, if circumstances commend that course, to invite it. There is no difference whether death comes to us, or whether we go to death.
Make yourself believe that all ignorant men are wrong when they say: "It is a beautiful thing to die one's own death."
But there is no man who does not die his own death. What is more, you may reflect on this thought: no one dies except on his own day. You are throwing away none of your own time; for what you leave behind does not belong to you. Farewell.
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 69
Over the years, I have gradually come to appreciate how Seneca can take most any topic and relate it back to the problem of mortality; I now smile instead of squirming uncomfortably. Is not death, after all, the final form of rest, and is not the fear of death the worst sort of restlessness? We desire or dread all the wrong things, and so we fail to find tranquility within our own nature.
Some “philosophers”, those who dwell upon their own anxieties, regard dying as an existential threat, and this is because they would rather suffer alone than be of service to Providence. The cessation of my existence is but a condition for the fulfillment of my essence, and once I focus on living well, I am no longer so fixated on merely living. Excise the moral center from a man, and he is now just the shell of a man.
Seneca is critical of a phrase that at first seems harmless: surely it is good to die on our own terms, just as it is good to live on our own terms? The danger may be subtle, but it is nevertheless grave: we are not the masters of our circumstances, only the masters of our judgments, and therefore it is not up to us to pick and choose the setting for our deaths, even as we will choose the attitude toward our deaths.
In other words, every time to die is the right time to die, and there is never a wrong time, though not every man embraces it with character, and many men demean themselves by bargaining about the provisions. As Epictetus said, the Author chooses the particulars of the role and its duration, while the actor is challenged to play it to the best of his ability; when something has only been lent to us, we have no claim to decide when it will be taken away.
Discontent is a result of a failed expectation, and thus no one who relies on what he knows with certainty to be his own must ever feel troubled or dissatisfied.
Over the years, I have gradually come to appreciate how Seneca can take most any topic and relate it back to the problem of mortality; I now smile instead of squirming uncomfortably. Is not death, after all, the final form of rest, and is not the fear of death the worst sort of restlessness? We desire or dread all the wrong things, and so we fail to find tranquility within our own nature.
Some “philosophers”, those who dwell upon their own anxieties, regard dying as an existential threat, and this is because they would rather suffer alone than be of service to Providence. The cessation of my existence is but a condition for the fulfillment of my essence, and once I focus on living well, I am no longer so fixated on merely living. Excise the moral center from a man, and he is now just the shell of a man.
Seneca is critical of a phrase that at first seems harmless: surely it is good to die on our own terms, just as it is good to live on our own terms? The danger may be subtle, but it is nevertheless grave: we are not the masters of our circumstances, only the masters of our judgments, and therefore it is not up to us to pick and choose the setting for our deaths, even as we will choose the attitude toward our deaths.
In other words, every time to die is the right time to die, and there is never a wrong time, though not every man embraces it with character, and many men demean themselves by bargaining about the provisions. As Epictetus said, the Author chooses the particulars of the role and its duration, while the actor is challenged to play it to the best of his ability; when something has only been lent to us, we have no claim to decide when it will be taken away.
Discontent is a result of a failed expectation, and thus no one who relies on what he knows with certainty to be his own must ever feel troubled or dissatisfied.
—Reflection written in 8/2013
IMAGE: Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death (1896)
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