Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/325

 are among things external and those which lie outside the province of the moral purpose, so also is a book. Or for what purpose do you wish to read? Tell me. If you turn to reading merely for entertainment, or in order to learn something, you are futile and lazy. But if you refer reading to the proper standard, what else is this but a life of serenity? However, if reading does not secure for you a life of serenity, of what good is it?—Nay, it does secure me serenity, one says, and that is why I am discontented because I am deprived of it.—And what kind of serenity is this which any chance comer can impede, not merely Caesar, or a friend of Caesar, but a crow, a flutist, fever, thirty thousand other things? But no feature of serenity is so characteristic as continuity and freedom from hindrance.

At this instant I am being called to do something; at this instant I shall go home with the purpose of observing the due measure which I ought to maintain, acting with self-respect, with security, apart from desire and avoidance of things external; and in the second place I observe men, what they say, how they move, and this in no malignant spirit, nor in order to have something to censure or ridicule, but I look at myself the while, to see if I too am making the same mistakes. "How, then, shall I cease to make mistakes?" There was a time when I too made mistakes, but now no longer, thanks be to God.  315 VOL. II.