Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/139

Rh and the nearer I approach to death, the more easily I shall accept the exchange. Just as I have experienced on several occasions the truth of what Cæsar says, that things often appear greater to us at a distance than close at hand, so I have found that when well I have had much more horror of maladies than when I have been touched by them. My lightheartedness, my enjoyment, and my vigour make the other condition appear to me so utterly disproportionate to this, that in imagination I magnify its discomforts by half, and fancy them more burdensome than I find them when I have them on my shoulders; I hope that it will be so for me with death.

(b) See how Nature, in the ordinary changes and impairments that we undergo, takes from us the perception of er loss and our waning powers. What is left to an old man of the vigour of his youth and his past years?

Heu! senibus vitæ portio quanta manet.

(c) To a worn-out and broken soldier of his guard who came to him in the street and asked his leave to kill himself, Cæsar, observing his decrepit aspect, replied jestingly: “Do you think then that you are living?” (b) Were we to fall into it suddenly, I do not think that we should be capable of enduring such a change; but, led by her hand, down a gentle and, as it were, imperceptible descent, little by little, step by step, she impels us into that wretched state and enures us to it, so that we feel no shock when our youth dies in us, which is essentially and in truth a sterner death than is the utter death of a languishing life, and than is death in old age; because the leap from half-existence to non-existence is not so great as from a pleasant and flourishing existence to a painful and grievous one. (a) The bent and bowed body has less strength to sustain a burden; so likewise our soul: we must train her and educate her to meet the force of this adversary.