Essays of Montaigne

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition. One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son, as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best:

"'Miser, O miser,' aiunt, 'omnia ademit

Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.'"

["'Wretch that I am,' they cry, 'one fatal day has deprived me of

all joys of life.'"—Lucretius, iii. 911.]

And the builder,

"Manuet," says he, "opera interrupta, minaeque

Murorum ingentes."

["The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls

unmade."—AEneid, iv. 88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are born to action:

"Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus."

["When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed."

—Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

"Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum

jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."

["They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess

things."—Lucretius, iii. 913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours. To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end, that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies should put us in mind of our frail condition:

"Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede

Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira

Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum

Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis."

["It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and

to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with

the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and

covering the tables with blood."—Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]