Wherefore steel yourself, Lucilius, with all your might against fear of death. This fear it is that drags us down; this it is that torments and destroys the life it tries to preserve. It magnifies all those dangers, earthquakes and lightnings, and the rest. You will be able to bear them all resolutely if you but reflect that short and long in life make no difference. It is but hours we lose. But suppose it is days, 10 or months, or years, what we lose is, surely, bound to perish. What difference, pray, is it whether I manage to reach them or not? Time flows on; it leaves behind those most eager to seize it. Neither what is to be is mine, nor what was. I am poised upon a point of fleeting time; it is a great thing to have been moderate in one’s ambitions. Laelius the Wise made a neat retort once to a person who said, I am sixty years old: you mean, said he, the sixty you no longer 11 _are_.[89] We show our failure to grasp the terms of this elusive life of ours, and the conditions of time that is never our own, in reckoning up as ours years that are now lost. Let us fix this in our minds, and constantly remind ourselves, I must die. When? What matter is that to you? Death is a law of nature; death is a tribute and a duty imposed on mortals; it is the remedy of all ills. Whoever now fears it will one day long for it. Giving up all else, Lucilius, make this your one meditation, not to dread the name death. By long reflection make death an intimate friend, that, if so required, you may be able even to go forth to welcome it. [89] It is almost impossible to express in English the play on _habeo_ = have; French is more amenable. “J’ai soixante ans! Parlez-vous des soixante ans que vous n’avez plus?”--NISARD. BOOK VII WHICH TREATS OF COMETS I