enough. Or are you determined to lie down with evil? Hasn’t
experience even taught you that—to avoid it like the plague?
Because it is a plague—a mental cancer—worse than
anything caused by tainted air or an unhealthy climate.
Diseases like that can only threaten your life; this one attacks
your humanity.
- Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of
the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like
growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first
gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the
other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is
no different.
So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not
with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but
simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now
you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s
womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul
will emerge from its compartment.
Or perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in
the back of your mind. Well, consider two things that should
reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you’ll leave
behind you, and the kind of people you’ll no longer be mixed
up with. There’s no need to feel resentment toward them—in
fact, you should look out for their well-being, and be gentle
with them—but keep in mind that everything you believe is