to find himself constantly reproaching nature—complaining
that it doesn’t treat the good and bad as they deserve, but
often lets the bad enjoy pleasure and the things that produce
it, and makes the good suffer pain, and the things that produce
pain. And moreover, to fear pain is to fear something that’s
bound to happen, the world being what it is—and that again
is blasphemy. While if you pursue pleasure, you can hardly
avoid wrongdoing—which is manifestly blasphemous.
Some things nature is indifferent to; if it privileged one
over the other it would hardly have created both. And if we
want to follow nature, to be of one mind with it, we need to
share its indifference. To privilege pleasure over pain—life
over death, fame over anonymity—is clearly blasphemous.
Nature certainly doesn’t.
And when I say that nature is indifferent to them, I mean
that they happen indifferently, at different times, to the things
that exist and the things that come into being after them,
through some ancient decree of Providence—the decree by
which from some initial starting point it embarked on the
creation that we know, by laying down the principles of what
was to come and determining the generative forces: existence
and change, and their successive stages.
- Real good luck would be to abandon life without ever
encountering dishonesty, or hypocrisy, or self-indulgence, or
pride. But the “next best voyage” is to die when you’ve had