The greater part of mortals complain, Paulinus, of the spite of nature, because our life is short, and because the time given to us passes and flows away so swiftly that, with very few exceptions, all others are snatched away by death before they are sated with living. It is no slight, no vulgar matter to plead against nature on behalf of the human condition; yet it is not with her that we must contend here. She is in the right, she renders her reasons: this life, if you know how to use it, she has made long; but if you let it slip away, it has been too brief. Why so? We were not given a scant portion of time, but we have wasted much of it. Life has been squandered in idle cares, applied to nothing; we have not perceived what was passing, and we have seen others grow old before us. Hence we have not found life excessively short; we have made of it a deposit that was not ours to keep, as light and as fleeting as if we had received it on loan, to be repaid. I must first persuade you, then, of this truth: that those who chase after honors, who expose themselves day and night to great labors in order to reach the summit of power, whose efforts, multiplied on every side, extend to the salvation of mankind — that these men, I say, are strangled by ambition, far from breathing freely and at ease. Those whom fortune has raised to grandeur, above all if they delight in displaying it through outward marks, if they wish to dazzle with torches and with gilded, emblematic robes, are in the same case as men whose life is languid and torpid, and who lament without ceasing. For what does their grandeur avail them, if its very bulk leaves them no leisure to savor life? Those who make their glory of eloquence and of the liberal arts, even those whom the crowd calls fortunate, who run through all men's affairs in order to be learned and useful to others, stifle amid their business and are drowned in the crowd of jurists, orators and scholars. But none of these men can recognize his own poverty, because the great occupations they pursue present themselves under the aspect of great things. I should say that the greatest loss of life is that which grows torpid without pleasure, without labor, without passion of the mind. He who desires neither glory, nor wine, nor delights, but who wills that his life should not drain away before it reaches its appointed term, who lives in a calm and tranquil manner — such a man, I say, might be judged to have possessed a life already of long duration. The greatest of poets, in the sorrow he felt for the brevity of our nature, says: 'Flow, fairest life, flow swiftly.' True, nature gave us a very brief span; but memory will add to the past an immense extension, and expectation will enlarge the future, and we shall not have a short life. We must add the life of others to our own. Before I speak of those who amuse themselves by confiscating each day a part of their time, and who, on the contrary, make their life long, I must point out who they are who possess a long life, and who have not even a small portion of one. I do not count among those who deal their life a blow each day, and subtract a part of it, those who have squandered it on one person and one occupation alone. Of those whose occupations leave them some leisure, some devote themselves to other men's affairs, others to private interests, yet such as are dangerous to them, whose passion brings back anxiety at the very moment when they rest; and who, after passing from public life to private, return from private life to public. All those whom fortune has raised to the summit of grandeur, all these men who stand in need of leisure, for whom repose would be the greatest happiness — all, I repeat, are unable to enjoy their time. And this is what happens: we see them, when life is near its end, asking for the prolongation of their days, imploring that the end be pushed back, as if that were the great thing, while they do not know how to distinguish life from the empty hours that flow away without fruit. Hence one must observe that Homer often called Pyrrhus a king, so strong, so spirited, so illustrious, though he was still in his youth; and he foretells his death in a passage where he mourns it. But there is nothing here to rejoice over; for what is already past belongs to the past, and it is the fruit of a life that has been squandered, not preserved. Therefore do not fix your gaze on what we can no longer consider: look to what is no more, and to what is hoped for. The past, the one we have covered with diverse occupations, is lost; the future is uncertain, and losing it does not make us wiser. Join these two times, then, and set the present between the past and the future, and keep it preciously, and see to it that nothing of it is wasted without fruit, that you feel no losses. He who joins these three times into one will be able to prolong his life to the point that it will far exceed the life of any other man. This is the thing most necessary and most important for attaining a life long enough: not to fritter it away, to take care to do nothing idly, to practice thrift with it. A great part of life flows away in doing ill, a great part in doing nothing, and the whole of it in doing something other than what one ought.