Calvinus, the greatest loss that life suffers is postponement: it makes us wait for each day, and while we wait for it, that day slips away. Thus whatever you put off until tomorrow is taken from you. The promise of tomorrow is the greatest loss we can make. Make me believe, Calvinus, that the greatest good of life is that it is brief, and that nature has given us enough of it, if we know how to use it well. One does not receive a short existence from life; one makes it such: it is not that we have lacked time, but that we have lost a great deal of it. Time is the only thing of which it is shameful to be miserly when we do not possess it, and of which men are so prodigal without thinking. You are right to complain of nature: she has treated you like a father, not like a greedy heir; she has opened before you a vast domain, if you know how to cultivate it. Yet most men complain of the unkindness of nature because she made us live so short a time, whereas life is long enough, and more than enough has been granted to accomplish the greatest things, if the whole of it were well invested. But when negligence and idleness have crept into it, when nothing has been learned that one might leave to posterity, when nothing has been turned to one's own profit, time slips away imperceptibly: nothing passes more imperceptibly than what flows on without shock. Do not wonder, then, that the most busy of men wish for a long life: they do not realize that nothing is less their own than the past, that the present escapes them, and that even the future is no longer theirs, since they have surrendered it to hope. Hence I have always judged those who have lived little to be little different from those who have never lived. It is no small thing, Calvinus, to gather into a single review the scattered moments of your life, and to reckon with yourself that you have lived little, though you have lived long. Consider: for everything that presses upon us and agitates us, you will seek in vain an age that allows you to do it. Life is divided into three times: what has been, what is, and what will be. Of these three, the one in which we act is the present; what has been and what will be are not within our power. The future is doubtful, the past is lost, the present alone is certain; it is also the shortest, and it escapes us before we can possess it. Hence the life of the busy is very short: they have lost the present. All those you see bustling about the courts and the halls of justice, all whom you see in the crowd driven by their own clients or the clients of others, by the senate or by private and public business, keep their souls always strained beyond themselves, fixed upon what is far off or what is to come, hanging upon hope, forgetting what lies at hand. What concerns the present, even if sweet and tranquil, they despise, and they chase after what does not yet exist; they dread what is coming and long for what is not to come. Yet nature has given us an immense advantage: if the time she has granted us is swift and fleeting, unable to be held, the moral being, whom the divine has placed among divine things, can nevertheless so act that the moments that have fled are not all lost. All the hours of past ages are shut up in memory; nature has opened to us the entrance to ages that were not ours; she has made it possible for us to know whatever has been done that is memorable, and to embrace it in our minds. We can therefore prolong our life into the past; we can exercise our minds upon the times that preceded us, and if anywhere there has appeared some great and noble example, we can examine it and imitate it. This is an excellent way to free oneself from busyness: to transport oneself in thought to bygone ages. Those who have devoted themselves to the study of ancient centuries and of all times, those, in the presence of life, have leisure for everything that has seemed worthy of remembrance. And you, Calvinus, must not complain of nature: she has acted toward you as a father; she has given you life, and, so that you may use it well, she has opened to you all the ages. Do not yield to those who complain of the shortness of life: it is not life that is short, it is we who do not know how to use it. It is not that we have little time, but that we lose much. Life is long enough, and enough has been given to accomplish the greatest things, if the whole of it were well invested.