Another doozy from Seneca:
Have you anything that might induce you to wait? You have exhausted the very pleasures that make you hesitate and hold you back; not one of them has any novelty for you, not one of them now fails to bore you out of sheer excess. You know what wine or honey-wine tastes like: it makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand flagons go through your bladder – all you are is a strainer. You are perfectly familiar with the taste of oysters or mullet. Your luxurious way of life has kept back not a single fresh experience for you to try in coming years. And yet these are the things from which you are reluctant to be torn away. What else is there which you would be sorry to be deprived of? Friends? Do you know how to be a friend? Your country? Do you really value her so highly that you would put off your dinner for her? The sunlight? If you could you would put out that light – for what have you ever done that deserved a place in it? Confess it – it is no attachment to the world of politics or business, or even the world of nature, that makes you put off dying – the delicatessens, in which there is nothing you have left untried, are what you are reluctant to leave. You are scared of death – but how magnificently heedless of it you are while you are dealing with a dish of choice mushrooms! You want to live – but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying – and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead? Caligula was once passing a column of captives on the Latin Road when one of them, with a hoary old beard reaching down his breast, begged to be put to death. 'So,' replied Caligula, 'you are alive, then, as you are?' That is the answer to give to people to whom death would actually come as a release. 'You are scared of dying? So you are alive, then, as you are?'
It can be disconcerting or liberating, depending on how you look at it, to be persuaded that your own death wouldn't be so bad.
