August 26, 2020

📚 Book Notes: On the Shortness of Life

It's a good reminder that life is short, so do things that you love doing. There's no point toiling to acquire things you wouldn't enjoy for long. My main problem with this, as with other philosophical texts I've read, is that the language used is unnecessarily complex (both in terms of sentence structure and words). The book consists of 3 letters. The first is quite good and I'll probably read it again next year. Skip the second one, skim the third.

Here are my notes from On the Shortness of Life:

1. Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion. For the rest, Fortune can dispose as she likes: his life is now secure. Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
2. Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
3. Some men, after they have crawled through a thousand indignities to the supreme dignity, have been assailed by the gloomy thought that all their labours were but for the sake of an epitaph.
4. Those who are still armed when they agree terms with their enemies are safer and more highly regarded.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Until We Meet Again...
🖖 swap