Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the
miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you
have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at
sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your
powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever: you must eat
up your principal bit by bit and be tortured by seeing it grow
continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being
rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty. Remember, too, that there
never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of
the unborn if he could do so with decency and honour. Being in the
world, he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go; but do you
think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he
had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter the
past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not
think that he would do it very gladly? What was it that one of their own
poets meant, if it was not this, when he cried out upon the day in which
he was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child
conceived? 'For now,' he says, 'I should have lain still and been quiet,
I should have slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors
of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes
that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden
untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
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