On the Shortness of Life

Most people, Paulinus, complain that nature shortchanged us. Our lifespan is too brief. The years we get burn through too fast. Life walks out on almost all of us, they say, just when we were finally getting ready to live.

It isn't only the crowd who feels this way. Even people of real distinction make the same complaint. Hippocrates put it in his famous line: “Life is short, art long.” Aristotle made the same protest, oddly unphilosophical for him, when he charged nature with giving animals five or ten human lifetimes while cutting humans short, even though we're born to do so many great things.

The truth is different. We don't have a short time to live. We waste most of what we have. Life is long enough, and we've been given more than enough of it to accomplish great things, if we invest the whole of it well.

Frail old men beg in their prayers for a few more years. They lie about their age. They flatter themselves with the lie. They enjoy fooling themselves the way they'd enjoy fooling fate.

Then a real illness arrives and reminds them they're mortal. Watch the terror in them as they die. They aren't leaving life. They're being dragged out of it. They cry over and over that they were fools. They never really lived. If only they survive this, they'll finally take it easy. Then they realize how pointlessly they piled up things they'll never enjoy. All that effort, for nothing.

But why wouldn't life be plenty long for someone who keeps it free of distractions? None of it is signed over to other people. None scattered here and there. None handed to fortune. None lost to neglect. None given away just to seem generous. None of it is wasted. The whole of it pays a return.