Lucretius on why we shouldn't fear death

by - 11:36 AM

It's been such a long time since I read anything after Book I of Lucretius's De Rarum Natura (trans. On the Nature of Things), that I had forgotten this poignant and beautiful moment from Book 3:
Thus one thing will never cease to rise out of another, and life is granted to none in fee-simple, to all in usufruct. Think too how the bygone antiquity of everlasting time before our birth was nothing to us. Nature therefore holds this up to us as a mirror of the time yet to come after our death. Is there anything in this that looks appalling, anything that wears an aspect of gloom? Is it not more untroubled than any sleep?...
How beautiful. It is a much more elegant way of saying what Ecclesiastes says, "From dust we have come, to dust we shall go." What has been before us was of no consequence to us insofar as we were unconscious of it as that which we call us - our conscious humanity - did not exist. When we, with our sense of self that comes about through the phenomena-generating machine of our bodies, die, we will simply cease and sleep forever, unconcerned about "our" fates because "we" won't exist.

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