All Things Have Their Season — The Essays of Montaigne

Those who compare Cato the Censor with the younger Cato, who killed himself, compare two beautiful natures that much resemble one another. The first acquired reputation several ways and excels in military exploits and the utility of his public employments. The virtue of the younger, besides that it were blasphemy to compare any to it in vigour, was much more pure and unblemished. Who could absolve the Censor from envy and ambition, having dared to attack the honour of Scipio, a man in goodness infinitely beyond him or any other of his time? What they report of the Censor, that in extreme old age he put himself upon learning Greek with so greedy an appetite as if to quench a long thirst, does not seem to Montaigne to make much for his honour. It is properly what we call falling into second childhood. All things have their seasons, even good ones, and a man may say his Paternoster out of time, as they accused T. Quintus Flaminius of being seen praying apart in the time of a battle that he won.

Eudemonidas, seeing Xenocrates still very intent upon his school lectures when very old, asks when this man will be wise if he is yet learning. Philopaemen, to those who extol King Ptolemy for every day inuring his person to the exercise of arms, says it is not commendable in a king of his age to exercise himself in these things; he ought now really to employ them. The young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them, say the sages. The greatest vice they observe in us is that our desires incessantly grow young again; we are always re-beginning to live. Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age, yet we have one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every day anew. The longest of Montaigne's designs is not of above a year's extent. He thinks of nothing now but ending, rids himself of all new hopes and enterprises, takes his last leave of every place he departs from, and every day dispossesses himself of what he has.

The only comfort he finds in old age is that it mortifies several cares and desires wherewith his life has been disturbed: the care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge, of health, of himself. There are men who are learning to speak at a time when they should learn to be silent for ever. A man may always study, but he must not always go to school. What a contemptible thing is an old Abecedarian. If we must study, let us study what is suitable to our present condition, that we may answer as he did who, asked to what end he studied in his decrepit age, said that he may go out better, and at greater ease. Such a study was that of the younger Cato, feeling his end approach, and which he met with in Plato's Discourse of the Eternity of the Soul. He applied himself to this study not for the service of his death, but as a man whose sleeps were never disturbed in the importance of such a deliberation. The night that he was denied the praetorship he spent in play. That wherein he was to die he spent in reading. The loss either of life or of office was all one to him.