To return to my subject: there is, then, no great harm in dying privately
and far from home; we conceive ourselves obliged to retire for natural
actions less unseemly and less terrible than this. But, moreover, such
as are reduced to spin out a long languishing life, ought not, perhaps,
to wish to trouble a great family with their continual miseries;
therefore the Indians, in a certain province, thought it just to knock a
man on the head when reduced to such a necessity; and in another of their
provinces, they all forsook him to shift for himself as well as he could.
To whom do they not, at last, become tedious and insupportable? the
ordinary offices of fife do not go that length. You teach your best
friends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long use
neither to regard nor to lament your sufferings. The groans of the stone
are grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them.
And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (which
does not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, which
easily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not too
much to make abuse of this half a lifetime? The more I should see them
constrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more I
should be sorry for their pains. We have liberty to lean, but not to lay
our whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; like
him who caused little children's throats to be cut to make use of their
blood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who was
continually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warm
in the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour and
stinking. I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline of
life. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. I am sociable even to excess,
yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from the
sight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without