of Malta. In vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and
even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken.
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath,
but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every
part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life
consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.
A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.
He would have fared better had he died young.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions.

I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the
infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. Our heads
are not good enough as God made them, they must be moulded outside
by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. The Caribs are better
off than we are. The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it
has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived
of its freedom. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with
its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides;
it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it
cannot move. It is fortunate if it has room to breathe, and it is
laid on its side so that water which should flow from its mouth can
escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this
purpose.

The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free