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Death has no loopholes. All of us must meet it in the
end.
We go through the same motions in the same old place.
No measure
Of added life will ever coin for us a novel pleasure.
True, while we lack that which we long for, it is an
obsession,
But we will just crave something else once it’s in our
possession;
We are forever panting with an unquenched thirst for
life.
No one knows what the years to come will bring – what
joy or strife
May lie in store for us, what outcome’s looming in our
lot.
But by adding to life, we don’t diminish by one jot
The length of death, nor are we able to subtract instead
Anything to abbreviate the time that we are dead.
Though you outlive as many generations as you will,
Nevertheless, Eternal death is waiting for you still.
It is no shorter, that eternity that lies in store
For the man who with the setting sun today will rise no
more,
Than for the man whose sun has set, months even years,
before.
The closing poem of ‘Mortality and the Soul’ book 3, in Lucretius’ The Nature of Things.