This nonchalance must be learned, because taking oneself too seriously comes quite naturally to human beings. Montaigne describes a man of his acquaintance who thought it a cosmic injustice to find himself on his deathbed before he could compose his history of this or that king. Montaigne thinks we are all a little like that and must teach

Practice 5 Contemplate Your Own Death

Rather, it is that intellectuals can always find a way out of the terrors and limitations of their own age, through writing and through contemplating the vastness of the universe. Whether or not this message was helpful to Marcia (it probably was not), this lesson was one to which Seneca himself was deeply attached; it was to be a primary