By the Lord's help we have said of human life that it is the likeness of a roadway, on which each as he journeys towards the eternal things, unconcerned with others' ambitions, should be satisfied with no more than the poverty of a sort of travelling allowance, so that, cleaving to no allurements, he may understand that all earthly things are foreign to him. Now let us show, as we have already said, that the same life is a shadow. Does not the life of man on earth seem to you to be a shadow and mirage, which is so doubtful and uncertain in its length that its reality is the equivalent of shadow? For you see and see it not; itself and not itself, let us say; what has been you do not see, and cannot even see what shall be. You only see what is, while it lasts; take away what is, and you see nothing; it is so unseen as if it were not; thus each sees his life a shadow, and from morning until evening, as in a mirror, he beholds the vanity of his own life. But similar things, though of a different kind, he sees only in his sleep; for he observes false things alike as true, and in
Wretched man that I am, if there I shall not see life, which I never see in truth; for it must be true there, where eternity dwells. Then fly, fly, you shade of mortal life; fly from us and we from you; fly as you are wont; for you ever fly that soon the true life may come; let us flee you, lest you deceive us; for you habitually deceive the laggards with specious entanglements. Fly, I say, and hasten, you that have beguiled many, and mean to beguile us, and after us will beguile others and apportion them to death. Oh, how blind, how beguiling are you, uncertain life! You await me to pounce, allure me to persuade, beseech me to beguile, persuade me to deceive. Who is so witless as to trust you who deceive your lovers and beguile your trusting friends? For those who cultivate you are deceived, and those who trust you are beguiled; but those who spurn you are enriched, and those who flee you, saved. They that scorn you seek God. Therefore let us flee you before you flee from us; and since you are mortal, brief, tottering, unsure, inconstant, transient, fickle, changeful, let us hold ourselves as lovers and merchants of God and eternal life rather than of you, and let us flee you as you flow and fly, lest you claim us with your lovers. For we must flee what flies, and so live in it as though we must daily die. For what does it matter to us whether we die today or tomorrow? For while we needs must die, we must so think of death as though it were already long past; and while nothing lasts upon this side of death, we must hasten to death, that after death we may be able to see eternal truths. Hence we must not linger, but hasten from the shadow of a pictured life to the true life's truth. And since the way of carnal life is quite other than the way of spiritual progress, let the mind in its progress press onward, even as life presses on its course, and let ripeness of the mind increase with fullness of age; and as the spans of life grow shorter, so let the number of our vices