Petrarch. Many a time have I heard that said, but I would still like to hear it afresh from your lips and lodge it in my remembrance.
S. Augustine. Behold him naked and unformed, born in wailings and tears, comforted with a few drops of milk, trembling and crawling, needing the hand of another, fed and clothed from the beasts of the field, his body feeble, his spirit restless, subject to all kinds of sickness, the prey of passions innumerable, devoid of reason, joyful to-day, to-morrow sorrowful, in both full of agitation, incapable of mastering himself, unable to restrain his appetite, ignorant of what things are useful to him and in what proportion, knowing not how to control himself in meat or drink, forced with great labour to gain the food that other creatures find ready at their need, made dull with sleep, swollen with food, stupefied with drink, emaciated with watching, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, at once greedy and timid, disgusted with what he has, longing after what he has lost, discontented alike with past, present and future, full of pride in his misery, and aware of his frailty, baser than the vilest worms, his life is short, his days uncertain, his fate inevitable, since Death in a thousand forms is waiting for him at last.
Petrarch. You have so piled up his miseries and beggary that I feel it were good if I had never been born.
S. Augustine. Yet, in the midst of such wretchedness and such deep destitution of good in man's estate, you go on dreaming of riches and power such as neither emperors nor kings have ever fully enjoyed.
Petrarch. Kindly tell me who ever made use of those words? Who spoke either of riches or of power?
S. Augustine. You imply both, for what greater riches can there be than to lack nothing? What greater power than to be independent of every one else in the world? Certainly those kings and masters of the earth whom you think so rich have wanted a multitude of things. The generals of great armies depend on those whom they seem to command, and, kept in check by their armed legions, they find the very soldiers who render them invincible also render them in turn helpless. Give up, therefore, your dreams of the impossible, and be content to accept the lot of humanity; learn to live in want and in abundance, to command and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend your neck wholly to the rule of Virtue. Then you will be free, wanting nothing, then. you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a king, truly powerful and perfectly happy.
Petrarch. Now I do indeed repent for all that is past, and I desire nothing. But I am still in bondage to one evil habit and am conscious always of a certain need at the bottom of my heart.
S. Augustine. Well, to come back to our subject, there is the very thing which keeps you back from the contemplation of death. It is that which makes you harassed with earthly anxieties; you do not lift up your heart at all to higher things. If you will take my counsel you will utterly cast away these anxieties, which are as so many dead weights upon the spirit, and you will find that it is not so hard after all to order your life by your nature, and let that rule and govern you more than the foolish opinions of the crowd.
Petrarch. I will do so very willingly, but may I ask you to finish what you were beginning to say about ambition, which I have long desired to hear?
S. Augustine. Why ask me to do what you can quite well do for yourself? Examine your own heart; you will see that among its other faults it is not ambition which holds the least place there.