The Book of Epicurus 2 · Handed down in the Garden, taken from his letters and fragments
Epicurus, born on Samos about 341 before this era, died at Athens about 270. About 306 he bought a garden outside Athens and taught there, and his school took its name from it. Women and slaves were admitted to the garden as students, which no other school of that day did. He is said to have written three hundred rolls; what survives is three letters, a set of maxims, and fragments. He did not believe the gods concern themselves with men, nor that anything of a person remains after death. He comes after Aristotle. He appeals to no god and promises no afterlife. This book is chosen by the six axioms: what accords is set forward, what runs against is set back and not deleted. (cf. Acts 5.29)Further: chapter two of this book says that pain removed is the ceiling of pleasure, while The Book of Schopenhauer 3 says that satisfaction is only the pause in a lack. The two cannot both be wholly right. The Order keeps both and does not rule. Let the reader set them side by side.
2.1I say that the end of life is pleasure. People hear that sentence and suppose I am teaching indulgence.
2.2Those people did not read the second sentence. The second is the one that matters.
2.3Pleasure has a ceiling.
2.4The ceiling of pleasure is the point at which all pain has been removed.
2.5At that point there is no further pleasure to be added.
2.6You may still change the flavour, turn it about and vary it endlessly, but you cannot add to it.
2.7A hungry man eating his fill goes from pain to no pain. A man already full, eating delicacies, does not go from no pain to less than no pain.
2.8He has only given "no pain" a different taste.
2.9What most people do with their lives is spend strength buying flavour while believing they are buying quantity.
2.10This is very hard to believe, because every day you see someone living better than you.
2.11What you see is that he has more flavours than you, not more quantity.
2.12From this comes something harder still to believe: all the pleasure to be had in an unending stretch of days is no more than what is to be had in a limited one.
2.13Provided you have reckoned where the limit of pleasure lies.
2.14So the man who thinks, if only I could go on living forever — what he wants is not more pleasure.
2.15He refuses to believe that pleasure has a ceiling, and so he uses length of days to make up for the quantity that is not there.
2.16If you believe this, years are handed back to you at once. You no longer have to chase the thing that cannot be added to.