The Book of Epicurus 3 · 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.
3.1Divide your desires into three kinds. A man who cannot tell them apart spends his life fighting a war he cannot win.
3.2The first kind: natural, and necessary. Hunger wants food, thirst wants drink, cold wants clothing, the body wants to be free of pain, the mind wants to be free of alarm.
3.3The second kind: natural, but not necessary. To eat finely, to live spaciously, to be loved.
3.4The third kind: neither natural nor necessary. To have a name, to have power, to be spoken of by everybody, to have a statue standing after you are dead.
3.5Now for what matters. What matters is not what each of them is. What matters is whether each of them has a ceiling.
3.6The first has a ceiling, and the ceiling is low; you reach up and touch it. Bread and water reach it.
3.7The second has a ceiling too, only higher. Failing to reach it will not injure you.
3.8The third has no ceiling.
3.9The whole hinge is in that sentence. However much you pour into a desire of the third kind, it will not fill, because there is no place in it called full.
3.10A man who wants everybody to speak of him gets a thousand and then wants ten thousand. He is not greedy.
3.11He has fallen into something with no bottom, and believes he is walking along a road.
3.12So what nature asks for is easily got, and costs little.
3.13What empty opinion asks for stretches on without end, and will swallow the whole strength of a life and still not be fed.
3.14If you doubt it, count: of the things that have genuinely kept you from sleeping, how many were of the first kind?
3.15I would guess none. A thing of the first kind, lacking, you go and get; got, it is done with; it does not keep a man awake.
3.16What keeps men awake is almost all of the third kind. And the third kind should never have been begun.