This life, certainly, is miserable enough. Can anyone be unaware of that, can there be anyone who doesn't admit it? How much we have to put up with, how much we undergo in this life that we don't want to! Quarrels, disagreements, trials, mistaken judgments about one another, so that sometimes, unawares, we embrace an enemy, go in fear of a friend; where there's hunger, there's nakedness, there's cold, there's heat, there's weariness, there's illness, there's jealousy. Certainly this life is miserable enough.
Certe ista misera est: quis hoc nesciat, quis non fateatur? Quanta habemus, quanta patimur, quae nolumus, in ista uita! Rixae, dissensiones, temptationes, ignorantia cordis nostri in inuicem, ita ut aliquando nescientes amplectamur inimicum, timeamus amicum: ubi fames, ubi nuditas, ubi frigora, ubi aestus, ubi lassitudines, ubi aegritudines, ubi zelotipiae. Certe misera est haec uita.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, August 06, 2024
This Life
Augustine, Sermons 229H.3, in G. Morin, ed., Sancti Aureli Augustini Tractatus, sive, Sermones inediti: ex codice Guelferbytano 4096 (Kempten: Kösel, 1917), p. 49 (tr. Edmund Hill):