Genre and place in the book. A definition (EXERCISEphysical definition) of death: death is a "rest" (ἀνάπαυλα) from four functions of life. Thus the EXERCISEmemory of death rests on a sober definition: death, "stripped" to what it is, ceases to frighten. The principal discipline is desire; the sustaining one is assent (the bare view).

The four functions. Death puts an end to: (1) sensory impression (αἰσθητικὴ ἀντιτυπία — the "counter-shock" of sensation); (2) impulsive twitching (ὁρμητικὴ νευροσπαστία) — impulse jerks us like a MOTIFmarionette on its strings (cf. 06-16); (3) the run of discursive thought (διανοητικὴ διέξοδος); (4) the service of the flesh (TERMσάρξ). None of these functions is, in itself, the "I" — all of them cease, and the "I" is deprived of them.

The meaning — rest (ἀνάπαυλα). The key word is not "annihilation" but "rest": death gives rest from what, in life, was either labor (the service of the flesh) or unfreedom (impulse jerking one like a puppet). The definition dispels the terror by redescribing death as the cessation of processes, not as an "evil" (cf. 04-05 — birth is composition, death the dissolution of the same elements, nothing contrary to the λόγος of our constitution).

Disciplines and parallels. The principal one is desire (the acceptance of death through its definition); the secondary is assent (the bare definition, EXERCISEdefinitio). Parallels: 04-05 (composition/dissolution; death not against the λόγος of our constitution); 02-02 (the definition of the human being — flesh, breath, ruling part); the MOTIFmarionette image — 06-16, Med. 2.2; Med. 2.17 (the body a river, all transient). (Rogovin drops the marionette image — "the impulses that determine us.")