A line drawn under life. The device of the closed account: reckon yourself "already dead (ἀποτεθνηκότα ἤδη) and having lived (βεβιωκότα) only up to this instant." Draw a mental line under all that has been — as under a life completed and already mourned. Then the remainder is not a "continuation" you dread to lose but a DOGMAsurplus (ἐκ τοῦ περιόντος — "out of the overplus, beyond the reckoning"): each further day is received as a gift, on top of a balance already closed. What is given over and above cannot be "taken away"; it can only be spent.

A surplus lived by nature. From this gratuitousness follows the norm: live the remainder DOGMAκατὰ τὴν TERMφύσιν ("according to nature"). Not in a fever to "make the most of the end," but calmly and humanly: the gifted time is spent on a human's work, not on clinging. Its kin in Marcus are 04-47 (to die tomorrow or after many years — the difference is trifling), 2.11 (to live, act, and speak "as one departing"); the teacher's background is Seneca (Ep. 12: to close each day as a whole life; Ep. 101). The EXERCISEmemory of death is given here not as dread but as release: the dead have nothing to lose, and so are freer than the living. We print without the negation (as Long and Rogovin also take it). The discipline is desire.