Memento Mori

Where it comes from

Memento mori is Latin for remember that you must die. The phrase is best known from Christian art, but the thought is older, and the Stoics came back to it often. Marcus Aurelius uses it in the Meditations not to frighten himself, but to get on with being good:

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, section 17, translated by George Long (1862)

Seneca's version

Seneca turns the thought into a habit for the end of each day. In a letter on growing old, he suggests going to sleep as if the day had been the last one, quoting a line of Virgil, so that each morning after it is a gift:

...as we go to sleep, let us say, glad and cheerful: “I have lived; I have run the course that fortune gave me.”

If God adds a tomorrow, let us receive it gladly. He is happiest, and the untroubled master of himself, who waits for tomorrow without anxiety. Whoever has said “I have lived” rises every day to a gain.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 12, section 9, translated from the Latin for this page (2026)

How the module works

Fifty-two circles, one for each week of the year, numbered every thirteen weeks so the quarters are easy to find. It goes once, at the front of the book. Fill in a circle as each week ends.

Painters of the 1600s made the same reminder into still lifes called vanitas, like the one by Philippe de Champaigne above: a flower that will fade, a skull, an hourglass running down. The page is meant the same way. The filled circles are time already spent, and the empty ones are the weeks still there to use well.