Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Do this, my dear Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself, and gather and guard the time that until now was being taken from you, or stolen from you, or simply slipping away. Convince yourself that it is exactly as I write: some of our time is snatched from us, some is quietly siphoned off, some just drains away. But the most shameful loss of all is the loss that comes through carelessness. And if you look closely, you'll see that a great part of life is spent doing wrong, the greatest part doing nothing at all, and the whole of it doing something other than what we should be doing.
Show me the man who puts a real price on his time, who values a day, who understands that he is dying every single day. In this we are mistaken - we look ahead to death as if it lay wholly in the future, when a great part of it has already happened. Whatever years lie behind us, death already holds. So do, my dear Lucilius, what you write that you're doing: hold on to every single hour. This way you'll depend less on tomorrow, if you get a grip on today.
While we put life off, it rushes past. Everything, Lucilius, belongs to someone else; only time is our own. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, so fleeting and slippery, and anyone who wishes can dislodge us from it. And such is human folly that people let themselves be charged for the smallest, cheapest things - things that can always be replaced - once they've gotten hold of them, yet no one who has received time judges himself to owe anything at all, when time is the one debt that not even a grateful man can repay.
You'll ask, perhaps, what I myself am doing, I who preach all this to you. I'll confess it frankly: like a man who is extravagant but careful, I keep an account of my expenses. I can't say I lose nothing, but I can tell you what I lose, and why, and how; I can give you the reasons for my poverty. But what happens to me is what happens to most people reduced to want through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, no one helps them.
So what follows? I don't consider a man poor if whatever little is left is enough for him. Still, I'd rather you kept what's yours, and you'll start at a good time. For as our ancestors saw it, 'thrift practiced late comes at the bottom of the barrel' - for what remains at the bottom isn't only the least, but the worst. Farewell.