Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] From what you write to me, and from what I hear, I'm forming good hopes about you: you aren't running from place to place, unsettling yourself with constant changes of scene. That kind of thrashing about belongs to a sick mind. To my thinking, the first evidence of a well-ordered mind is that it can stand still and keep its own company. [2] But watch out for this: all that reading of many authors and volumes of every sort may carry something drifting and unsteady in it. You have to stay with particular great minds and feed on them, if you want to take away anything that will settle reliably in your soul. The person who is everywhere is nowhere. People who spend life on the road end up with plenty of places to stay and no friendships; the same thing necessarily happens to those who never grow intimate with any single writer's mind but rush through everything at a gallop. [3] Food does no good, adds nothing to the body, if it comes back up the moment it's swallowed. Nothing blocks recovery like constantly switching remedies; a wound never closes over when different dressings keep being tried on it; a plant never takes strength when it's transplanted again and again. Nothing is so useful that it helps in passing. A crowd of books pulls the mind apart. So since you can't read everything you own, it's enough to own what you can read. [4] 'But,' you say, 'sometimes I want to open this book, sometimes that one.' Sampling a bit of everything is the mark of a queasy stomach; foods that are many and mismatched foul the system instead of feeding it. So read the proven authors, always; and if you feel like a detour to the others now and then, come back to the first ones. Lay in some provision every day against poverty, some against death, and no less against the other plagues; and after skimming much, pick out one thing to digest that day. [5] I do this myself: out of the many pages I've read, I seize on something. Today's find is one I came upon in Epicurus — I make a habit of crossing over into the enemy camp too, not as a deserter but as a scout. 'Cheerful poverty,' he says, 'is an honorable thing.' [6] But in fact, if it's cheerful, it isn't poverty. It isn't having little that makes a man poor; it's craving more. And why should it matter how much lies in a man's strongbox, how much in his granaries, how many head he grazes, how much he has out at interest, if he's hungering after his neighbor's property — if his accounting runs not on what he's acquired but on what remains to acquire? You ask what the right measure of wealth is? First, to have what is necessary; next, to have enough. Farewell.