Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Wherever I turn, I see the evidence of my old age. I had gone out to my place near the city and was complaining about the money the crumbling building was costing. My manager tells me the fault is not his negligence—he is doing everything—but the house is old. That house grew up under my own hands: what awaits me, then, if masonry the same age as I am is already that rotten? [2] Annoyed with him, I seize the next excuse for irritation. 'It's obvious,' I say, 'these plane trees are being neglected: they have no leaves. Look how knotted and shriveled the branches are, how sad and scaly the trunks! That would not happen if someone dug around them, if someone watered them.' He swears by my guardian spirit that he is doing everything, that his care never lets up—but they are little old trees. Between us: I planted them myself; I saw their first leaf myself. [3] Turning to the door, I say, 'Who is that? That broken-down creature, quite properly stationed at the entrance—he's facing the way out. Where did you pick him up? What possessed you to carry off someone else's corpse?' But the man says, 'Don't you recognize me? I'm Felicio—you used to bring me little clay figurines. I'm the son of Philositus the manager, your little pet.' 'The man is completely raving,' I say. 'Now he's become a small boy, my pet even? Well, it's entirely possible: his teeth are falling out this very moment.'
[4] I owe this to my place near the city: my old age stood plainly before me wherever I looked. Let us embrace old age and love it; it brims with pleasure for anyone who understands its use. Fruit is never so welcome as when its season is ending; boyhood is loveliest at its close; for devoted drinkers the last drink is the delight—the one that sinks them, that puts the finishing touch on drunkenness. [5] Every pleasure saves its sweetest part for its own end. The most delightful age is the one already on the downslope, though not yet plunging; and even the age standing on the last tile has, in my judgment, its own pleasures—or else this itself takes the place of pleasures: to need none. How sweet to have worn out one's desires and left them behind! [6] 'It is disagreeable,' you say, 'to have death before your eyes.' First, death ought to be before the eyes of the young man as much as the old—we are not called up by the census list. Second, no one is so old that he would be wrong to hope for one more day. And one day is a step in life. A whole lifetime is made of parts, and it has circles drawn one around another, the larger enclosing the smaller. There is one that embraces and rings them all—this one runs from birth to the final day. There is another that shuts in the years of youth; one that binds all of boyhood within its circuit; then there is the year, containing in itself all the seasons whose multiplication makes up a life; the month is girded by a tighter circle; the day has the narrowest circuit of all—but this too runs from a beginning to an end, from rising to setting. [7] That is why Heraclitus, who earned his nickname from the obscurity of his speech, said, 'One day is equal to every day.' Different people have taken this differently. One said it is equal in hours, and he is not lying; for if a day is a span of twenty-four hours, all days must be equal to one another, since night gains what day loses. Another said one day is equal to all days in likeness: for the longest stretch of time contains nothing you would not also find in a single day—light and darkness—and in the alternations of the universe this happens more often, not differently: at one time shorter, at another drawn out longer. [8] So every day should be arranged as if it brought up the rear, as if it rounded off and completed a life. Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by long tenure, used to hold his own funeral rites with wine and the customary funeral feast, and would have himself carried from dinner to his bedroom while, to applause from his favorites, this was sung to music: 'He has lived! He has lived!' [9] Not a day passed on which he did not bury himself. What he did out of a bad conscience, let us do out of a good one, and as we go to sleep let us say, glad and cheerful,
I have lived, and the course that fortune gave me I have run.
If god adds a tomorrow, let us receive it gladly. The happiest man, the untroubled owner of himself, is the one who waits for tomorrow without anxiety; whoever has said 'I have lived' gets up each day to a profit.
[10] But now I ought to close the letter. 'What,' you say, 'will it come to me without any little gift?' Don't worry: it carries something with it. Why did I say something? A great deal. What could be finer than this saying I hand it to deliver to you? 'It is bad to live under compulsion, but no compulsion compels anyone to live under compulsion.' And why should there be? On every side, many roads to freedom lie open—short ones, easy ones. We should give thanks to god that nobody can be kept in life against his will: we are free to trample the compulsions themselves. [11] 'Epicurus said that,' you say. 'What business have you with another man's property?' Whatever is true is mine. I will keep pressing Epicurus on you, so that those people who swear by a name, and weigh not what is said but who says it, may learn that the best things are common property. Farewell.