Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] The old Romans had a custom, still alive in my own day, of opening a letter with the words: 'If you are in good health, all is well; I am in good health.' The right version for us is: 'If you are doing philosophy, all is well.' Because that, in the end, is what good health means. Without it the mind is sick; and the body too, however much muscle it carries, is strong only the way a madman's or a lunatic's body is strong. [2] So look after that health first, and the other kind second — it won't cost you much, if what you want is genuine fitness. It is a foolish business, my dear Lucilius, and about the last thing that suits an educated man, this working up of biceps and thickening of the neck and hardening of the flanks. However well the bulking-up goes, however the muscles swell, you will never match a prize ox for strength or for weight. And there is this besides: the heavier the body's load, the more the mind is squeezed and the less nimble it becomes. So cut the body back as far as you can and clear room for the mind. [3] All sorts of nuisances trail after the people devoted to that regimen. First the workouts themselves, whose exertion drains the breath out of a man and leaves him unfit for concentration and for the more demanding studies; then the sheer quantity of food blunts the mind's fine edge. On top of that come the trainers — slaves of the worst stamp taken on as instructors, men whose whole existence runs between the oil-flask and the wine-jar, who count the day a success if they have sweated hard and then poured back down, into an empty stomach where it sinks the deeper, a quantity of drink to replace what leaked away. [4] Drinking and sweating — that is the life of a man with heartburn. There are exercises that are easy and short, that tire the body without delay and are sparing of time, which deserves our first consideration: running, moving the arms with some weight in the hands, and jumping — the kind that lifts the body straight up, or the kind that sends it forward, or the kind I might call the leaping of the Salii, or, to put it more rudely, of the fuller at his vat. Pick whichever of these you like; use makes it easy. [5] Whatever you do, come back quickly from body to mind, and exercise the mind night and day. Modest effort keeps it fed; this is one workout that no cold will interrupt, no heat, not even old age. Tend the good that improves with the years. [6] Not that I am ordering you to hang over a book or writing-tablets forever: the mind must be given some interval — slackened, though, not unstrung. Riding in a carriage shakes the body up without getting in study's way: you can read, you can dictate, you can talk, you can listen — and a walk forbids none of these either. [7] And don't sneer at voice-training; though I forbid you to run the voice up through scales and set rhythms and then back down. Suppose next you wanted lessons in how to walk! Once let in those characters whom hunger has taught new trades, and there will be someone to regulate your stride, watch your jaws while you eat, and go exactly as far as your patience and credulity encourage his nerve. Well then — should your voice start straight off at a shout, at full stretch? No: it is so natural to warm up by degrees that even men in a quarrel begin with ordinary talk and only then pass to yelling; nobody appeals to the honor of Roman citizens as his opening move. [8] So follow the push of your feeling: rail against vice now more fiercely, now more gently, as the voice itself prompts you in that direction; and when you rein it in and call it back, let it come down modestly — a descent, not a collapse; let it keep its middle register and not rage away in the untrained manner of a yokel. The point, after all, is not to give the voice a workout, but to have it give one.
[9] There — I have taken no small chore off your hands. One small fee, one Greek contribution, will round off these favors. Here is a precept worth marking: 'The fool's life is thankless and jittery; it pours itself entirely into the future.' 'Whose saying is this?' you ask. The same author as earlier. And whose life do you suppose is meant by 'the fool's'? Baba's and Isio's? Not at all: it means ours — we whom blind desire flings headlong at things that will hurt us and will certainly never fill us; we for whom, if anything could ever have been enough, it already would have been; we who never stop to consider what a delight it is to demand nothing, what a magnificence to be full and owe nothing to fortune. [10] So keep reminding yourself, Lucilius, how much you have already attained. When you notice how many people are ahead of you, think how many are behind. If you want to be grateful toward the gods and toward your own life, think how many you have outstripped. But what have others to do with it? You have outstripped yourself. [11] Fix a limit that you could not cross even if you wanted to. Let them go at last, those treacherous goods that are worth more to the hopeful than to the possessor. If there were anything solid in them, sooner or later they would satisfy; as it is, they only sharpen the thirst of those who gulp them. Away with the glittering trappings. And as for what the uncertain lot of time to come may bring — why should I beg fortune to grant it rather than beg myself not to want it? Why want it at all? Shall I pile things up, forgetting how fragile human life is? What would I be toiling for? Look: this day is your last; and if not, it is next door to the last. Farewell.