Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Throw away all those things, if you are wise—or rather, so that you may become wise—and strain toward a good mind at full speed and with all your strength; if there is anything holding you back, either free yourself from it or cut it away. 'My household affairs delay me,' you say; 'I want to arrange them so that they can support me even if I do nothing, so that neither poverty is a burden to me, nor I to anyone else.' When you say this, you do not seem to know the force and power of that good you have in mind; you see well enough the sum total of the matter—how much philosophy is worth—but you do not yet see its parts clearly enough, and you do not yet know how much it helps us everywhere, how it can, to use Cicero's word, 'lend aid' in the greatest things and also stoop down into the smallest. Trust me: call it into counsel; it will urge you not to sit down at your account books.
Surely this is what you are after, and this is what you want to achieve by that delay: that you need not fear poverty. But what if it is to be sought after? Riches have stood in the way of many who wished to philosophize: poverty is unencumbered, it is secure. When the trumpet sounds, it knows it is not being sought; when the cry of 'fire' goes up, it asks how to get out, not what to carry out; if a voyage must be made, the harbors do not roar for it, nor are the shores made restless by the escort of one man; no crowd of slaves stands around it, for whose feeding one would need to hope for the fertility of lands across the sea.
It is easy to feed a few bellies, well trained and wanting nothing but to be filled: hunger costs little, fastidiousness costs much. Poverty is content to satisfy pressing needs: why then do you refuse this companion, whose ways the sane rich man himself imitates? If you want to be free in mind, you must either be poor or be like the poor. A saving pursuit of health cannot come about without care for frugality, and frugality is voluntary poverty. So away with these excuses: 'I do not yet have enough; once I reach that sum, then I will give myself wholly to philosophy.' And yet this very thing you put off, and prepare for after everything else, is the first thing that must be secured; it is with this that you must begin. 'I want,' you say, 'to secure what I shall live on.' Learn to secure yourself at the same time: if something forbids you to live well, it does not forbid you to die well.
There is no reason poverty should call us back from philosophy, nor even want. For those hurrying toward this goal, even hunger must be endured; some have endured it in sieges, and what other reward was there for that endurance than not falling into the conqueror's power? How much greater is what is promised here: perpetual freedom, fear of no man and no god. Must one come to these things even while starving? Armies have endured the lack of every necessity, have lived on the roots of plants and borne hunger with things foul to mention; all this they suffered for a kingdom, and, to make you wonder the more, another's kingdom: will anyone hesitate to bear poverty in order to free his mind from madness? So it need not be acquired first: one can arrive at philosophy even without provisions for the road.
Is it so? Once you have everything, will you then want to have wisdom too? Will this be the last instrument of life and, so to speak, an extra addition? No—whether you have something already, philosophize now (for how do you know you do not already have too much?), or if you have nothing, seek this before anything else. 'But necessities will be lacking.' First of all, they cannot be lacking, because nature asks very little, and the wise man accommodates himself to nature. But if the direst necessities should befall him, he will already long since have departed from life and will cease to be a trouble to himself. If, however, what remains is meager and narrow, enough only to sustain life, he will take it in good part, and, no longer troubled or anxious beyond what necessity requires, he will give his stomach and shoulders their due, and, untroubled and cheerful, will laugh at the busy scrambling of the rich and the running about of those chasing after riches, and he will say, 'Why do you put yourself off so long? Will you wait for the profit of interest, or a gain from trade, or the will of some rich old man, when you could become rich right now? Wisdom hands over wealth on the spot, wealth it has made superfluous to whomever it has given it.' These things apply to others: you are closer to the wealthy. Change the age, and you have too much; but what is enough is the same in every age.
I could close the letter here, if I had not spoiled you. No one can greet the Parthian kings without a gift; you are not allowed to say goodbye to me for free. What of it? I will borrow from Epicurus: 'For many, the acquiring of riches has not been the end of miseries but a change of them.' Nor do I wonder at this; the fault is not in things but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us has made riches a burden too. Just as it makes no difference whether you place a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one—wherever you move him, he will carry his disease with him—so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is set among riches or among poverty: its evil follows it. Farewell.