Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] If you are well, and think yourself worthy of one day becoming your own master, I rejoice; it will be my glory if I manage to pull you out of the place where you're now tossing about with no hope of escape. But there's one thing I ask and urge of you, my dear Lucilius: bring philosophy down into your innermost being, and take the measure of your progress not by speech or writing, but by firmness of mind, by the diminishing of your desires. Prove your words by your deeds. [2] Those who make speeches and chase the crowd's applause have one goal; those who hold the attention of idle young men with varied or fluent argument have another. Philosophy teaches one to act, not to talk, and it demands this: that each person live according to its law, so that life does not clash with speech, or with itself - so that all one's actions have a single consistent color. This is the greatest task and the surest sign of wisdom: that word and deed be in harmony, that a person be uniform and the same, everywhere. 'Who will manage that?' Few, but some do. It is difficult - though I am not saying the wise man will always walk at the same pace, only along the same road. [3] So watch yourself: notice whether your clothing and your house are at odds with each other, whether you are generous to yourself but stingy to your own household, whether you dine frugally but build extravagantly. Pick one single rule to live by, and bring your whole life into line with it. Some people restrict themselves at home but expand and spread out in public: this inconsistency is a fault, a sign of a wavering mind that has not yet found its own steady course. [4] I will tell you now the source of this inconsistency and mismatch between actions and intentions: no one sets out what he wants for himself, and even if he has set it out, he does not persist in it, but leaps over it; and not only does he change, he goes back, circling around to the very things he had abandoned and condemned. [5] So, setting aside the old definitions of wisdom and taking in the whole scope of human life, I can be content with this: what is wisdom? Always wanting the same thing, and always refusing the same thing. You need not even add the small qualification that what you want should be right; for nothing can please a person always unless it is right. [6] So people do not know what they want, except in the very moment they want it; no one has ever decided, once and for all, to want or not want something; judgment shifts daily and turns to its opposite, and for most people life is played out as a game. So hold fast to what you have begun, and perhaps you will be led either to the summit, or to the point where you alone understand that it is not yet the summit.
[7] 'What,' you ask, 'will become of this crowd of dependents without an estate to support them?' Once that crowd stops being fed by you, it will feed itself - or else, something you cannot know through your own generosity, you will learn through poverty: poverty will keep for you your true and certain friends, and whoever was not seeking you but something else will leave. And is poverty not to be loved, if only for this one reason, that it shows you by whom you are truly loved? Oh, when will that day come, when no one will lie in order to flatter you! [8] Let your thoughts, then, tend toward this, care for this, wish for this, resigning all other prayers to God: that you be content with yourself and with the good things that spring from within you. What happiness could be closer at hand? Reduce yourself to the small things from which you cannot fall, and so that you may do this more willingly, the contribution of this letter - which I will hand over right now - will help with that.
[9] You may be envious, but even now Epicurus will gladly pay on my behalf. 'Believe me, your words will seem more impressive spoken from a cot and in rags; for then they will not merely be said, they will be proven.' I, for one, listen differently to what our friend Demetrius says when I see him lying naked, on something even less than straw bedding: he is not a teacher of the truth, he is its witness. [10] 'What then? Is it not permitted to despise riches when they are lying right in one's lap?' Why should it not be permitted? And that man has a truly great soul who, having wealth heaped all around him, marvels long and much that it has come to him, laughs at it, and merely hears that it is his rather than feels it. It is a great thing not to be corrupted by close association with riches; great is the man who is poor amid his riches. [11] 'I don't know,' you say, 'how he would bear poverty, if he fell into it.' Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether that poor man of yours would despise riches, if he fell into them; and so in both cases the mind must be judged, and one must examine whether the poor man indulges his poverty, or whether the rich man does not indulge his riches. Otherwise a cot or rags are a flimsy proof of good will, unless it becomes clear that someone endures them not out of necessity but by choice. [12] But it shows great natural character to approach such things not by rushing toward them as if they were something better, but by preparing for them as things easy to bear. And Lucilius, they are easy; and once you approach them after long meditation beforehand, they are pleasant too - for in them lies that security without which nothing is pleasant. [13] So I judge it necessary - as I have already written to you - to do what great men have often done: set aside certain days on which we practice imagined poverty, to prepare us for the real thing. This is all the more necessary because we have grown soft with luxury and judge everything hard and difficult. Instead, the mind must be roused from sleep, pinched awake, and reminded that nature has set very little as our due. No one is born rich; whoever comes out into the light is bound to be content with milk and rags. And yet from such beginnings, kingdoms cannot contain us. Farewell.