Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] By now you understand that you need to be led out of those glamorous, harmful occupations of yours, but you ask how you can manage it. Some things can only be shown by someone actually present — a doctor can't choose the timing of a meal or a bath by letter; he has to feel the pulse. There's an old saying that a gladiator takes his plan from the arena itself: something in his opponent's face, some movement of his hand, some shift of his body warns him, as he watches. [2] What is usually done, and what ought to be done, can be laid down and written in general terms — such advice can be given not only to people far away, but even to people not yet born. But the other question — when it should be done, or how — no one can advise from a distance; that has to be worked out on the spot, from the circumstances themselves. [3] It takes not just someone present but someone alert to catch an opportunity as it rushes past. So watch for it, and when you see it, seize it, and throw your whole effort, all your strength, into stripping yourself of those obligations. And listen to the verdict I'm handing down: I think you need to get out either of that life, or out of life altogether. But I also think you should take the gentle road — untie the knot you've tangled yourself in, rather than tearing it apart, provided that, if there's no other way to undo it, you go ahead and tear it. No one is so timid that he'd rather hang forever than fall once. [4] In the meantime — and this comes first — don't hold yourself back any further. Be content with the business you've gotten into, or, if you'd rather put it that way, that you've stumbled into. There's no reason to push yourself further into it; you'll lose your excuse, and it will become obvious that you didn't just stumble in after all. What people usually say is false: 'I couldn't have done otherwise. What if I hadn't wanted to? It was necessary.' No one is required to chase good fortune at a run. It's something, even if you can't resist it outright, simply to hold your ground and not press on after fortune as it rushes by.
[5] Would you mind if I don't just offer my own advice but call in reinforcements — and wiser ones than myself, people I regularly consult when I have a decision to make? Read Epicurus's letter on this very subject, the one addressed to Idomeneus, in which he asks him to flee as fast as he can and hurry, before some greater force steps in and takes away his freedom to withdraw. [6] Yet he adds that nothing should be attempted except when it can be attempted suitably and at the right time; but once that long-awaited moment arrives, he says, you must leap up and go. He forbids anyone thinking about escape to doze off, and he holds out hope of a safe way out even from the most difficult situations, provided we neither rush ahead of the time nor hold back when the time has come. [7] I suppose you're also wondering now what the Stoics would say. No one should accuse them, in your hearing, of recklessness — they're more cautious than they are bold. Maybe you're expecting them to tell you: 'It's shameful to give in under a burden; keep struggling with a duty once you've taken it on. A man isn't brave and vigorous if he flees hard work — unless the very difficulty of the task makes his spirit grow.' [8] They'll tell you that, if perseverance is worth the effort, if there's nothing a good man would have to do or endure that's beneath him. Otherwise, he won't wear himself down with degrading, humiliating labor, and he won't stay in business just for the sake of being busy. Nor will he do what you imagine — get so entangled in ambitious pursuits that he's forever swept along by their tide. Instead, once he sees how heavy, uncertain, and precarious the things are that he's caught up in, he'll draw back his foot — not turn and run, but gradually retreat to safety. [9] And it's easy, my dear Lucilius, to escape your occupations, if you stop valuing what they pay you. It's the rewards that hold us back and detain us. 'What, then? Am I to abandon such great hopes? Walk away right at harvest time? Leave my side unescorted, my litter unaccompanied, my hall empty?' It's this that people leave reluctantly — they love the wages of their misery, while cursing the misery itself. That's how people complain about ambition the way they complain about a mistress — that is, if you look closely at their real feelings, they don't hate it, they're just quarreling with it. Press these people who bemoan the very things they craved, who talk about fleeing from things they can't do without, and you'll see that their delay is voluntary, in the very thing they claim to resent and complain so miserably about. That's how it is, Lucilius: slavery holds few people, but most people hold onto slavery themselves. But if you've made up your mind to set it down, and freedom has genuinely won you over, and the only thing you're asking advice on is how to manage this without endless anxiety — why wouldn't the whole company of the Stoics approve? Every Zeno and every Chrysippus will urge on you exactly what is moderate, honorable, and your own. But if you're only stalling so you can calculate how much you can take with you, and how large a fortune you can build up to furnish your leisure, you'll never find your way out: no one swims to shore carrying his luggage. Rise up into a better life, with the gods' favor — though not the kind of favor they show those people on whom, with a kind and generous face, they've bestowed grand miseries, excused only on the grounds that the very things that burn and torment them were given because they asked for them.
[13] I was already sealing this letter, but it has to be opened again, so that it can come to you with its customary little gift, carrying some splendid saying along with it. And here one occurs to me — I don't know whether it's truer or more eloquent. 'Whose is it?' you ask. Epicurus's — I'm still doting on other men's belongings: 'No one leaves life any differently than if he had just now entered it.' Take anyone you like — a young man, an old man, someone in between — you'll find him equally afraid of death, equally ignorant of life. No one has anything actually accomplished; we've put everything off to the future. Nothing pleases me more in that saying than the reproach it levels at old men for their childishness. 'No one,' he says, 'leaves life in any way other than the way he was born into it.' That's false: we die worse than we're born. This is our own fault, not nature's. Nature ought to complain to us and say, 'What is this? I brought you into the world without desires, without fears, without superstition, without treachery, without the rest of these plagues — leave it in the same condition you entered it.' A man has grasped wisdom if he can die as free from care as he was when he was born; but as it is, we start to panic the moment danger draws near — our composure fails us, our color fails us, tears fall that will do us no good. What's more shameful than being anxious right on the threshold of security? The reason is this: we're empty of every good thing, yet we labor over our life. No part of it has settled and remained with us — it has all been passed through and drained away. Hardly anyone cares how well he lives, only how long, though it's within everyone's reach to live well, and within no one's to live long. Farewell.