Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Urge your friend to hold in noble contempt those who scold him for seeking shade and leisure, for abandoning his rank and, though he could have achieved more, preferring quiet to everything else; let him show them every day how profitably he has managed his own affairs. Those who are envied will not cease to pass by: some will be crushed, others will fall. Prosperity is a restless thing; it stirs itself up. It disturbs the mind in more than one way: it goads different men in different directions - some toward loss of self-control, others toward extravagance; some it puffs up, others it softens and utterly dissolves.
"But someone bears it well." Yes, the way one bears wine well. So there is no reason for these people to persuade you that a man besieged by crowds is happy: people rush to him the way they rush to a pond, which they drain and muddy. "They call him useless and idle." You know that some people speak perversely and mean the opposite of what they say. They used to call him happy - well, was he?
Nor do I care in the least that some think his character too harsh and severe. Ariston used to say he would rather have a young man be somber than cheerful and pleasing to the crowd, since good wine turns out to come from what seemed hard and rough when new; the vintage does not tolerate what pleased already in the cask. Let them call him gloomy and an enemy to his own advancement: that very gloominess will turn out well as it ages, provided only he keeps at cultivating virtue, keeps drinking deep of the liberal studies - not those with which it is enough merely to be sprinkled, but those with which the mind must be thoroughly dyed.
This is the time for learning. "What then - is there some time when one should not be learning?" Not at all; but just as it is honorable to pursue study at every age, it is not fitting to be under instruction at every age. It is a shameful and ridiculous thing, an old man still at his ABCs; the young must acquire, the old must use what they have acquired. So you will do the most useful thing for yourself if you make him as good as possible; they say such benefits are the ones most to be sought and bestowed, without doubt of the first rank, since giving them profits as much as receiving them.
Finally, he no longer has any freedom of his own - he has pledged himself; and it is less shameful to default on a creditor than on a good hope. To pay off that debt, a merchant needs a favorable voyage, a farmer needs the fertility of the land he tills and the favor of the sky; but what our friend owes can be paid off by will alone.
Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. Let him arrange his character so that his mind may come to perfection in the greatest possible tranquility, a mind that feels nothing taken from it and nothing added to it, but stays in the same condition no matter how things turn out - one which, whether ordinary goods are heaped upon it, rises above its own possessions, or whether chance strips away some or all of them, grows no smaller.
If he had been born in Parthia, he would have drawn a bow as an infant; if in Germany, he would have brandished a light spear as a mere boy; if he had lived in our grandfathers' time, he would have learned to ride and to strike the enemy hand to hand. These are the things each nation's own tradition urges and demands of its people.
What, then, must this man of ours train for? For what serves well against every weapon, against every kind of enemy: to hold death in contempt - and no one doubts that death has something terrible in it, enough to offend even our minds, which nature has shaped to love themselves. For there would be no need to be prepared and sharpened for something we would go toward by a kind of voluntary instinct anyway, as all creatures are carried toward self-preservation.
No one learns so that, if it should be necessary, he can lie on a bed of roses with an even mind; rather, one is toughened for this: so that he will not surrender his integrity under torture, so that, if necessary, he will stand watch, sometimes even wounded, before the rampart, and not lean even on his spear, since sleep tends to creep up on those who rest against any support. Death has no drawback to it - for there must be something existing for a drawback to belong to.
But if such a strong desire for a longer life grips you - consider that nothing which passes from our sight is destroyed, but only stored back into the nature of things, out of which it came and from which it will soon emerge again. These things cease, they do not perish; and death, which we so dread and refuse, only interrupts life, it does not steal it away. A day will come again that will place us back into the light - a day many would refuse, if it did not bring them back forgetful of what came before.
But later I will teach more carefully that everything which seems to perish only changes. He who is to return should leave with an even mind. Watch the cycle of things returning upon themselves: you will see that nothing in this world is extinguished, but only rises and falls in turn. Summer departs, but another year will bring it back; winter has fallen, but its own months will restore it; night buries the sun, but day at once drives night away. That procession of the stars brings back whatever has passed; part of the sky is always rising, part always sinking.
In short, I will bring this to an end, if I add just this one thing: neither infants nor children nor those who have lost their minds fear death, and it is most shameful if reason cannot grant us the same freedom from care that folly grants to them. Farewell.