Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
You complain that where you are there's a shortage of books. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how good they are: reading a fixed selection does good, reading widely only gives pleasure. Whoever wants to arrive where he has set out for should follow a single road, not wander through many; that isn't traveling, it's straying. "I'd rather," you say, "you gave me guidance than books." As for me, I'm ready to send you whatever I have, and to empty my whole storehouse; I'd transfer myself to where you are too, if I could, and if I didn't hope you'd soon win release from your official duties, I would have set myself this journey even at my age, and not even Charybdis and Scylla and that fabled strait could have deterred me. I would have swum across, not merely sailed across, if only I could embrace you and see for myself, in person, how much you'd grown in spirit.
As for your wanting my books sent to you, I don't think myself any more eloquent for that than I'd think myself handsome if you asked for my portrait. I know that's a matter of your affection, not your judgment; and even if it is judgment, your affection has deceived you. But whatever they're worth, read them as though I were still seeking the truth, not yet knowing it, and seeking it stubbornly. I haven't signed myself over to anyone as property; I don't carry any master's name. I trust a great deal to the judgment of great men, but I claim something for my own judgment too. For they too left us not discoveries but things still to be searched for, and they might have discovered what's necessary if they hadn't also gone searching for what's superfluous. Much of their time was stolen by quibbling over words, by those trap-laying disputes that exercise cleverness to no purpose. We tie knots and bind ambiguous meanings into words, and then untie them again: do we really have so much free time? Do we already know how to live, already know how to die? We should press on with our whole mind toward the point where we must guard against being deceived by things, not by words. Why do you point out to me subtle distinctions between words that no one was ever caught out by except while arguing? It's things that deceive us: sort those out. We embrace evils in place of goods; we wish for the opposite of what we once wished for; our own prayers fight against our prayers, our own plans against our plans. How like friendship flattery is! It doesn't just imitate friendship, it outdoes and surpasses it; it's welcomed by open and receptive ears and sinks down into the depths of the heart, all the more winning for the very harm it does: teach me how I can tell the two apart. A fawning enemy comes to me disguised as a friend; vices creep up on us under the name of virtues: recklessness hides under the title of courage, caution is called cowardice, the timid man is taken for the careful one. In these matters we go badly astray, at great risk: stamp on them some sure marks. As for the rest, a man asked whether he has horns isn't so foolish as to feel his own forehead, but neither is he so silly or dull that he wouldn't know the answer -- unless you'd persuaded him otherwise with some extremely subtle chain of reasoning. That's how such tricks deceive harmlessly, the way a conjuror's cups and balls do, where the very deception delights me. Make me understand how it's done, and I've spoilt the game. I say the same about these verbal traps -- what better name is there for them than sophisms? -- they neither harm the ignorant nor help the wise. If you really want to untangle ambiguities of words, teach us this instead: that the happy man is not the one the crowd calls happy, the one great wealth has flowed toward, but the one for whom every good lies in the mind, upright and lofty, treading marvels underfoot, who sees no one he'd want to trade places with, who values a human being only by that which makes him human, who takes nature as his teacher, shapes himself to her laws, lives just as she has prescribed; a man whose goods no force can shake loose, who turns evils into good, sure in judgment, unshaken, fearless; whom some force may move, but none can throw into confusion; a man whom fortune, even when she hurls with all her might the most harmful weapon she possesses, only pricks, not wounds -- and even that rarely; for the rest of her weapons, by which the human race is beaten down, bounce off him like hail, which rattles and dissolves against a roof without any harm to the person sheltered inside. Why do you keep me lingering over that puzzle you yourself call the Liar, on which so many books have been written? Look, my whole life is lying to me: refute that, bring that back to the truth, if you're so sharp. It judges necessary a great many things that are actually superfluous; and even what isn't superfluous carries no real weight toward this, toward being able to guarantee a fortunate and happy life. For a thing isn't automatically good just because it's necessary -- otherwise we'd be cheapening the very word "good" by applying it to bread and porridge and everything else without which life can't be sustained. Whatever is good is certainly necessary; but whatever is necessary isn't necessarily good, since indeed some necessary things are also utterly worthless. No one is so ignorant of the dignity of the good as to lower it to the level of things merely useful for the day. What then? Wouldn't you do better to turn your attention to showing everyone that superfluous things are pursued at enormous cost of time, and that many people have spent their whole lives assembling life's equipment? Look at individuals, consider people as a whole: there is no one whose life doesn't look ahead to tomorrow. You ask what's wrong with that? Everything. For such people don't live, they're only going to live: they put everything off. Even if we paid close attention, life would still race past us; as it is, while we hesitate, it rushes by as though it belonged to someone else, and it comes to an end on the very last day, though it's been perishing the whole time. But so as not to overrun the limit of a letter, which shouldn't fill the left hand of its reader, I'll put off this quarrel with the logicians -- too subtle by half, and caring about this alone, and nothing else -- to another day. Farewell.