Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. It is a careless, lazy sort of man, my dear Lucilius, who has to be jogged into remembering a friend by some particular place. And yet the longing that lies stored in our minds is sometimes summoned back by familiar surroundings, which do not revive a memory that had died out but stir up one that had merely gone quiet—just as the grief of mourners, even when time has softened it, is renewed by a favorite slave they have lost, or a piece of clothing, or a house. Well, here I am in Campania, and the mere sight of Naples and of your beloved Pompeii has, unbelievably, made my longing for you fresh again. You stand before my eyes, whole. I am on the very point of leaving you: I can see you swallowing back your tears, unable, for all your self-control, to keep your feelings from breaking through.
It seems only just now that I lost you. And really, what is not 'just now,' if you think back on it? It seems only just now that I sat as a boy at the feet of the philosopher Sotion; just now that I began to plead cases in court; just now that I stopped wanting to plead them; just now that I stopped being able to. Time moves with an unimaginable speed, and this is most visible to those who look back. To people intent on the present it slips by unnoticed—so smooth is the passage of its headlong flight. You ask the reason for this? Whatever time has gone by stands in the same place; it is all seen together, it all lies in a single heap; everything falls into the same abyss. And besides, there cannot really be long intervals within a thing that is, in its entirety, brief. What we live is a mere point, and less than a point; and yet nature has mocked even this least of things by giving it the appearance of a longer stretch: out of it she has made one part infancy, another childhood, another adolescence, another a kind of downward slope from youth toward old age, and another old age itself. In so narrow a space, how many steps she has fitted!
It seems only just now that I said goodbye to you—and yet that 'just now' amounts to a considerable share of our lifetime, whose brevity we ought to keep in mind, since it will one day run out. Time never used to seem so swift to me; now its course strikes me as unbelievable, whether because I sense the finish line drawing near, or because I have begun paying attention and counting up my losses.
That is why I am all the more indignant that some people spend the greater part of this time—which cannot even suffice for necessities, however carefully it is guarded—on things that are entirely unnecessary. Cicero says that even if his life were doubled, he would not have time to read the lyric poets: I would place the logicians in the same category—though they are tiresome in a sadder way. The lyric poets play the fool openly; the logicians think they are actually accomplishing something.
Not that I deny these subjects deserve a glance—but only a glance, a greeting from the threshold, so that we are not taken in by mere words and led to imagine that they contain some great, hidden good. Why torment and wear yourself out over a question it is more elegant to dismiss with contempt than to solve? It is only someone at leisure, moving house at his own convenience, who goes around gathering up trifles; when the enemy is pressing from behind and the soldier has been ordered to move out, necessity shakes loose whatever peacetime idleness had collected. I have no time to go chasing after words that teeter between two meanings and testing my own cleverness on them.
'See what peoples are gathering, what walled cities are sharpening iron behind closed gates.'
It is with a stout heart that I must listen to this din of war resounding all around me. I would rightly seem out of my mind if, while old men and women were piling up stones to fortify the walls, while the young men under arms inside the gates were waiting for, or clamoring for, the signal to charge, while enemy spears quivered in the very gates and the ground itself shook with mines and tunnels—if, amid all that, I sat there at my ease posing little puzzles of this sort: 'What you have not lost, you have. But you have not lost horns. Therefore you have horns'—and other such nonsense fashioned on the model of that clever lunacy.
And yet I might just as well seem out of my mind if I spent my energy on questions like these: for I too am under siege right now. In that case, though, the danger threatening me under siege would come from outside, and a wall would separate me from the enemy; but now the deadly things are within me. I have no time for such trifles; I have a vast piece of business on my hands. What am I to do? Death is following me, and life is fleeing.
Teach me something to use against these things. Bring it about that I do not flee death, and that life does not escape me. Encourage me against hardships, against things that cannot be avoided; widen out the narrow confines of my time. Teach me that the good of life does not consist in its length, but in how it is used—and that it can happen, indeed happens very often, that a man who has lived long has lived little. Tell me, as I am about to fall asleep, 'You may never wake again'; tell me, once awake, 'You may never sleep again.' Tell me, as I go out, 'You may never come back'; tell me, as I come back, 'You may never go out again.'
You are wrong if you think it is only at sea that the gap separating life from death is at its narrowest: everywhere the interval is equally thin. Death does not always show itself so close at hand—but it is always that close. Scatter this darkness, and you will more easily hand on to me the teachings for which I stand prepared. We were brought into being by nature as capable of being taught, and she gave us reason imperfect, but capable of being perfected.
Discuss justice with me, and duty, and frugality, and both kinds of modesty—the one that consists in keeping one's hands off another's body, and the one that consists in caring for one's own. If you are unwilling to lead me by roundabout paths, I will more easily arrive where I am headed; for, as the tragic poet says, 'the language of truth is simple,' and so it ought not to be tangled up in complications; nothing suits minds engaged in great undertakings less than that sly cleverness. Farewell.