Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I received your letter many months after you sent it; so I thought it pointless to ask the man who brought it how you were doing. He would have to have an extraordinarily good memory to remember. And in any case I hope you are now living in such a way that, wherever you are, I will know how you are doing. For what else are you doing but making yourself better day by day, shedding some of your errors, coming to understand that the faults you attribute to circumstances are really your own? Some things, after all, we blame on places and occasions; but those faults will follow us wherever we go.
You know Harpaste, my wife's fool, who has remained in my house as an inherited burden—I myself have the greatest aversion to such freaks; if I ever want to amuse myself with a fool, I need not look far: I laugh at myself. Well, this fool has suddenly lost her sight. I am telling you something unbelievable but true: she does not know she is blind. She keeps asking her attendant to move to another house, saying this one is too dark.
What we laugh at in her case, you may be sure, happens to all of us: no one recognizes that he is greedy, no one that he is grasping. The blind at least look for a guide; we wander without one, and say, 'I am not ambitious, but there is no other way to live in Rome'; 'I am not extravagant, but the city itself demands great expense'; 'It is not my fault that I am short-tempered, that I have not yet settled on a fixed way of life: it's my youth that does it.'
Why do we deceive ourselves? Our trouble is not something outside us: it sits within us, lodged in our very insides, and that is why we come to health with such difficulty—because we do not know we are sick. If we were to begin treatment now, when would we ever break the massive strength of so many diseases? As it is, we do not even look for a doctor—one who would have far less work to do if he were called in while the fault was still fresh; young, untried minds would follow readily enough someone who showed them the right path.
No one finds it hard to be brought back to nature except the one who has departed from it: we are ashamed to learn to have a sound mind. But, good heavens, if it is shameful to look for a teacher in this matter, then we must give up all hope—hope that so great a good could flow into us merely by chance: we must work at it. And, to tell the truth, the work is not even great, provided that, as I said, we begin shaping and correcting our minds before their perversity has hardened.
But even in a mind already hardened I do not despair: there is nothing that persistent effort and intent, careful attention cannot conquer. You can straighten out timber, however warped, back to true; heat unbends curved beams, and things that grew in one shape are reshaped into whatever our use demands. How much more easily does the mind take on a form—pliant as it is, and more yielding than any liquid! For what is the mind but a kind of breath, disposed in a certain way? And you can see that breath is far more tractable than any other material, the thinner it is.
There is nothing in this, my dear Lucilius, that should stop you from having good hopes for us, on the grounds that wickedness already has hold of us, that it has long been in possession of us: no mind ever arrived at goodness before it had first been occupied by badness. We are all preoccupied beforehand; learning the virtues means unlearning the vices.
But we ought to set about correcting ourselves with all the more courage because, once the good has been handed over to us, our possession of it is permanent: virtue is not unlearned. Its opposites cling badly, because they cling to something not their own, and so they can be driven out and expelled; but what comes into its own proper place settles there for good. Virtue is in accordance with nature; vices are its enemies, hostile to it.
But just as virtues, once received, cannot leave, and are easy to guard, so the beginning of the journey toward them is hard, because it is characteristic of a weak and sickly mind to be afraid of what it has not yet tried; so the mind has to be forced to make a start. After that, the medicine is not bitter; it gives pleasure from the very first, even as it heals. With other remedies, the pleasure comes only after health is restored; philosophy alone is both healing and sweet at once. Farewell.