Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Bad health had given me a long furlough; then, without warning, it jumped me. 'What kind?' you ask. A perfectly fair question — there isn't a kind I haven't met. But there's one disease I've practically been assigned to. Why should I call it by its Greek name? I don't know; 'gasping' describes it well enough. The attack is very short, like a squall; it's over within about an hour — after all, who can spend long breathing his last? [2] Every discomfort and danger the body has to offer has passed through me, and none seems worse than this. Naturally: anything else is being sick; this is heaving out your life. That's why the doctors call it 'a rehearsal for death' — for one day that breath will accomplish what it has attempted so often. Do you think I'm writing this in high spirits because I got away? [3] If I take pleasure in this ending of the attack as if it were good health, I'm being as ridiculous as a man who thinks he's won his case because he got the hearing postponed.
As for me, even in mid-suffocation I never stopped resting in cheerful, brave thoughts. [4] 'What is this?' I said. 'Death keeps testing me — let it. I tested death a long time ago.' 'When?' you ask. Before I was born. Death is not existing. I already know what that's like: what follows me will be what preceded me. If there is any torment in this condition, then there must have been torment before we came out into the light — and we felt no distress then at all. [5] Tell me: wouldn't you call it utter stupidity to think a lamp is worse off after it's put out than before it was lit? We too are put out and lit. In the time between, we suffer some things; on either side of it lies deep peace. Here is our mistake, my Lucilius, if I'm not wrong: we think death comes after, when in fact it came before and will come after. Whatever was before us is death. What difference does it make whether you never begin or you cease, when the result of both is the same — not existing?
[6] With these encouragements and others like them — silent ones, of course; there was no room for words — I kept talking to myself. Then, gradually, that gasping, which had already turned into panting, came at longer intervals and slowed down. But it has lingered; even now, though the attack has stopped, my breathing doesn't flow naturally. I feel it catch and hesitate. Let it do as it likes, so long as the sighing doesn't come from my soul. [7] Take this promise about me: I won't tremble at the end. I'm already prepared; I make no plans for a whole day. Praise and imitate the man who isn't reluctant to die even while it's a pleasure to live. What virtue is there in leaving when you're being thrown out? Yet there's virtue here too: I am being thrown out, yes — but as though I were walking out. And that is why the wise man is never thrown out: to be thrown out is to be driven from a place you leave unwillingly. The wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity, because he wills what it is going to force. Farewell.