Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Damn me if silence is really as necessary as it seems for a man shut away with his studies. Look: a jumble of noise surrounds me on every side — I live right over a bathhouse. Now picture every variety of sound that can make ears hate themselves. When the stronger types are working out, pumping hands weighted with lead, when they're straining or pretending to strain, I hear the grunting; every time they release their held breath, I hear the hissing and the raspiest gasping. When I get someone lazy, content with the cheap common rubdown, I hear the smack of a hand slapping shoulders, changing pitch according to whether it lands flat or cupped. And if a ball-player turns up and starts calling the score out loud, it's all over. [2] Now add the brawler, and the thief caught in the act, and the man who loves the sound of his own voice in the bath; add the divers hitting the pool, each landing with a huge report of driven water. Besides all these — whose voices are at least natural, if nothing else — think of the hair-plucker, forcing out his thin, screechy cry again and again to advertise himself, never quiet except when he's plucking armpits and making someone else do the yelling for him. Then the drink-seller's assorted shouts, and the sausage-man and the pastry-man and all the food-stall hawkers crying their wares, each with his own trademark singsong.
[3] 'You must be made of iron,' you say, 'or stone deaf, if your mind holds steady amid so many different, clashing noises, when a constant stream of morning callers is driving our friend Chrysippus to the grave.' But honestly, I care no more about that racket than about waves or falling water — even though I hear one nation moved its entire city for this single reason: it could not endure the crash of the Nile's cataract. [4] A voice seems to me more distracting than mere noise, because a voice tugs at the attention, while noise only fills and pounds the ears. Among the sounds that clatter around me without distracting me I count passing carriages, the carpenter in my building, a sawyer next door, and the fellow near the Meta Sudans testing his little trumpets and pipes — not playing, just blasting. [5] Even now, an intermittent noise bothers me more than a continuous one. But by this point I've toughened myself so far against all of it that I could even listen to a rowing-master setting the stroke for oarsmen in the harshest voice imaginable. I force my mind to attend to itself and not be dragged off toward externals. Let everything outside rattle, so long as there's no uproar inside — so long as desire and fear aren't brawling with each other, so long as greed and self-indulgence aren't at odds, one harassing the other. What good is silence over a whole district if your passions are roaring?
[6] All things lay settled in the night's calm rest.
Wrong. There is no calm rest except the rest reason has settled. Night puts our distress on display; it doesn't remove it — it just trades one set of worries for another. Even the dreams of sleepers are as stormy as their days. The only true tranquility is the one in which a sound mind unfolds itself. [7] Look at the man for whom sleep must be procured by hushing his vast house: so that no sound will disturb his ears, his whole herd of slaves has fallen silent, and whoever approaches him walks on tiptoe. Naturally he tosses this way and that, chasing a light sleep between his miseries, and complains he heard things he never heard. [8] What do you think is the cause? His mind is making the noise. That is what must be quieted; that is where the mutiny needs putting down. Don't assume the mind is at peace just because the body lies still — sometimes stillness itself is restless. That's why we should rouse ourselves to action and keep busy with the practice of good pursuits whenever this idleness, unable to stand itself, makes us miserable. [9] Great generals, when they see the troops turning insubordinate, break them with hard labor and keep them occupied with expeditions: men kept busy have no time for mischief, and nothing is more certain than that the vices of leisure are worked off by work. Often we appear to have withdrawn out of weariness with public life and regret at an unrewarding, thankless post; yet in that hiding place into which fear and fatigue threw us, ambition sometimes flares up again. It never quit because it was cut out at the root — it was just tired, or sulking because things wouldn't go its way. [10] I say the same of self-indulgence, which seems at times to have retreated and then starts pestering the very people who have professed plain living: right in the middle of their frugality it goes after pleasures it never renounced but only left behind — and all the more fiercely for doing it in secret. All vices are milder out in the open; even diseases turn toward healing when they break out of hiding and show their full strength. So with greed, ambition, and the other sicknesses of the human mind: know that they are at their deadliest when they lie low behind a mask of health. [11] We look like men at leisure, and we are not. For if we genuinely are — if we've sounded the retreat, if we've learned to despise what merely glitters — then, as I was saying a moment ago, nothing will pull us away; no chorus of men or of birds will break in on thoughts that are good, and by now solid and settled. [12] A character that jumps at a voice and at random happenings is a flimsy one that hasn't yet drawn itself inward. It carries some anxiety inside, some ingrained flinch of fear, and that is what makes it jittery — as our Virgil puts it:
and I, whom until now no hurled spears could shake, nor Greeks massed in a hostile column, now every breeze terrifies, every sound startles me — on edge, fearing alike for my companion and my burden.
[13] The first man is the wise one, frightened neither by whirring spears, nor by the clashing weapons of a packed column, nor by the crash of a city under assault. The second is the untrained man: he fears for his possessions and panics at every rattle; a single voice of any kind, taken for a mob's roar, flattens him; the slightest movements stop his heart. His baggage is what makes him a coward. [14] Pick any of these so-called lucky men you like, hauling much and carrying much, and you'll see him 'fearing for his companion and his burden.' Know that you have arrived at composure, then, when no shout reaches you, when no voice can shake you out of yourself — not by coaxing, not by threatening, not by swirling around you with empty, meaningless noise. [15] 'What then? Isn't it sometimes simpler just to get away from the din?' Granted — and that's why I'm moving out of this place. I wanted to test and train myself. Why go on being racked, when even against the Sirens Ulysses hit on so simple a cure for his crew? Farewell.