Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
When I had to travel back from Baiae to Naples, I readily convinced myself there was a storm at sea, so as not to try a boat again; and the whole road was so muddy that I might as well be said to have sailed after all. That day I had to endure the full fate of an athlete: from the oil we went straight into the dust, in the Naples tunnel. Nothing is longer than that prison, nothing dimmer than those torches, which serve us not to see through the darkness but to see the darkness itself. But even if the place had light, the dust would take it away, and dust is a heavy, annoying thing even in the open air; what must it be there, where it swirls back on itself and, shut in with no vent at all, falls back on the very people who stirred it up? We suffered two opposite discomforts at once: on the same road, on the same day, we struggled with both mud and dust.
Still, that darkness gave me something to think about. I felt a certain jolt of the mind, and a change of mood without fear, brought on by the strangeness and ugliness of an unfamiliar experience hitting me all at once. I'm not talking about myself now with you - I'm a long way from being even a tolerable man, let alone a perfect one - but about the man over whom fortune has lost all its rights: even his mind will be struck by this, his color will change. Some things, my dear Lucilius, no virtue can escape; nature reminds even virtue of its own mortality. And so it will draw the face into gloom at sad things, and shudder at sudden ones, and grow dizzy if it looks down a vast height while standing on its very edge: this is not fear, but a natural reaction that reason cannot conquer. And so some men, brave and perfectly ready to shed their own blood, cannot bear to watch someone else's; some grow faint and lose their nerve at the handling and sight of a fresh wound, or of an old, festering one; others take a sword more easily than they can look at one. So I felt, as I said, not exactly turmoil, but a change of state: and the moment I caught sight of light restored, my old good spirits came back, unthought and uncommanded. Then I began asking myself how foolishly we fear some things more and others less, when all of them end the same way. What difference does it make whether a watchtower falls on someone, or a mountain? You'll find none. And yet there will be people who fear this collapse more than that one, though both are equally deadly - so true is it that fear looks not to the effect, but to what causes it.
Now do you think I'm talking about the Stoics, who hold that a man's soul, crushed under a great weight, cannot go on existing but is scattered at once, because it had no free way out? I am not making that argument: those who say this seem to me to be mistaken. Just as a flame cannot be smothered - for it slips away on every side that presses it - just as air is not hurt by a blow or a stroke, nor even split by it, but flows back around whatever it has yielded to, so the mind, which is made of the finest substance, cannot be caught or crushed to death inside the body, but by virtue of its very fineness bursts out through the very things that press upon it. Just as lightning, even when it strikes and flashes over the widest area, has its way back out through the tiniest opening, so the mind, which is finer even than fire, has an escape route through the whole body. And so the question to ask about it is whether it can be immortal. But hold this much as certain: if it survives the body, it can in no way be crushed out of existence, since no immortality comes with an exception clause, and nothing eternal can be harmed. Farewell.