Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I took great pleasure in your letter; let me use the word in its everyday sense, and don't twist it into a Stoic technicality. We hold that pleasure is a vice. Fine, let it be so; but we still use the word to describe a cheerful state of mind.
I know, I say, that pleasure, if we measure words by our own strict standard, is a disreputable thing, and that joy belongs only to the wise man; for joy is the elation of a mind that trusts in its own true goods. Yet in ordinary speech we say we felt great joy at someone's consulship, or his wedding, or the birth of his wife's child—things which are so far from being true joys that they are often the seeds of future sorrow. Joy, properly speaking, is bound up with never ceasing and never turning into its opposite.
So when our Virgil says
"and the mind's evil joys,"
he speaks eloquently, but not quite correctly; for no joy is ever evil. He gave that name to pleasures, and expressed exactly what he meant: he was pointing to people made happy by their own harm.
Still, I was not wrong to say I took great pleasure from your letter. Even when an untutored man feels joy from an honorable cause, I still call his state pleasure, since it is uncontrolled and bound to swing at once to its opposite—stirred as it is by the mere belief in a good that is false, excessive and immoderate.
But to return to my point: hear what delighted me in your letter. You have your words under control; your style doesn't carry you away, doesn't drag you further than you meant to go.
Many writers are lured away from their intended subject by the charm of some appealing word—that never happens to you. Everything is compact and fitted to the matter. You say as much as you wish, and you convey more than you say. That is a mark of something greater: it shows that your mind, too, has nothing superfluous, nothing swollen.
Still, I do find metaphors—not reckless ones, but ones that take a certain risk. I find images too, and if anyone forbids us to use them, judging them the exclusive privilege of poets, he seems to me never to have read the ancients, among whom fine phrase-making for its own sake was not yet the fashion. Those writers, who spoke plainly and only to make their point clear, are full of comparisons—which I consider necessary, not for the same reason poets use them, but as props for our weakness, to bring both speaker and listener face to face with the thing itself.
Take Sextius, whom I happen to be reading just now, a keen thinker who philosophizes in Greek words but with Roman character. I was struck by an image he uses: an army advancing in a hollow square, ready for battle, when the enemy is suspected on every side. 'The wise man,' he says, 'ought to do the same: he should deploy all his virtues on every front, so that wherever some hostile force may arise, defenses are already in place there and respond to the commander's signal without confusion.' What we see happen in the armies that great generals marshal—that the whole force feels the commander's will at once, so arranged that a single signal runs through infantry and cavalry together—he says is even more necessary for us.
Soldiers, after all, have often feared the enemy without cause, and the safest road has often been the one most suspected; folly has nothing settled about it. Its fear comes from above as much as from below; both flanks tremble; dangers pursue it and meet it coming; it is terrified of everything, unprepared, and frightened even by its own defenses. The wise man, by contrast, is fortified against every attack, alert, and will not retreat a step whether poverty assaults him, or grief, or disgrace, or pain: undaunted, he will walk straight against them and through them.
We, on the other hand, are bound by many chains, weakened by many. We have lain a long time in these faults; washing them off is hard, for we are not merely stained but dyed through.
Not to leap from one image to another, let me ask this question, which I often turn over in my own mind: why does folly hold us so stubbornly? First, because we do not resist it forcefully, and do not strain with our whole strength toward safety; second, because we do not trust enough in what wise men have discovered, and do not drink it in with open hearts, and give only a light effort to so great a matter.
How can anyone learn enough to fight vice, when he studies only as much as he is already free from vice? None of us goes down deep; we skim only the surface, and think it more than enough, given how busy we are, to have spent a little time on philosophy.
What especially hinders us is that we grow satisfied with ourselves too quickly. If we find someone to call us good men, prudent, upright, we accept it. We are not content with modest praise: whatever flattery heaps on us without shame, we seize as our due. We agree with those who assure us we are the best, the wisest, even though we know they often lie a good deal. And we indulge ourselves so far that we want to be praised for a quality we are, at that very moment, contradicting by our actions. A man hears himself called most merciful even in the midst of inflicting punishment, most generous in the midst of plunder, most temperate in the midst of drunkenness and lust. And so it follows that we refuse to change, precisely because we have convinced ourselves we are already the best.
When Alexander was already roaming through India, ravaging peoples scarcely even known to their own neighbors, at the siege of some city, while he was circling the walls looking for the weakest point in the fortifications, he was struck by an arrow; yet he stayed at his post a long while and kept on with what he had begun. Then, when the bleeding was checked and the pain of the dry wound grew worse, and his leg, hanging from the horse, gradually went numb, he was forced to stop, and said: 'Everyone swears I am the son of Jupiter, but this wound shouts that I am a man.'
Let us do the same. Flattery makes each of us a fool, each according to his own share of it: let us say, 'You indeed call me prudent, but I see how many useless things I crave, how many harmful things I wish for. I do not even grasp what animals show by simply reaching their fill—how much food is enough, how much drink; how much I can hold, I still do not know.'
Now I will teach you how to recognize that you are not yet wise. The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and calm, unshaken; he lives on equal terms with the gods. Now examine yourself: if you are never downcast, if no hope disturbs your mind with expectation of the future, if day and night alike your state of mind holds one steady, unwavering course, upright and pleased with itself, then you have reached the height of human good. But if you go chasing pleasures from every direction and of every kind, know that you lack as much wisdom as you lack joy. You wish to reach that height, but you go astray, hoping to arrive there amid riches, amid honors—that is, you search for joy amid anxieties. The very things you pursue as though they would give you gladness and pleasure are in fact the causes of pain.
All men, I say, aim at joy, but they do not know from where they might obtain something lasting and great: one seeks it in banquets and luxury, another in ambition and the crowd of clients surrounding him, another in a mistress, another in the empty display of liberal studies and letters that heal nothing—all of these are deceived by pleasures that are false and short-lived, like drunkenness, which pays for one hour of cheerful madness with a long stretch of weariness, or like the applause and favor of popular acclaim, won at the cost of great anxiety and needing, afterward, to be atoned for.
So consider this: that the effect of wisdom is an evenness of joy. The wise man's mind is like the region of the sky above the moon: there it is always clear. You have, then, a reason to wish to be wise, since the wise man is never without joy. And this joy is born from nothing but the awareness of one's own virtues: no one can rejoice unless he is brave, unless he is just, unless he is temperate.
'What then,' you say, 'do fools and wicked men not rejoice?' No more than lions that have caught their prey. When they have worn themselves out with wine and lust, when night has left them exhausted in the midst of their vices, when pleasures crammed into a body too small to hold them have begun to fester, then the wretches cry out that line of Virgil's:
"for you know how we spent that last night amid false joys."
The luxurious spend every night amid false joys, and indeed as though it were their last. But that joy which follows the gods and those who rival the gods is never interrupted, never ceases; it would cease, if it had been borrowed from elsewhere. Because it is not another's gift, it is not subject to another's whim either: what fortune did not give, she cannot take away. Farewell.