Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] I am sorry to hear that your friend Flaccus has died — but I don't want you to grieve beyond measure. That you should not grieve at all, I'll hardly dare demand, though I know it would be better. But who gets that kind of firmness of soul, except a man already lifted high above fortune? Even him such a loss will pinch — but only pinch. As for us, we can be forgiven for slipping into tears, provided they haven't overflowed, provided we've checked them ourselves. When a friend is lost, the eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Weep, yes; wail, no. [2] Does the rule I'm laying down seem harsh, when the greatest of the Greek poets granted a right to cry for just one day, when he tells us that even Niobe thought about food? Do you ask where the loud laments come from, the extravagant weeping? Through our tears we are hunting for proof that we miss the dead; we are not following our grief but exhibiting it. Nobody is sad for his own benefit. What miserable folly — even grief has its vanity. [3] 'What, then,' you say, 'am I to forget my friend?' You're promising him a short stay in your memory if it can only last as long as your sorrow does: any chance trifle will soon smooth that brow of yours into a smile. I won't stretch it further than that — the interval that soothes every longing, in which even the sharpest mourning settles down. The moment you stop watching yourself, that mask of sadness will fall away. Right now you are standing guard over your own grief; but grief slips away even from its guard, and the fiercer it is, the sooner it stops. [4] Let's work at making the memory of those we've lost a pleasure to us. Nobody willingly returns to a thought he can't entertain without torment — though it's inevitable that the names of loved ones we've lost come back to us with a certain sting. But even that sting has its own sweetness. [5] As our Attalus used to say, 'the memory of dead friends is pleasing the way certain fruit is pleasingly tart, the way in a very old wine the very bitterness delights us; but once time has intervened, everything that hurt is snuffed out and the pleasure reaches us pure.' [6] If we take his word for it, 'to think of friends alive and well is to enjoy honey and cake; recalling those who are gone gives pleasure with a certain bite in it. Yet who would deny that sharp things too, things with an edge of harshness, wake up the appetite?' [7] My own experience is different: to me the thought of dead friends is sweet and comforting. When I had them, I held them as men I would lose; having lost them, I hold them as if I have them still.
So do what your own fairness requires, my dear Lucilius: stop misreading what fortune did for you. She took away — but she also gave. [8] Let us therefore enjoy our friends hungrily, because how long that privilege will last is uncertain. Think how often we've left them behind when setting out on some long journey, how often we've failed to see them while staying in the same town — and we'll realize we lost more time with them while they were alive. [9] And can you stand these people who treat their friends with total neglect and then mourn them with total abandon — who love no one until they've lost him? They grieve the more lavishly precisely because they're afraid someone might doubt whether they loved at all; they're scrambling for late evidence of their own affection. [10] If we have other friends, we treat them badly and rate them cheaply if they count for so little as consolation for the one who's been buried. If we have none, we've done ourselves a worse injury than fortune did us: she took one man away; we failed to make any. [11] What's more, a man who couldn't love more than one person didn't love even that one very much. If someone stripped of his only tunic chose to stand there bewailing himself rather than looking about for a way to escape the cold and find something to throw over his shoulders, wouldn't you call him a perfect fool? You have buried someone you loved: find someone to love. Replacing a friend beats crying for one.
[12] What I'm about to add is worn thin, I know, but I won't leave it out just because everyone has said it: even the man who never ended his grieving by decision finds it ended by time. And for a man of sense, the most disgraceful cure for sorrow is to grow tired of sorrowing. I'd rather you abandoned your grief than have it abandon you. Stop as soon as you can doing what you couldn't keep doing for long even if you wanted to. [13] Our ancestors set women a year for mourning — not so they would mourn that long, but so they would mourn no longer. For men no period is prescribed, because no period is honorable. Still, out of all those poor women who could barely be dragged from the pyre, barely pried off the corpse, show me one whose tears lasted a full month. Nothing becomes hateful faster than grief: while fresh, it finds a consoler and draws people to its side; grown stale, it gets laughed at — and deservedly, for by then it is either fake or foolish.
[14] And I write this to you as the man who wept for my dearest Annaeus Serenus so uncontrollably that — the last thing I'd want — I stand among the examples of men whom grief defeated. Today, though, I condemn what I did, and I understand that the chief reason I mourned that way was that I had never once considered he could die before me. Only one thought ever occurred to me: he was younger, much younger — as if the fates kept to a schedule! [15] So let us think constantly about our own mortality no less than that of everyone we love. Back then I should have said, 'My Serenus is younger — what does that matter? He ought to die after me, but he can die before me.' Because I didn't, fortune's blow caught me unprepared. Now I keep it all in mind: everything is mortal, and mortal on no fixed terms. Whatever can ever happen can happen today. [16] So let us reflect, dearest Lucilius, that we will soon arrive where we grieve that he has arrived; and perhaps — if only the report of the wise is true and some place receives us — the one we think we have lost has simply been sent on ahead. Farewell.