Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I agree with your plan: hide yourself away in leisure, but hide the leisure itself too. You may know that the Stoics would have you do this, if not by precept, then at least by example; but you'll do it by precept as well—you'll win the approval both of yourself and of whomever else you choose. We don't send everyone into public life, nor always, nor without any limit; besides, since we have given the wise man a commonwealth worthy of him—namely, the universe—he is not outside public life even when he has withdrawn from it; in fact, perhaps, having left behind one small corner, he passes into something greater and wider, and once set in the heavens he understands, as he takes his seat on a magistrate's chair or tribunal, how humble a place he used to occupy. Store this away in your mind: the wise man is never doing more than when things divine and human have come within his sight.
Now let me return to what I began urging on you—that your leisure should go unnoticed. You have no business labeling your retreat 'Philosophy' and 'quiet'; give your project some other name—call it ill health, or frailty, or plain idleness. To boast of one's leisure is a lazy kind of ambition. Some animals blur their own tracks around the den itself so they can't be found; you must do the same, or else there will be no shortage of people hunting you down. Many pass by what's out in the open, but pry into what's hidden and shut away; a locked door tempts a thief. Whatever lies exposed seems cheap; the burglar walks past open doors. This is the crowd's way, and every least experienced person's way: they long to break into secrets. So the best course is not to make a show of your leisure; and making too much of hiding is itself a kind of showing off. That man buried himself at Tarentum, that one shut himself up at Naples, another hasn't crossed his own threshold in many years: whoever turns his leisure into a story draws a crowd.
When you withdraw, the point is not to get people talking about you, but to talk with yourself. And what should you say? What people are only too glad to do about others—say hard things about yourself, to yourself; you'll grow used to both speaking the truth and hearing it. Above all, work on whatever you sense is weakest in yourself. Each of us knows the particular faults of his own body. So one man relieves his stomach by vomiting, another props it up with frequent meals, another empties and purges his body with an interposed fast; those whose feet are plagued by recurring pain abstain from wine or the baths: in other respects careless, they take precautions against the one thing that so often attacks them. So too in our minds there are certain, so to speak, sickly parts, which need to be given treatment.
What am I doing in my leisure? Tending my own sore. If I were showing you a swollen foot, a discolored hand, or the shriveled sinews of a shrunken leg, you would allow me to lie in one place and nurse my ailment: this is a worse trouble, that I can't show it to you—the abscess and the festering wound are inside the chest itself. I don't want, I don't want praise, I don't want you to say, 'What a great man! He has scorned everything and fled the madness of human life, which he condemns.' I have condemned nothing except myself. There's no reason for you to want to come to me for the sake of self-improvement. You're mistaken if you hope for any help from this quarter: it isn't a doctor who lives here, but a patient. I would rather, when you leave, you say: 'I used to think that man happy and learned—I had pricked up my ears—but I was let down; I saw nothing, heard nothing, that I coveted, or that would draw me back.' If that's what you feel, if that's what you say, something has been gained: I would rather you forgive my leisure than envy it.
'Are you recommending leisure to me, Seneca?' you say. 'Are you sliding down into Epicurean talk?' I recommend leisure to you in which you may do greater and finer things than the ones you've left behind: knocking on the proud doors of the powerful, drawing up in writing the names of childless old men, wielding great influence in the forum—that kind of power is enviable but brief, and, if you judge it truly, squalid. That man will far outstrip me in influence at the bar, that one in his years of military service and the standing won through them, that one in his crowd of dependents. I cannot be his equal; they have more favor to offer. It's worth being outdone by everyone else, so long as I outdo fortune.
If only the resolve to follow this course had come to you long ago! If only we were not discussing the happy life within sight of death! But even now we're not delaying too long; for many things which we would once have believed superfluous and hostile to reason, we now believe on the strength of experience. Let's do as those do who set out too late and want to make up for lost time by hurrying—let's put spurs to it. This age is best suited to these studies: it has already boiled itself down, it has already tired out the vices that ran unchecked in the first fever of youth; not much remains for it to extinguish. 'And when,' you ask, 'will what you're learning at the end of your life do you any good, or for what purpose?' For this: that I may leave life a better man. Still, there's no reason to think any age better suited to a sound mind than one that has tamed itself through many trials and long, repeated regret over past actions, and has come to what is wholesome only once the passions have been calmed. This is that good's proper season: whoever arrives at wisdom in old age arrives at it only after long years. Farewell.