Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] I don't want you changing your location and leaping from one place to another. First, because such frequent moving is a sign of an unsettled mind: it cannot cohere in stillness unless it stops looking around and wandering. To hold your mind in place, first stop your body from fleeing. [2] Second, remedies work best when kept up without interruption: your quiet, and your forgetting of your former life, must not be broken off. Don't let your eyes unlearn their new habits, don't let your ears stop growing used to sounder words. Every time you go out, something will cross your path, right there in transit, that stirs your old cravings back to life. [3] Just as someone trying to shed a love affair must avoid every reminder of the body he loved - nothing flares back up more easily than love - so too a person who wants to lay aside his longing for all the things he once burned to have must turn his eyes and ears away from whatever he has left behind. [4] The feeling rebels quickly. Wherever it turns, it will spot some immediate reward for going back to its old business. No vice comes without a bribe: greed promises money, indulgence promises many and varied pleasures, ambition promises the purple robe and applause and, through them, power, and whatever power can buy. [5] Vices court you with a fee; here, you must live for free. It can hardly be managed in an entire lifetime to subdue vices so swollen with long license and make them accept the yoke - let alone if we keep breaking up the little time we have with these gaps. Constant vigilance and effort can barely bring even one single thing to completion. [6] If you're willing to listen to me, meditate on this and practice it: how to both welcome death and, if the situation calls for it, summon it yourself. It makes no difference whether death comes to us or we go to it. Convince yourself that the phrase every ignorant person repeats is false: 'it's a fine thing to die one's own death.' No one dies any death but his own. And consider this too: no one dies except on his own day. You lose nothing of your own time, for what you leave behind was never yours. Farewell.