Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] That you are plagued by constant runnings of catarrh and by the low fevers that follow when such attacks drag on and settle into a habit — this troubles me all the more because I have been through that kind of ill health myself. At the start I brushed it off — my youth could still absorb rough treatment and stand up defiantly to disease — but then I went under, and was brought so low that I was practically dissolving in catarrh myself, wasted down to extreme thinness. [2] Many times I felt the urge to cut my life short; what held me back was the old age of my very affectionate father. I thought not of how bravely I could die, but of how little bravery he would have for missing me. So I ordered myself to live — for sometimes even staying alive is an act of courage.
[3] I will tell you what comforted me then, but first let me say this: the very things I rested on had the force of medicine. Honorable consolations turn into cures, and whatever lifts the spirit does the body good as well. My studies were my salvation. I credit philosophy with my getting up, with my recovery; I owe her my life, and that is the least of what I owe her. [4] My friends, too, contributed a great deal to my return to health; their encouragement, their sitting up with me, their talk kept my spirits up. Nothing, Lucilius — best of men — restores and helps a sick man like the affection of friends; nothing so steals away the expectation of death and the fear of it. I could not believe I was dying while leaving them behind alive. I believed, I tell you, that I would go on living, not with them, but through them; I felt I was not pouring out my breath but handing it over. These things gave me the will to help myself and to endure every torment; otherwise it is the most wretched state of all, to have thrown away the will to die and not to have the will to live.
[5] Turn, then, to these remedies. Your doctor will lay out how far to walk and how much to exercise; will warn you not to sink into the idleness that a listless illness inclines toward; will tell you to read aloud, to exercise the breath whose passage and reservoir are ailing; to take boat trips and let the gentle rocking shake up your insides; will say what foods to take, when to call in wine to build strength and when to leave it off so it doesn't irritate and inflame your cough. My own prescription for you is a remedy not just for this illness but for your whole life: despise death. Nothing is grim once we have escaped the fear of it.
[6] Three things weigh heavy in every illness: fear of death, bodily pain, and the interruption of pleasures. About death enough has been said; I will add only this, that the fear belongs not to the disease but to nature. Illness has postponed many people's deaths, and seeming to be dying has proved their salvation. Your death will come not from the sickness but from the living. That fate waits for you even when you are cured; in recovering, you escape not death but ill health.
[7] Now let's return to the complaint that is specific here: the disease brings great torments — but the intervals make them bearable. For pain at its utmost pitch comes to an end; no one can be in extreme pain for long. Nature, who loves us dearly, has arranged things so that pain is either endurable or brief. [8] The greatest pains lodge in the leanest parts of the body: sinews, joints, and whatever else is thin rage most fiercely when trouble takes hold in a narrow space. But these parts quickly go numb, and through the very pain they lose the feeling of pain — whether because the vital breath, blocked from its natural course and altered for the worse, loses the force by which it thrives and signals to us, or because the corrupted humor, when it no longer has anywhere to drain, chokes on itself and knocks out sensation in the parts it has overfilled. [9] So gout in the feet, gout in the hands, and every pain of the spine and sinews takes its pauses, once it has dulled the very region it was torturing; in all of these it is the first gnawing that torments; the attack is snuffed out by time, and numbness is the end of pain. Toothache, eye-ache, earache are so very sharp precisely because they arise in the body's narrow places — no less sharp, I swear, than pain in the head itself; but if it grows too violent, it turns into stupor and sleep. [10] This, then, is the consolation of overwhelming pain: feel it beyond a certain pitch, and you cease to feel it at all. What really makes the untrained suffer in bodily torment is this: they have not learned to be content with the mind; they have been much occupied with the body. That is why a great and sensible man separates mind from body and dwells much with the better, divine part, and with this whining, fragile one only as much as he must. [11] 'But it is a hardship,' someone says, 'to go without the pleasures you're used to — to abstain from food, to be thirsty, to be hungry.' Abstinence is hard at first; then desire slackens as the very things we crave tire and give out; after that the stomach turns fussy, and people who once had a greed for food come to loathe it. The cravings themselves die off, and there is nothing bitter about lacking what you have ceased to want. [12] Add that every pain either pauses entirely or at least eases. Add that you can guard against its coming and meet its approach with remedies; for every pain sends warning signs ahead, certainly any that comes back on schedule. Enduring an illness is bearable if you have learned to despise its ultimate threat.
[13] Do not make your troubles heavier for yourself, or load yourself with complaints. Pain is light if opinion adds nothing to it. If instead you start encouraging yourself — 'It's nothing, or next to nothing; let's hold out; it will stop soon' — then in thinking it light you will make it so. Everything hangs on opinion: not only ambition looks to it, and luxury, and greed — our very pain follows opinion. [14] Each of us is as miserable as he has believed himself to be. I say we should strike out all lamenting over past pains — all that talk of 'No one was ever worse off. What agonies, what horrors I went through! Nobody thought I would get up again. How many times my family gave me up for lost, how many times the doctors abandoned me! Men stretched on the rack aren't pulled apart like that.' Even if all of it is true, it is over. What good does it do to chew over past pains and be miserable now because you once were? Besides, doesn't everyone add a great deal to his own troubles and lie to himself? And what was bitter to bear is pleasant to have borne: it is natural to rejoice when one's trouble ends. Two things, then, must be pruned away: fear of the future and the memory of old discomfort. The one no longer concerns me; the other does not yet. [15] Set in the very thick of his difficulties, let a man say,
Someday, perhaps, even these things will be a joy to remember.
Let him fight with his whole soul: he will be beaten if he yields; he will win if he strains against his pain. As it is, most people do the opposite — they pull down onto themselves the collapse they should be propping up. The thing that presses on you, hangs over you, bears down on you — if you start backing away from it, it will follow and land on you all the harder; if you stand your ground and choose to push back, it will be driven off. [16] Think how many blows athletes take to the face, how many over the whole body! Yet they bear every torment out of hunger for glory, and they suffer these things not only because they fight, but in order to fight: the training itself is torment. Let us too conquer everything — we whose prize is not a wreath or a palm branch or a trumpeter hushing the crowd for the announcement of our name, but virtue, firmness of mind, and peace secured for all time to come, if once, in any contest, fortune has been beaten to her knees. 'I feel severe pain.' [17] Well — do you feel it any less by bearing it like a coward? Just as an enemy is deadlier to men in flight, so every misfortune that chance sends presses harder on the one who gives way and turns his back. 'But it is heavy.' What — is our strength for carrying light loads only? Would you rather the illness were long, or sharp and short? If it is long, it has pauses, gives room for recovery, grants plenty of time; it must rise to its crisis and then stop. A short, steep illness will do one of two things: be extinguished, or extinguish. And what difference does it make whether it is gone or I am? Either way the pain ends.
[18] This too will help: turn the mind to other thoughts and walk away from the pain. Think of what you have done honorably, done bravely; go over the good chapters with yourself; scatter your memory across the things you have most admired. Then let the bravest men rise before you, each one a conqueror of pain: the one who kept on reading his book while he held out his varicose veins to be cut; the one who never stopped laughing while his torturers, enraged by exactly that, tried every instrument of their cruelty on him. Shall pain not be beaten by reason, when it has been beaten by a laugh? [19] Name anything you please now — the catarrh, the force of an unbroken cough that brings up pieces of your insides, fever scorching the very chest, thirst, limbs twisted with the joints wrenched out of line: worse still are the flame, the rack, the hot metal plates, and the thing pressed into wounds already swelling to reopen them and drive in deeper. Yet amid all that, a man did not groan. That's not all: he did not beg. Not all: he did not answer. Not all: he laughed — and from the heart. After that, are you willing to laugh at pain?
[20] 'But my illness,' someone says, 'lets me do nothing; it has pulled me away from all my duties.' Ill health holds your body, not your mind as well. So it slows a runner's feet; it hampers a cobbler's or a smith's hands. If your mind is the tool you normally work with, you will still advise and teach, listen and learn, inquire and remember. What's more — do you think you are doing nothing if you are self-controlled while sick? You will be demonstrating that illness can be overcome, or at least carried. [21] There is room for virtue, believe me, even in a sickbed. Weapons and battle lines are not the only proof of a keen spirit unbroken by terrors: a brave man shows himself even in his bedclothes. You have something to do: wrestle well with your disease. If it forces nothing from you, if it wheedles nothing out of you, you are setting a signal example. What a vast field for glory there would be, if we had an audience when sick! Be your own audience; give yourself your own applause.
[22] Besides, there are two kinds of pleasures. The bodily ones illness checks but does not abolish — in fact, judged rightly, it sharpens them. Drinking gives more delight to a thirsty man; food is more welcome to a hungry one; whatever comes after abstinence is seized more eagerly. As for the pleasures of the mind — greater and more reliable — no doctor denies these to a patient. Whoever pursues them and understands them well despises all the sweet-talk of the senses. [23] 'Oh, the poor invalid!' Why? Because he doesn't melt snow into his wine? Because he doesn't refresh the chill of his drink — mixed in a giant cup — by crumbling ice on top? Because Lucrine oysters aren't opened for him right at the table? Because there's no commotion of cooks around his dining room, carrying the stoves in along with the dishes? For this is luxury's latest invention: so that no food cools off, so that nothing arrives insufficiently scalding for a palate already calloused, the kitchen follows the dinner in. [24] 'Oh, the poor invalid!' He will eat as much as he can digest. No boar will lie in full view only to be banished from the table as cheap meat; no breasts of birds will be piled on his serving tray (since seeing them whole is disgusting). What harm has been done to you? You will dine like a sick man — that is, for once, like a healthy one.
[25] But all these things — the broth, the warm water, and whatever else seems unendurable to the pampered, to people dissolving in luxury, sick more in mind than in body — all these we will bear easily, if only we stop shuddering at death. And we will stop, once we have learned the limits of goods and evils; then and only then will life not be a weariness, nor death a terror. [26] For surfeit of itself cannot take hold of a life that surveys so many things — varied, great, divine; it is idle inactivity that usually drives life to self-loathing. To one who ranges through the nature of things, truth will never grow stale; it is falsehoods that cloy. [27] And again, if death approaches and calls, even if it is early, even if it cuts a man off in mid-life, he has already gathered the fruit of the longest life. He has come to know nature in large part; he knows that honorable things do not grow with time. Life must inevitably seem short to those who measure it by pleasures that are empty and, for that very reason, endless.
[28] Refresh yourself with these thoughts, and in the meantime keep some room for my letters. A time will come someday that joins and mingles us again; however brief it is, the knowledge of how to use it will make it long. For as Posidonius says, 'A single day of the educated stretches wider than the longest lifetime of the ignorant.' [29] Meanwhile hold on to this, sink your teeth into it: do not go down before adversity; do not trust prosperity; keep all of fortune's license before your eyes, as though she were going to do whatever she can do. What has long been expected arrives more gently. Farewell.