Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. In the letter where you complained about the death of the philosopher Metronax, as though he both could and should have lived longer, I missed in you that fairness you show toward every person and every matter, but that fails you in the one case where it fails everyone: I have found many people fair toward men, no one fair toward the gods. Every day we scold fate: 'Why was he snatched away in mid-course? Why isn't that one snatched away? Why does he drag out an old age burdensome to himself and others?'
Tell me, please, which do you think fairer: that you obey nature, or that nature obey you? And what does it matter how soon you leave a place you must leave in any case? We should not aim to live long, but to live enough; for living long depends on fate, living enough on your own character. Life is long if it is full; and it is full once the mind has restored to itself its own good and transferred into its own possession the mastery of itself.
What good do eighty years do a man spent in idleness? Such a man did not live, he merely lingered in life, and he did not die late, but took a long time dying. 'He lived eighty years.' That depends on the day from which you start counting his death. 'But he died in his prime.'
No—he carried out the duties of a good citizen, a good friend, a good son; in no part did he fall short. Though his years were incomplete, his life was complete. 'He lived eighty years.' Rather, he existed for eighty years—unless you mean he 'lived' the way trees are said to live. Please, Lucilius, let us work at this: that our life, like precious things, should not spread out wide but weigh heavy; let us measure it by what it did, not by how long it lasted. Do you want to know the difference between this vigorous man, a scorner of fortune, who fulfilled every campaign of human life and rose to its highest good, and the other man to whom many years were merely handed over? One exists even after death; the other perished before death.
Let us praise him, then, and count him among the fortunate, this man to whom whatever small span of time fell was well invested. He saw the true light; he was not one of the crowd; he both lived and flourished. Sometimes he enjoyed clear skies; sometimes, as often happens, the brilliance of a strong star flashed out through the clouds. Why do you ask how long he lived? He lives: he has leapt across to future generations and given himself over to memory.
Not that I would therefore refuse more years, should they be offered me; yet I would say nothing was missing from my happy life even if its span were cut short; for I did not fit my hopes to that final day that greedy expectation promised me, but I have looked at every day as though it were my last. Why do you ask me when I was born, whether I still count among the younger men? I have what is mine.
Just as a man can be complete in a smaller frame of body, so too a life can be complete in a smaller span of time. Age belongs among external things. How long I shall exist is not up to me; that I truly exist for as long as I do exist—that is mine. This is what you must demand of me: that I not measure out an obscure span of time as if groping through darkness, but that I actually live my life, not merely be carried past it.
You ask what is the fullest possible span of a life? To live until you reach wisdom. Whoever arrives there has touched not the longest limit, but the greatest. Let him boast of it boldly and give thanks to the gods, and among the gods to himself, and let him credit his share to the nature of things—and rightly so, for he has given nature back a better life than he received from it. He set up the model of a good man; he showed what such a man is like and how great; had he added more, it would only have repeated what came before.
And yet how long do we really live? We have enjoyed knowledge of all things: we know from what first principles nature raises itself up, how it orders the world, through what changes it brings back the year, how it has enclosed everything that will ever exist and made itself the boundary of itself; we know that the stars move by their own force, that nothing but earth stands still, that everything else runs on in continuous swift motion; we know how the moon passes before the sun, why the slower body leaves the swifter one behind it, how it takes or loses its light, what cause brings on night and what brings back day. It is there we must go to see these things at closer range.
'And it is not only in this hope,' says that wise man, 'that I go out more bravely—the hope that the way lies open for me to my gods. I have deserved admission; indeed I have already been among them, and I have sent my mind there, and they have sent theirs to me. But suppose I am simply removed from the scene, and after death nothing remains of the man: I have just as great a spirit even if I depart to pass into nowhere.' He did not live as many years as he could have.
There is also a book of only a few lines, and yet praiseworthy and useful; you know how ponderous the Annals of Tanusius are, and what they're nicknamed. This is what the long life of certain people is like—it follows the Annals of Tanusius.
Do you judge the gladiator killed on the last day of the games happier than one killed in the middle of it? Do you think anyone so foolishly greedy for life that he would rather have his throat cut in the stripping-room than in the arena? We do not outdistance one another by any great stretch. Death goes through everyone; the one who is killed catches up with the one who killed him first. The matter over which we fret so anxiously is the smallest of things. What does it matter, after all, how long you avoid what you cannot escape? Farewell.