Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Never believe anyone happy whose happiness hangs on borrowed goods. Whoever takes joy in what comes from outside is leaning on fragile supports: the joy that entered from elsewhere will exit the same way. But that joy which arises from oneself is trustworthy and solid, and it grows and stays with a man to the very end; everything else, the sort of thing the crowd admires, is a good only for a day. 'What, then? Can such things not be useful or pleasant?' Who denies it? But only on condition that they depend on us, not we on them. [2] Everything that fortune looks upon becomes fruitful and pleasant only if the one who has it also has himself in hand, and is not in the power of his own possessions. People go wrong, Lucilius, when they judge that fortune hands out either something good or something bad to us: she supplies the raw material of good and bad things, and the beginnings of matters that will turn out, in our hands, for good or ill. For the mind is stronger than any fortune, and it steers its own affairs itself, in one direction or the other, and is itself the cause of a happy or a wretched life. [3] A bad mind turns everything to the bad, even things that had arrived under the best of appearances; an upright and sound mind corrects the crookedness of fortune, and by its skill in bearing things softens what is hard and harsh, and it receives good fortune gratefully and with restraint, and bears adversity steadily and with courage. Even if a man is wise, even if he does everything with sound judgment, even if he attempts nothing beyond his strength, he will not attain that good, whole and beyond the reach of threats, unless he is certain in the face of uncertainty. [4] Whether you want to observe others (judgment is freer when it deals with what belongs to someone else) or observe yourself, setting favoritism aside, you will feel this and admit it: none of these desirable and dear things is of any use unless you have armed yourself against the fickleness of chance and the chance that follows on its heels, unless you frequently say, without complaint, in the midst of each loss:
the gods saw fit otherwise.
[5] Actually, by Hercules, to reach for a saying that is stronger and fairer, one that will prop up your spirit more firmly, say this instead, whenever something turns out other than you had planned: 'the gods have arranged it better.' A person composed like this will have nothing happen to him. And he will be composed like this if he has thought, before he feels it, about what the variety of human affairs can do — if he holds his children, his wife, and his fortune in such a way as though he were not necessarily going to keep them forever, and as though he would not be more wretched on that account if he ceased to have them. [6] A mind anxious about the future is a wretched one, wretched even before its miseries arrive, one that worries whether the things it delights in will last all the way to the end; for it will never rest, and by anticipating what is to come it will lose the present, which it could have enjoyed. The pain of losing something and the fear of losing it stand on the same footing. [7] I am not, for that reason, telling you to be careless. No — do avoid what should be avoided; whatever can be foreseen through forethought, foresee it; whatever is going to hurt you, watch for it and ward it off long before it arrives. What will help you most in this very effort is confidence and a mind steeled to endure everything. A man who can bear fortune can also be on guard against it; certainly, once at peace, he doesn't panic. Nothing is more wretched or more foolish than fearing things in advance — what madness is it, to run out ahead to meet your own misfortune? [8] In short, to sum up my view briefly, and to describe to you these fretful, self-tormenting people: they are just as lacking in self-control in the midst of their miseries as they were before them. A man who grieves before he must, grieves more than he must; for it is the same weakness that makes him fail to gauge his grief that made him fail to anticipate it. That same lack of self-control makes him imagine his own happiness will last forever, makes him imagine that whatever has befallen him ought to grow, not merely endure, and, forgetting the seesaw on which human affairs are tossed about, he alone promises himself constancy amid chance events. [9] So I think Metrodorus put it splendidly, in that letter in which he consoles his sister for the loss of a son of the finest character: 'every good thing belonging to mortals is itself mortal.' He is speaking there of those goods that people run after; for the true good does not die — it is certain and everlasting, namely wisdom and virtue; this alone falls to mortals as something immortal. [10] But people are so thoughtless, and so forgetful of where they're heading, of where each passing day is pushing them, that they're astonished to lose some one thing, though one day they will lose everything at once. Whatever you can label 'mine' is in your keeping, but it is not yours; nothing is stable for something unstable, nothing is eternal and unconquerable for something fragile. It is just as necessary to perish as it is to lose things, and this very fact, if we understand it, is itself a comfort. Lose with an even mind: you have to perish anyway.
[11] So what remedy have we found against these losses? This one: that we hold on to the memory of what we've lost, and not let the enjoyment we drew from it vanish along with the thing itself. Having a thing can be taken from us; having had it, never. It is a thoroughly ungrateful man who, once he has lost something, feels he owes nothing for having received it in the first place. Chance snatches the object from us, but leaves its use and enjoyment in our possession — which we ourselves destroy through the unfairness of our longing. [12] Tell yourself: 'Of these things that seem so terrible, nothing is unconquerable.' Many people have already conquered them one by one: Mucius conquered fire, Regulus the cross, Socrates poison, Rutilius exile, Cato a death driven home by the sword: let us too conquer something. [13] Then again, those things that draw the crowd along as though splendid and blessed have been despised by many people, and often. Fabricius, as a general, rejected riches; as censor, he branded them with disgrace. Tubero judged poverty worthy both of himself and of the Capitol, when, by using earthenware dishes at a public banquet, he showed that a man ought to be content with the very things the gods themselves still use. Sextius the father turned down public honors: born into a position that obliged him to take up public life, he refused the broad purple stripe offered by the deified Julius; for he understood that what could be given could also be taken away. Let us too, on our own, do something with spirit; let us stand among the examples. [14] Why have we grown slack? Why do we despair? Whatever could be done can still be done, if only we cleanse our minds and follow nature — a person who strays from nature is bound to desire and to fear, and to be a slave to chance. It is possible to return to the road, possible to be restored to wholeness: let us be restored, so that we can bear pains, however they invade the body, and say to fortune, 'You have a man to deal with: go find someone to beat.'
[15] *** By these words and others like them, that violent pain of the ulcer is eased — a pain I truly hope will be soothed, and either healed, or held steady and grow old along with the man himself. But I have no worry on his account: it's our loss that's at stake, we who are about to have this remarkable old man taken from us. For he himself is full of life, a man who wants nothing more added to it for his own sake, but only for the sake of those to whom he is useful. [16] It is a generous act on his part that he goes on living. Another man would long since have put an end to these torments; he thinks it just as shameful to flee death as to flee to death. 'What then? Won't he leave, if the situation urges it?' Why wouldn't he leave, if no one can any longer make use of him, if all he'd be doing is ministering to his pain? [17] This, my dear Lucilius, is learning philosophy in action, and being trained in the real thing: to see what a wise man's spirit holds in reserve against death, against pain, when the one is approaching and the other pressing hard; what must be done is to be learned from the one who is doing it. [18] Up to now the question has been argued in theory, whether anyone could withstand pain, whether death, even when it draws near, could bring low even great spirits. What need is there for words? Let us go to the facts themselves: in him, it isn't death that makes him braver against pain, nor pain that makes him braver against death. He trusts himself against each of them separately: he doesn't endure his pain patiently out of hope for death, and he doesn't die gladly out of weariness with pain. This one he bears; that one he awaits. Farewell.