Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] Every day, every hour, shows us how little we are, and reminds those of us who have forgotten it, with some fresh proof, of our fragility; then it forces those of us who have been contemplating eternal things to look back toward death. You ask what this opening is driving at? You knew Cornelius Senecio, a distinguished and dutiful Roman knight: he had raised himself up from small beginnings, and by now his path to everything else was downhill, since standing on rank is easier than reaching it in the first place. [2] Money, too, involves the greatest delay around poverty; while it's crawling out of it, it sticks. Senecio was by now closing in on wealth, toward which two very effective things were leading him: the skill of acquiring and the skill of guarding, either one of which could have made a man rich. [3] This man, of the utmost frugality, no less careful of his estate than of his body, had seen me that morning as usual, had sat the whole day beside a friend who was gravely ill and past hope, lingering into the night, had then dined cheerfully, and was seized by a swift illness, quinsy, and drew breath, barely, through a throat squeezed narrow, all the way into daylight. So within a very few hours of having performed all the duties of a healthy and vigorous man, he died. [4] The man who was moving money about by sea and by land, who, leaving no kind of profit untried, had gone into public contracting as well, was snatched away in the very act of his affairs going well, in the very rush of money flowing in.
'Plant your pear trees now, Meliboeus, set your vines in rows.'
How foolish it is to plan out one's life when one isn't even master of tomorrow! Oh, what madness it is to begin upon long-range hopes: I will buy, I will build, I will lend, I will collect debts, I will hold office, and then at last, when I'm tired and full of years, I'll withdraw old age into leisure. [5] Everything, believe me, is uncertain, even for the fortunate; no one has any right to promise himself anything about the future; even what we hold slips through our hands, and chance cuts into the very hour we are grasping. Time rolls on by a fixed law, but through darkness: what does it matter to me whether it is fixed for nature, if it is uncertain for me? [6] We plan long voyages and, after wandering foreign shores, a late return to our homeland; we plan military service and the slow wages of camp labor, official posts and advancement through a succession of offices, while all the time death stands at our side, which, since it is never thought of except as happening to someone else, keeps thrusting examples of our mortality upon us that stick with us no longer than the time it takes us to marvel at them. [7] But what is more foolish than to be amazed that something happened on some particular day, when it can happen on any day at all? There is indeed a boundary fixed for us, set wherever the inexorable necessity of the fates has fixed it, but none of us knows how close he stands to that boundary; so let us shape our mind as though it were now come to the very end. Let us put nothing off; let us balance the books of our life with each passing day. [8] The greatest flaw of life is that it is always incomplete, that some part of it is always being postponed. The man who has put the finishing touch on his life every single day has no need of more time; but out of this need is born fear, and a craving for the future that eats away at the mind. There is nothing more wretched than uncertainty about where things are headed; how great is what remains, or of what sort, a mind troubled by inexplicable dread cannot work out. [9] How shall we escape this tossing about? By one way alone: if our life does not reach out ahead of itself, if it gathers itself into itself. For the man hangs suspended on the future for whom the present counts for nothing. But when I have paid back what I owe to myself, when my settled mind knows there is no difference between a day and an age, then whatever days and events are still to come it looks out on from on high, and contemplates the whole sequence of time with a good deal of laughter. For what will the variety and instability of chance disturb, if you are certain in the face of uncertainty? [10] So hurry, my dear Lucilius, to live, and count each single day as a separate life. The man who has fitted himself to this pattern, whose life has been complete every single day, is free of care: for those who live in hope, each coming stretch of time slips away, and in its place creeps a craving and the most wretched of things, a fear of death that spoils everything. That is the source of Maecenas's utterly shameful prayer, in which he refuses neither weakness nor deformity nor, finally, the sharpened stake, provided only that his breath be prolonged amid these evils:
[11] 'Make me weak of hand, weak of foot and hip, heap a hump upon my crooked back, shake loose my teeth; so long as life remains, it is well: sustain me even if I must sit upon the sharpened stake.'
[12] What would have been most wretched if it had befallen him unasked, he prays for, and seeks life as though it were the mere prolonging of a punishment. I would think it utterly contemptible if a man wished to go on living all the way to the cross. 'Yes,' he says, 'weaken me as you like, so long as breath remains in this broken and useless body; deform me as you like, so long as some scrap of time is added to a monstrous and twisted frame; impale me on a stake if you like, and set me down upon the sharpened point that I am to sit on': is it worth so much to keep pressing on one's own wound and to hang stretched out upon a gibbet, only to postpone what, among evils, is the best of them, the end of the punishment? Is it worth so much to have a breath of life only in order to go on suffering? [13] What could one wish this man but that the gods be kind to him? What is the point of this shameful indecency of an effeminate poem? What is this bargain struck by the most senseless fear? What is this so foul a begging for life? Do you suppose Virgil was ever recited to this man:
'Is it really so wretched, then, to die?'
He prays for the worst of evils and desires that what is hardest to endure be drawn out and sustained; at what price? Of a somewhat longer life, of course. But what is it to live long, if not to die for a long time? [14] Can one find a man who would want to waste away amid torments, and perish limb by limb, and let out his breath drop by drop, rather than exhale it once and for all? Can one find a man who, driven up onto that unlucky beam of wood, already weak, already deformed, and crushed into a foul swelling of shoulders and chest, though he had many reasons for dying quite apart from the cross, would want to draw out a breath that will only draw out so much torment? Deny now, if you can, that it is a great kindness of nature that death is a necessity. [15] There are many who are prepared to bargain for still worse things: even to betray a friend, so as to live a little longer, and to hand over their own children to be abused with their own hands, so as to have the chance to see the light of day, an accomplice in so many crimes. The craving for life must be shaken off, and we must learn that it makes no difference when you suffer what must be suffered at some point regardless; what matters is how well you live, not how long; and often it is precisely in this that living well consists, in not living long. Farewell.