Letters From a Stoic (7 page)
Read Letters From a Stoic Online
Authors: Seneca
No amount of wisdom, as I said before, ever banishes these things; otherwise – if she eradicated every weakness – wisdom would have dominion over the world of nature.
One’s physical make-up and the attributes that were one’s lot at birth remain settled no matter how much or how long the personality may strive after perfect adjustment.
One cannot ban these things any more than one can call them up.
The tokens used to portray embarrassment by professional actors, those actors who portray emotion, simulate unhappiness and reproduce for us fear and apprehension, are a hanging of the head, a dropping of the voice, a casting down of the eyes and keeping them fixed on the ground; a blush is something they can never manage to reproduce; it is something that
will neither be summoned up nor be told to stay away.
Against these things philosophy holds out no remedy and avails one nothing; they are quite independent; they come unbidden, they go unbidden.
My letter calls for a conclusion.
Here’s one for you, one that will serve you in good stead, too, which I’d like you to take to heart.
‘We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.’ This, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus’ advice, and in giving it he has given us a guardian and a moral tutor – and not without reason, either: misdeeds are greatly diminished if a witness is always standing near intending doers.
The personality should be provided with someone it can revere, someone whose influence can make even its private, inner life more pure.
Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts!
And happy, too, is the person who can so revere another as to adjust and shape his own personality in the light of recollections, even, of that other.
A person able to revere another thus will soon deserve to be revered himself.
So choose yourself a Cato – or, if Cato seems too severe for you, a Laelius, a man whose character is not quite so strict.
Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval.
Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model.
There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves.
Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.
W
HEREVER
I turn I see fresh evidence of my old age.
I visited my place just out of Rome recently and was grumbling about the expense of maintaining the building, which was in a dilapidated state.
My manager told me the trouble wasn’t due to any neglect on his part: he was doing his utmost but the house was old.
That house had taken shape under my own hands; what’s to become of me if stones of my own age are crumbling like that?
Losing my temper I seized at the first excuse that presented itself for venting my irritation on him.
‘It’s quite clear,’ I said, ‘that these plane trees are being neglected.
There’s no foliage on them.
Look at those knotty, dried-up branches and those wretched, flaking trunks.
That wouldn’t happen if someone dug round them and watered them.’ He swore by my guardian angel he was doing his utmost: in everything his care was unremitting but the poor things were just old.
Between you and me, now, I had planted them myself and seen the first leaf appearing on them myself.
Then, turning towards the front door, I said: ‘Who’s that?
Who’s that decrepit old person?
The door’s the proper place for him all right – he looks as if he’s on the way out.
Where did you get him from?
What was the attraction in taking over someone else’s dead for burial?’ Whereupon the man said, ‘Don’t you recognize me?
I’m Felicio.
You used to bring me toy figures.
*
I’m the son of the manager Philositus, your pet playmate.’ ‘The man’s absolutely crazy,’ I said.
‘Become a little child again, has he, actually calls himself my playmate?
Well, the way he’s losing his teeth at this very moment, it’s perfectly possible.’
So I owe it to this place of mine near town that my old
age was made clear to me at every turn.
Well, we should cherish old age and enjoy it.
It is full of pleasure if you know how to use it.
Fruit tastes most delicious just when its season is ending.
The charms of youth are at their greatest at the time of its passing.
It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one that sets the crowning touch on his intoxication and sends him off into oblivion.
Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest delights.
The time of life which offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement – not the steep decline – already begun; and in my opinion even the age that stands on the brink has pleasures of its own – or else the very fact of not experiencing the want of any pleasures takes their place.
How nice it is to have outworn one’s desires and left them behind!
‘It’s not very pleasant, though,’ you may say, ‘to have death right before one’s eyes.’ To this I would say, firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one – the order in which we each receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and, secondly, that no one is so very old that it would be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day.…
*
Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives.
Pacuvius, the man who acquired a right to Syria by prescription,
53
was in the habit of conducting a memorial ceremony for himself with wine and funeral feasting of the kind we are familiar with, and then being carried on a bier from the dinner table to his bed, while a chanting to music went on of the words ‘He has lived, he has lived’ in Greek, amid the applause of the young libertines present.
Never a day passed but he celebrated his own funeral.
What
he did from discreditable motives we should do from honourable ones, saying in all joyfulness and cheerfulness as we retire to our beds,
I have lived; I have completed now the course
That fortune long ago allotted me.
*
If God adds the morrow we should accept it joyfully.
The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others.
Whoever has said ‘I have lived’ receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning.
But I must close this letter now.
‘What!’ you’ll be saying.
‘Is it coming to me just as it is, without any parting contribution?’ Don’t worry, it’s bringing you something.
Why did I call it ‘something’, though?
It’s a great deal.
For what could be more splendid than the following saying which I’m entrusting to this letter of mine for delivery to you: ‘To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.’ Of course not, when on every side there are plenty of short and easy roads to freedom there for the taking.
Let us thank God that no one can be held a prisoner in life – the very constraints can be trampled under foot.
‘It was Epicurus who said that,’ you protest.
‘What business have you got with someone else’s property?’ Whatever is true is my property.
And I shall persist in inflicting Epicurus on you, in order to bring it home to the people who take an oath of allegiance to someone and never afterwards consider what is being said but only who said it, that the things of greatest merit are common property.
O
UR
ancestors had a custom, observed right down as far as my own lifetime, of adding to the opening words of a letter: ‘I trust this finds you as it leaves me, in good health.’ We have good reason to say: ‘I trust this finds you in pursuit of wisdom.’ For this is precisely what is meant by good health.
Without wisdom the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in persons in a demented or delirious state.
So this is the sort of healthiness you must make your principal concern.
You must attend to the other sort as well, but see that it takes second place.
It won’t cost you any great trouble if good health is all you want.
For it is silly, my dear Lucilius, and no way for an educated man to behave, to spend one’s time exercising the biceps, broadening the neck and shoulders and developing the lungs.
Even when the extra feeding has produced gratifying results and you’ve put on a lot of muscle, you’ll never match the strength or the weight of a prize ox.
The greater load, moreover, on the body is crushing to the spirit and renders it less active.
So keep the body within bounds as much as you can and make room for the spirit.
Devotees of physical culture have to put up with a lot of nuisances.
There are the exercises, in the first place, the toil involved in which drains the vitality and renders it unfit for concentration or the more demanding sort of studies.
Next there is the heavy feeding, which dulls mental acuteness.
Then there is the taking on as coaches of the worst brand of slave, persons who divide their time between putting on lotion and putting down liquor, whose idea of a well spent day consists of getting up a good sweat and then replacing the fluid lost with plenty of drink, all the better to be absorbed
on a dry stomach.
Drinking and perspiring – it’s the life of a dyspeptic!
There are short and simple exercises which will tire the body without undue delay and save what needs especially close accounting for, time.
There is running, swinging weights about and jumping – either high-jumping or long-jumping or the kind indulged in by the priests of Mars, if one may so describe it, or to be rather more disrespectful, by the laundress.
Pick out any of these for ease and straightforwardness.
But whatever you do, return from body to mind very soon.
Exercise it day and night.
Only a moderate amount of work is needed for it to thrive and develop.
It is a form of exercise to which cold and heat and even old age are no obstacle.
Cultivate an asset which the passing of time itself improves.
I’m not telling you to be always bent over book or writing-tablets.
The mind has to be given some time off, but in such a way that it may be refreshed, not relaxed till it goes to pieces.
Travelling in one’s carriage shakes the body up and doesn’t interfere with intellectual pursuits; you can read, dictate, speak, or listen – nor does walking, for that matter, preclude any of these activities.
Nor need you look down on voice-training, though I will not have you practising any of this ascending and then descending again by degrees through set scales – if you start that, you’ll be going on to take lessons in walking!
Once let into your house the sort of person that hunger teaches unheard-of occupations and you’ll have someone regulating the way you walk and watching the way you use your jaws as you eat, and in fact going just as far as your patience and credulity lead his audacity on.
Are you to conclude from what I’ve just said that your voice should start its exercises with immediate shouting at full force?
The natural thing is to lead up to it through easy stages, so natural in fact that even persons involved in a quarrel begin in conversational tones: only later do they go on to rend the air.
No
one makes an impassioned appeal for ‘the help and support of all true men of Rome’ at the very outset.
…
*
Our purpose in all this is not to give the voice, exercise, but to make it give us exercise.
I have relieved you, then, of no little bother.
To these favours there shall be added the following small contribution, a striking maxim that comes from Greece.
Here it is: ‘The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future.’ ‘Who said that?’ you ask.
The same man as before.
And what sort of life do you think is meant by ‘the life of folly’?
Baba’s and Isio’s?
†
No, he means our own life, precipitated by blind desire into activities that are likely to bring us harm and will certainly never bring us satisfaction – if they could ever satisfy us they would have done so by now – never thinking how pleasant it is to ask for nothing, how splendid it is to be complete and be independent of fortune.
So continually remind yourself, Lucilius, of the many things you have achieved.
When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.
If you want to feel appreciative where the gods and your life are concerned, just think how many people you’ve outdone.
Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you’ve outdone your own self?
Set yourself a limit which you couldn’t even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them.
If there were anything substantial in them they would sooner or later bring a sense of fullness; as it is they simply aggravate the thirst of those who swallow them.
Away with pomp and show; as for the uncertain lot that the future has in store for me, why should I demand from
fortune that she should give me this and that rather than demand from myself that I should not ask for them?
Why should I ask for them, after all?
Am I to pile them up in total forgetfulness of the frailty of human existence?
What is the purpose of my labours going to be?
See, this day’s my last – or maybe it isn’t, but it’s not so far away from it.