Read Letters From a Stoic Online
Authors: Seneca
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T
is clear to you, I know, Lucilius, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life, although even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable.
Yet this conviction, clear as it is, needs to be strengthened and given deeper roots through daily reflection; making noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already.
You have to persevere and fortify your pertinacity until the will to good becomes a disposition to good.
So you needn’t go in for all this long-winded protestation or say any more on the subject – I’m well aware that you’ve made a great deal of progress.
I realize the feelings that prompt you to put these things in your letter, and there is no pretence or speciousness about them.
But – to give you my honest opinion – at this stage, although I have great hopes of you, I do not yet feel quite confident about you.
And I should like you to adopt the same attitude: you’ve no grounds for forming a ready, hasty belief in yourself.
Carry out a searching analysis and close scrutiny of yourself in all sorts of different lights.
Consider above all else whether you’ve advanced in philosophy or just in actual years.
Philosophy is not an occupation of a popular nature, nor
is it pursued for the sake of self-advertisement.
Its concern is not with words, but with facts.
It is not carried on with the object of passing the day in an entertaining sort of way and taking the boredom out of leisure.
It moulds and builds the personality, orders one’s life, regulates one’s conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm, and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas.
Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry.
Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy.
Someone may say: ‘What help can philosophy be to me if there is such a thing as fate?
What help can philosophy be if there is a deity controlling all?
What help can it be if all is governed by chance?
For it is impossible either to change what is already determined or to make preparations to meet what is undetermined; either, in the first case, my planning is forestalled by a God who decrees how I am to act, or, in the second case, it is fortune that allows me no freedom to plan.’ Whichever of these alternatives, Lucilius, is true – even if all of them are true – we still need to practise philosophy.
Whether we are caught in the grasp of an inexorable law of fate, whether it is God who as lord of the universe has ordered all things, or whether the affairs of mankind are tossed and buffeted haphazardly by chance, it is philosophy that has the duty of protecting us.
She will encourage us to submit to God with cheerfulness and to fortune with defiance; she will show you how to follow God and bear what chance may send you.
But I mustn’t pass on here to a discussion of the problem what is within our control if there is a governing providence, whether we are carried along enmeshed in a train of fated happenings, or whether we are at the mercy of the sudden and the unforeseeable.
For the present I go back to the point where I was before, to advise and urge you not to allow your
spiritual enthusiasm to cool off or fall away.
Keep a hold on it and put it on a firm footing, so that what is at present an enthusiasm may become a settled spiritual disposition.
If I know you, you’ll have been looking around from the very start of this letter to see what it’s going to bring you by way of a little present.
Search the letter and you’ll find it.
You needn’t think my kindness all that remarkable: I am only being generous, still, with someone else’s property.
Why, though, do I call it someone else’s?
Whatever is well said by anyone belongs to me.
Here is another saying of Epicurus: ‘If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.’ Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.
Imagine that you’ve piled, up all that a veritable host of rich men ever possessed, that fortune has carried you far beyond the bounds of wealth so far as any private individual is concerned, building you a roof of gold and clothing you in royal purple, conducting you to such a height of opulence and luxury that you hide the earth with marble floors – putting you in a position not merely to own, but to walk all over treasures – throw in sculptures, paintings, all that has been produced at tremendous pains by all the arts to satisfy extravagance: all these things will only induce in you a craving for even bigger things.
Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop, for falsity has no point of termination.
When a person is following a track, there is an eventual end to it somewhere, but with wandering at large there is no limit.
So give up pointless, empty journeys, and whenever you want to know whether the desire aroused in you by something you are pursuing is natural or quite unseeing, ask yourself whether it is capable of coming to rest at any point; if after going a long way there is always something remaining farther away, be sure it is not something natural.
I
T
is the month of December, and yet the whole city is in a sweat!
Festivity at state expense is given unrestricted licence.
Everywhere there echoes the noise of preparations on a massive scale.
It all suggests that the Saturnalia
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holidays are different from the ordinary working day, when the difference is really non-existent – so much so in fact that the man who said that December used to be a month but is now a year was, in my opinion, not far wide of the mark!
If I had you with me I should enjoy consulting you and finding out what course you think we should follow: should we make no alteration in our daily habits, or should we take off our togas – time was when a change from formal wear would come about only during periods of grave political upheaval, whereas with us it happens for holidays’ and pleasure’s sake!
– and have dinner parties with a note of gaiety about them, to avoid giving the impression that we disagree with the ways of those around us?
If I know you as well as I think I do and you had to give a decision in the matter, you would say that we should be neither altogether like nor altogether unlike the festive-hatted crowd.
But perhaps this is the very season when we should be keeping the soul under strict control, making it unique in abstaining from pleasure just when the crowd are all on pleasure bent.
If the soul succeeds in avoiding either heading or being carried away in the direction of the temptations that lead people into extravagant living, no surer proof of its strength of purpose can be vouchsafed it.
Remaining dry and sober takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk; it takes a more developed sense of fitness, on the other
hand, not to make of oneself a person apart, to be neither indistinguishable from those about one nor conspicuous by one’s difference, to do the same things but not in quite the same manner.
For a holiday can be celebrated without extravagant festivity.
Still, my determination to put your moral strength of purpose to the test is such that I propose to give even you the following direction found in great men’s teaching: set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing, and will ask yourself, ‘Is this what one used to dread?’ It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened against her rebuffs.
In the midst of peace the soldier carries out manoeuvres, throws up earthworks against a non-existent enemy and tires himself out with unnecessary toil in order to be equal to it when it is necessary.
If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes.
This was the aim of the men
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who once every month pretended they were poor, bringing themselves face to face with want, to prevent their ever being terrified by a situation which they had frequently rehearsed.
You must not at this point imagine that I mean meals like Timon’s or ‘the poor man’s room’ or anything else to which the extravagance of wealth resorts to amuse away its tedium.
That pallet must be a real one, and the same applies to your smock, and your bread must be hard and grimy.
Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes more, so that it is a genuine trial and not an amusement.
At the end of it, believe me, Lucilius, you will revel in being sated for a
penny, and will come to see that security from care is not dependent on fortune – for even when she is angry she will always let us have what is enough for our needs.
There is no reason, mind you, why you should suppose yourself to be performing a considerable feat in doing this – you will only be doing something done by thousands upon thousands of slaves and paupers.
But take credit on one account, that you will be doing it of your own free choice – and finding it no more difficult to endure on a permanent basis than to try out once in a while.
We should be practising with a dummy target, getting to be at home with poverty so that fortune cannot catch us unprepared.
We shall be easier in our minds when rich if we have come to realize how far from burdensome it is to be poor.
The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be niggardly in satisfying his hunger, with the object of seeing to what extent, if at all, one thereby fell short of attaining full and complete pleasure, and whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.
At least so he says in the letter he wrote to Polyaenus in the year Charinus was in office.
He boasts in it indeed that he is managing to feed himself for less than a halfpenny whereas Metrodorus, not yet having made such good progress, needs a whole halfpenny!
Do you think such fare can do no more than fill a person up?
It can fill him with pleasure as well, and not the kind of insubstantial, fleeting pleasure that needs constant renewal but a pleasure which is sure and lasting.
Barley porridge, or a crust of barley bread, and water do not make a very cheerful diet, but nothing gives one keener pleasure than the ability to derive pleasure even from that – and the feeling of having arrived at something which one cannot be deprived of by any unjust stroke of fortune.
Prison rations are more generous: the man in the condemned cell is not so scantily fed as that by the executioner; to reduce oneself, then, of
one’s own free choice to a diet that no man has any real call to be apprehensive about even if he is sentenced to death, that is an act of real spiritual greatness.
To do this is truly to forestall the blows of fortune.
So, my dear Lucilius, start following these men’s practice and appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing.
Start cultivating a relationship with poverty.
Dear guest, be bold enough to pay no heed
To riches, and so make yourself, like him,
Worthy of a god.
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For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches.
I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.
But it’s time I started folding up this letter.
‘Not till you’ve settled your account,’ you say.
Well, I’ll refer you to Epicurus for payment.
‘Anger carried to excess begets madness.’ How true this is you’re bound to know, having had both slaves and enemies.
It is a passion, though, which flares up against all types of people.
It is born of love as well as hate, and is as liable to arise in the course of sport or jesting as in affairs of a serious kind.
The factor that counts is not the importance of the cause from which it springs but the kind of personality it lands in, in the same way as with fire what matters is not the fierceness of the flame but where it catches – solid objects may resist the fiercest flame while, conversely, dry and inflammable matter will nurse a mere spark into a conflagration.
It is true, my dear Lucilius.
The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.
I
T
’s only a short time since I was telling you I was in sight of old age.
Now I’m afraid I may have left old age behind me altogether.
Some other term would be more in keeping now with my years, or at least my present physical state, since old age connotes a period of decline, not debility.
Put me in the list of the decrepit, the ones on the very brink!
However, I congratulate myself, mind you, on the fact that my age has not, so far as I’m aware, brought any deterioration in my spirit, conscious as I am of the deterioration in my constitution.
Only my vices and their accessories have decayed: the spirit is full of life, and delighted to be having only limited dealings with the body.
It has thrown off a great part of its burden.
It’s full of vigour, and carrying on an argument with me on the subject of old age, maintaining that these are its finest years.
Let’s accept what it says, and let it make the most of its blessings.
It tells me to start thinking and examine how far I owe this serenity and sobriety to philosophy, and how far I owe it simply to my years, and to investigate with some care what things I really am refusing to do and what I’m simply incapable of doing – and it’s prepared to accept whatever I’m really pleased to find myself incapable of doing as equivalent to refusing to do them; and what cause can there be for complaint, after all, in anything that was always bound to come to an end fading gradually away?
What is troubling about that?
‘Nothing,’ you may say, ‘could be more troubling than the idea of our wasting and perishing away – melting out of existence, one may aptly call it, since we aren’t struck down all of a sudden but worn away, every day that passes diminishing in some degree our powers.’ Moving to one’s end through nature’s own gentle process of dissolution – is there
a better way of leaving life than that?
Not because there is anything wrong with a sudden, violent departure, but because this gradual withdrawal is an easy route.