Letter 293

293. To Julian

How has your body fared in this time between? Have you fully recovered the use of your hand? And how stand the rest of the affairs of your life? Do they go on according to your wish, as we pray they may, and as is owed to your purpose of life? For where the mind is prone to change, in such men it is not surprising that life too should be without order; but where the purpose is fixed, ever standing firm and the same, it follows for such men that they lead their life in harmony with that purpose. For indeed it is not granted to the helmsman to make a calm whenever he wishes, but for us to make our own life waveless is altogether easy, if we silence the tumults that rise up against us from within, out of the passions, and set our mind higher than the things that fall upon us from without. For neither losses, nor sicknesses, nor the other hardships of life will touch the earnest man, so long as he keeps his mind trading with God, and looking off toward what is to come, and lightly and trimly rising above the storm that surges up from the ground. Since those who are firmly held fast by the cares of life, like fat-fleshed birds that bear their wings in vain, are dragged along somewhere down below with the grazing herds.

But we have been permitted by our affairs to see you only as much as those who pass one another on the open sea. Yet, since from the claw one may know the whole lion, we think that from this brief experience we have come to know you well enough. Hence we make much of the fact that you hold our affairs in some account, and that we are not absent from your mind, but are continually present with you through memory. And the proof of memory is to write; the more continually you do this, the more you will gratify us.