Letter 101

Every day, every hour shows us how mere a nothing we are, and warns by some fresh proof those who have forgotten their frailty; and then, while we are dreaming of things eternal, it forces us to look toward death. Do you ask what this opening is meant to convey? You knew Cornelius Senecio, a Roman knight of distinction and obliging temper: from humble beginnings he had pushed himself forward, and already his course toward the rest lay downhill. For rank grows more easily than it begins.

Money too lingers longest about poverty, while it is still struggling free of it and clings there. By now Senecio was reaching toward riches, to which two most effective qualities were leading him, the knowledge both of getting and of keeping, either one of which by itself could have made him wealthy.

This man, of the utmost frugality, no less careful of his estate than of his body, had paid me his customary morning call, had sat the whole day until nightfall by the bedside of a friend grievously ill and lying without hope, had dined in good cheer, when he was seized by a sudden and headlong form of sickness, a quinsy, and with his throat narrowed scarcely drew breath enough to last till daybreak. Within a very few hours, then, after he had discharged all the duties of a sound and vigorous man, he was gone.

He who drove his money to and fro by sea and land, who had taken up public contracts too, leaving no kind of gain untried, in the very act of his affairs prospering, in the very rush of his advancing fortune, was swept away. "Graft now your pears, Meliboeus, set your vines in rows." How foolish it is to plan out one's life, when one is not even master of the morrow! What madness it is for men to launch upon far-reaching hopes: "I will buy, I will build, I will lend and call in my loans, I will hold offices, and then at last, weary and full of years, I will retire into leisure."

All things, believe me, even for the fortunate, are uncertain. No one ought to promise himself anything about the future. Even what we hold slips through our hands, and chance cuts short the very hour we are pressing close; time rolls on by a fixed law, but in darkness. And what is it to me whether to Nature that is certain which to me is uncertain?

We plan long voyages and a late return to our homeland after wandering along foreign shores, military service and the slow wages of the labours of the camp, posts of administration and a climb through one office to another, while all the while death stands at our side, and because it is never thought of save in others, examples of mortality are continually thrust upon us, destined to stay no longer than while we marvel at them.

But what is more foolish than to be astonished that something has happened on a given day, which can happen on any day? A boundary stands fixed for us, where the inexorable necessity of the Fates has set it; yet none of us knows how near he is moving toward that boundary. Let us, then, so shape our minds as though we had come to the very end. Let us put nothing off. Let us daily balance our account with life.

The greatest fault of life is that it is always unfinished, that something of it is held over. He who has each day put the finishing touch to his own life has no need of time. But from this need are born fear and a craving for the future that eats away the mind. Nothing is more wretched than the suspense of waiting to see how things to come will turn out; how great is what remains, or of what sort, the anxious mind is racked by a dread it cannot unravel.

How shall we escape this tossing to and fro? By one means only: if our life does not project itself ahead, if it is gathered into itself. For that man hangs upon the future for whom the present is wasted. But once whatever I owed to myself has been paid back, once a steadied mind knows that there is no difference between a day and an age, it looks down from on high upon whatever days and events are still to come, and with much laughter reflects upon the succession of the seasons. For what shall the variety and shifting of chances disturb, if you are sure in the face of the uncertain?

Therefore make haste to live, my dear Lucilius, and count each single day as a single life. He who has thus fitted himself, for whom each day has been a complete life, is free from care; but for those who live in hope each nearest stretch of time slips away, and there steals upon them greed, and the fear of death, most wretched and making all things wretched. Hence that most shameful prayer of Maecenas, in which he does not refuse even feebleness, even deformity, and at the last even the sharp cross, provided that breath be prolonged amid these evils:

"Make me feeble of hand, feeble in a crippled foot, pile a humped hunchback upon me, shake loose my teeth; while life remains, it is well; preserve it for me, even though I sit upon the sharp cross."

What would have been most wretched if it had befallen is here prayed for, and a prolonging of torment is sought as though it were life. I should think him most contemptible if he wished to live right up to the cross: "You may indeed," says he, "make me feeble, provided breath remains in a body broken and useless. You may maim me, provided some span of time be added to my monstrous and distorted frame. Nail me up, and set beneath me, when I am seated, the sharp cross." Is it worth so much to press upon one's own wound and to hang stretched upon the gibbet, only to defer that which is best amid evils, the end of one's torture? Is it worth so much to keep one's life-breath, only to give it up at last?

What would you wish for such a man but kindly gods? What does that vileness of an unmanly verse intend? What is this bargain of a most insane terror? What is so foul a begging for life? Would you suppose that Virgil ever recited to such a man the line, "Is it then so wretched a thing to die?" He prays for the utmost of evils, and longs to have prolonged and endured what it is most grievous to suffer; at what price? Why, of a longer life. But what is it to live, but a long dying?

Is there found a man who would wish to waste away amid torments and perish limb by limb, and to let out his soul so many times drop by drop, rather than breathe it out once for all? Is there found a man who, dragged to that ill-omened wood, already crippled, already deformed and crushed into a foul swelling of shoulders and chest, who had many reasons for dying even short of the cross, would yet wish to draw out a breath that must draw out with it so many tortures? Now deny that it is a great boon of Nature, that we must die.

Many are ready to strike still worse bargains: even to betray a friend in order to live longer, and with their own hand to hand over their children to be defiled, that they may go on to look upon a daylight that is witness to so many crimes. We must shake off the craving for life, and learn that it makes no difference when you suffer what must at some time be suffered. It is how well you live that matters, not how long; and often it lies in this, that you live well, namely in not living long. Farewell.