Letter 22

You now understand that you must be drawn out of those occupations that are showy and evil. But how you may achieve this, you ask. Certain things are pointed out only by one who is present. The physician cannot by letters choose the right time for food or for the bath; the pulse must be felt. There is an old proverb that the gladiator takes his counsel in the arena; something in the adversary's face, something in his moving hand, something in the very inclination of his body, warns the watcher.

What is wont to be done, what ought to be done, can be both enjoined and written in general terms; such counsel is given not only to the absent, but even to posterity. But that other matter—when it ought to be done, or in what manner—no one will advise from afar; one must deliberate with the very circumstances.

It is the part not only of the present man, but of the watchful man, to mark the occasion as it hurries by. So look about for this occasion; if you see it, seize it, and with your whole onset, with all your strength, set about stripping yourself of those duties. And indeed attend to the opinion I give. I judge that you must depart either from that life, or from life itself. But I judge this too: that you must go by a gentle road, so that what you have ill entangled you should rather untie than break off—provided that, if there shall be no other way of untying it, you even break it off. No one is so timid as to prefer always to hang than to fall once.

Meanwhile—and this is the first thing—do not hinder yourself. Be content with the business into which you have gone down, or, as you prefer it to seem, into which you have fallen. There is no reason why you should strive after further things; otherwise you will lose your excuse, and it will appear that you did not merely fall into them. For those things that men are wont to say are false: "I could not do otherwise. What if I had been unwilling? It was necessary." It is necessary for no man to follow prosperity at a run; there is something to be said for halting, even if not for fighting back, and not pressing on with the Fortune that bears one along.

Will you be offended if I not only come into your counsel, but call others in—and indeed wiser men than I am, to whom I am wont to defer if I am deliberating about anything? Read Epicurus's letter that bears on this matter, the one inscribed to Idomeneus. He asks him to hasten and flee, before some greater power intervenes and takes away the liberty of withdrawing.

Yet the same man adds that nothing should be attempted except when it can be attempted aptly and at the right season. But when that long-awaited moment has come, he says one must leap out. He forbids the man who is thinking of flight to fall asleep, and hopes for a saving issue even from the hardest straits, if we neither hurry before the time nor loiter when the time has come.

Now, I think, you ask the Stoic opinion too. There is no reason why anyone should defame them to you for rashness; they are more cautious than brave. You expect, perhaps, that they will say this to you: "It is base to yield to a burden. Struggle with the duty you have once undertaken. He is not a brave and strenuous man who flees toil, unless his spirit grows by the very difficulty of things."

These things will be said to you, if perseverance has its reward, if nothing unworthy of a good man must be done or suffered; otherwise he will not wear himself out with sordid and insulting toil, nor will he be in business for the sake of being busy. He will not even do what you suppose he will—that, being entangled in ambitious affairs, he should always endure their swell. But when he sees the things grievous, uncertain, doubtful, amid which he was wallowing, he will draw back his foot; he will not turn his back, but will gradually retire into safety.

It is easy, my Lucilius, to escape from occupations, if you have despised the rewards of occupations. It is these that delay and detain us: "What then? Shall I leave behind such great hopes? Shall I depart from the very harvest? Will my side be bare, my litter unattended, my hall empty?" From these things, then, men withdraw unwillingly, and they love the wage of their miseries while they curse the miseries themselves.

So they complain of ambition as of a mistress; that is, if you look into their true feeling, they do not hate it, but quarrel with it. Sift those men who deplore the things they have desired and talk of fleeing the very things they cannot do without; you will see that there is a voluntary lingering on their part in that which they say they bear hardly and wretchedly.

So it is, Lucilius; slavery holds few, but the more hold fast to slavery. But if it is in your mind to lay it aside, and liberty has pleased you in good faith, and you seek a brief in this one point alone, that it may fall to you to do this without perpetual anxiety, why should not the whole cohort of the Stoics approve you? All the Zenos and the Chrysippuses will counsel you moderate, honourable things—your own things.

But if you shuffle on this account, that you may look about to see how much you may carry off with you, and with how great a sum you may furnish your leisure, you will never find a way out. No one swims clear with his baggage. Emerge into a better life, with the gods favourable—but not as they are favourable to those men to whom, with a kindly and benign countenance, they have granted magnificent evils, excused on this one count, that those things which burn and torment have been given to men who prayed for them.

I was already setting the seal upon my letter; it must be unsealed, so that it may come to you with its customary little gift and carry some splendid saying with it. And behold, there occurs to me one—I know not whether truer or more eloquent. "Whose?" you ask. Epicurus's; for I am still claiming another's baggage.

"No one but goes out of life as though he had just entered it." Take whom you will—a young man, an old man, one of middle age; you will find him equally afraid of death, equally ignorant of life. No one has anything finished; for we have put off our affairs into the future. Nothing in that saying delights me more than that infancy is reproached against old men.

"No one," he says, "goes out otherwise than as he came in." It is false; we die worse than we were born. That is our fault, not Nature's. She might complain against us: "What is this? I begot you without desires, without fears, without superstition, without treachery and the other plagues; go out such as you came in."

He has grasped wisdom who will die as untroubled as he was born; but now we tremble when the danger has drawn near; neither our spirit nor our colour holds firm; tears fall that will profit nothing. What is more shameful than to be anxious on the very threshold of security?

And the cause is this: that we are empty of all goods, and suffer from the wasting of life. For no part of it remains with us; it has passed by and flowed away. No one cares how well he lives, but how long; whereas it lies within the reach of all to live well, within none to live long. Farewell.