Letter 23

Do you suppose I am going to write to you how kindly the winter has dealt with us—a winter both mild and short—how grudging the spring is, how perverse its cold, and other such trifles of those who hunt for something to say? No, I will write something that may profit both me and you. And what will that be, except that I exhort you to a sound mind? Do you ask what the foundation of this is? That you should not rejoice in vain things. I said it was the foundation; it is the very crown.

He has come to the heights who knows in what to rejoice, who has not set his happiness in another's power; he is anxious and unsure of himself whom some hope tickles, even if it lies ready to hand, even if it is sought from no difficult quarter, even if the things hoped for have never deceived him.

Above all, my Lucilius, do this: learn to rejoice. Do you suppose that I am now taking many pleasures away from you, when I remove the fortuitous, when I judge that hopes, those sweetest of delights, must be shunned? On the contrary, I would never have gladness fail you. I would have it born to you at home; and it is born, if only it be within yourself. The other kinds of mirth do not fill the breast; they only smooth the brow; they are light—unless perhaps you judge that a man rejoices because he laughs. The mind must be brisk and confident and uplifted above all things.

Believe me, true joy is a serious thing. Or do you suppose that any man, with a relaxed face and, as those dainty fellows say, with a little smirk, despises death, opens his door to poverty, holds his pleasures under the rein, and rehearses the endurance of pains? He who turns these things over within himself is in great joy, but in joy little flattering. In the possession of this joy I would have you be; it will never fail, once you have found the source from which it is to be sought.

The yield of the shallow mines lies at the surface; the richest are those whose vein, lying deep, will answer the digger ever more fully. These things in which the crowd delights have a thin and superficial pleasure, and whatever joy is brought in from outside lacks a foundation. This of which I speak, to which I try to bring you, is solid, and one that lies more open the further inward you go.

Do, I beg you, dearest Lucilius, the one thing that can make you happy: cast away and trample upon those things that glitter from without, that are promised you by another or out of another, and look to the true good and rejoice in your own. But what is this "your own"? Yourself, and the best part of you. The poor little body too, though nothing can be done without it, believe to be a thing more necessary than great; it supplies vain pleasures, brief, to be repented of, and, unless tempered by great moderation, destined to turn into their opposite. So I say: pleasure stands on a precipice and verges toward pain, unless it has kept its measure. But it is hard to keep a measure in that which you have believed to be a good. The craving for the true good is safe.

You ask what this is, or whence it comes? I will tell you: from a good conscience, from honourable counsels, from right actions, from contempt of the fortuitous, from the calm and continuous tenor of a life that keeps to one path. For those men who pass from one set of resolves to another—or do not even pass, but are carried over by some chance—how can they have anything sure or lasting, hanging and wandering as they are?

Few there are who order themselves and their affairs by counsel; the rest, after the manner of things that float upon rivers, do not go, but are borne along. Of these, one a gentler wave has detained and carried more softly, another a more violent has snatched away, another, nearest the bank, a slackening current has set down, another a torrent's rush has flung into the sea. Therefore we must determine what we want, and persevere in it.

Here is the place for paying off my debt. For I can render to you a saying of your own Epicurus and free this letter: "It is troublesome always to be beginning life." Or, if the sense can better be expressed in this way: "They live ill who are always beginning to live."

"Why?" you say; for that saying calls for explanation. Because life is always unfinished for them. But the man who is only now beginning to live cannot stand ready for death. We must so act that we may have lived enough. No one thinks this who is at this very moment just commencing his life.

There is no reason for you to suppose that these men are few; nearly all are such. Some, indeed, begin to live just when they ought to stop. If you judge this strange, I will add what may make you marvel more: some have stopped living before they began. Farewell.