Letter 32

I make inquiry about you and question everyone who comes from that region of yours: what you are doing, where and with whom you are passing your time. You cannot deceive me; I am with you. Live in such a way as though I were to hear of whatever you do, nay, as though I were to see it. Do you ask what most delights me among the things I hear about you? That I hear nothing, that most of those whom I question do not know what you are doing.

This is wholesome, not to consort with men unlike yourself and bent on different desires. I have indeed the confidence that you cannot be turned aside, and that you will hold to your purpose, even though a crowd of distracting men surround you. What then? I do not fear that they may change you; I fear that they may hinder you. And it does much harm even when one only delays us, especially in so brief a life, which we make briefer still by our inconstancy, beginning it now in one way, now in another. We break it up into little pieces and tear it to shreds.

Make haste, then, dearest Lucilius, and consider how much you would add to your speed if an enemy were pressing at your back, if you suspected a horseman was bearing down and crowding upon the tracks of fugitives. So it is: you are being pressed; hasten and escape, bring yourself to safety, and then consider how fair a thing it is to bring life to completion before death, and after that to await, untroubled, the remaining portion of one's time, set in the possession of the happy life, which is made no happier by being longer.

Oh, when will you see that time when you shall know that time has nothing to do with you, when you shall be tranquil and at peace and heedless of the morrow, as one in the fullest satisfaction with himself! Do you wish to know what it is that makes men greedy of the future? No one has come into possession of himself. And so your parents wished other things for you; but I, on the contrary, wish for you the contempt of all those things which they wished in abundance. Their prayers despoil many, that they may enrich you. Whatever they transfer to you must be taken from someone.

I wish you the command of yourself, that your mind, tossed by wandering thoughts, may at last come to rest and be steadfast, that it may be pleased with itself and, the true goods once understood (which, as soon as they are understood, are possessed), may need no addition of years. He has at last risen above necessities, discharged from service and free, who lives with his life already complete. Farewell.