Letter 36

Encourage your friend to despise with a great spirit those who reproach him because he has sought obscurity and leisure, because he has resigned his rank, and because, when he might have attained more, he has preferred peace to all else. Let him show them daily how usefully he has managed his own affairs. Those who are envied will not cease to pass on; some will be crushed, others will fall. Prosperity is a restless thing; it harasses itself. It troubles the brain in more than one way; it goads different men to different ends, some toward power, others toward extravagance. It puffs up some, it softens others and wholly dissolves them.

"But one man bears it well." Yes, in the way one bears wine. Therefore there is no reason why those people should persuade you that the man besieged by many is happy; men run to him as to a pool, which they drain dry and trouble. They call him a trifler and a sluggard. You know that some men speak perversely and mean the opposite.

They called him fortunate; well, then—was he? I do not even care that to some he seems of too harsh and gloomy a temper. Ariston used to say that he preferred a young man austere to one cheerful and pleasing to the crowd. "For wine becomes good," he said, "that seemed harsh and rough when new; that does not endure age which was pleasing in the vat." Let them call him austere and an enemy to his own advancement; that very austerity will turn out well in age, only let him persevere in cultivating virtue, in drinking deep of liberal studies—not those with which it is enough to be sprinkled, but these in which the mind is to be steeped.

This is the time for learning. "What then? Is there any time in which one ought not to learn?" By no means. But just as it is honourable to study at every age, so it is not seemly to be schooled at every age. It is a base and ridiculous thing, an old man at his ABC's; the young man must acquire, the old man must use. You will do therefore a most useful thing for yourself, if you make him as good as possible; such benefits, they say, are to be sought and bestowed—undoubtedly of the first rank, since to give them profits as much as to receive.

In short, he has now nothing of his own free; he has given his pledge. And it is less shameful to default on a creditor than on good hope. To pay that debt the merchant needs a prosperous voyage, the tiller of the soil the fertility of the land he tills, the favour of the sky; but what this man owes can be discharged by the will alone.

Over character fortune has no rights. Let him so order his character that this mind may come most tranquilly to perfection, a mind that feels neither anything taken from it nor anything added, but remains in the same state, however things may turn out. A mind to which, if common goods are heaped up, it stands superior to its own possessions, or if chance has shaken out some of them, or all, it is made no less.

Had he been born in Parthia, he would at once as an infant bend the bow; if in Germany, straightway as a boy he would brandish the slender spear; if he had lived in the days of our ancestors, he would have learned to ride and to strike the enemy hand to hand. These pursuits the discipline of his own people recommends and enjoins upon each.

What then must this man rehearse? That which serves well against all weapons, against every kind of enemy: to despise death. No one doubts that death has something terrible in it, so as to offend even our minds, which Nature shaped to the love of self; for otherwise there would be no need to be prepared and sharpened for that toward which we should go by a kind of voluntary instinct, as all beings are borne toward their own preservation.

No one learns to lie calmly upon roses, if it should be necessary; but he is hardened to this, that he should not betray his trust under torture, that, if need be, he should stand and even sometimes, wounded, keep watch at the rampart and not lean even on his spear, because sleep is wont meanwhile to steal upon those who recline against any support. Death has no hardship in it; for there must be something for the hardship to belong to.

But if so great a desire of a longer span holds you, consider that nothing of those things which pass from our eyes and are stored away into the nature of things, from which they came forth and into which they will soon proceed, is consumed; these things cease, but do not perish. And death, which we dread and refuse, interrupts life, does not snatch it away; there will come again a day to set us back into the light, which many would refuse, did it not bring them back forgetful.

But later I shall teach more carefully that all things which seem to perish are changed. He ought to go forth with an even mind who is to return. Observe the cycle of things returning into themselves; you will see that nothing in this universe is extinguished, but goes down and rises again by turns. Summer has gone, but another year will bring it back; winter has fallen, but its own months will restore it; night has buried the sun, but day straightway will drive night off. That coursing of the stars repeats whatever it has passed; one part of the sky is forever rising, another sinking.

In short, I shall make an end, if I add this one thing: that neither infants nor boys nor the deranged fear death, and that it is most shameful if reason does not furnish us that security to which folly leads. Farewell.