Letter 57

When I had to make my way back from Baiae to Naples, I readily believed there was a storm, so as not to try the boat a second time; and there was so much mud along the whole road that I might seem to have gone by sea none the less. That whole day I had to endure the lot of athletes: after the wrestler's oil came the dust upon us, in the tunnel of Naples.

Nothing is longer than that prison, nothing darker than those torches, which let us see, not through the darkness, but only the darkness itself. Besides, even if the place had light, the dust would take it away — a heavy and troublesome thing even in the open; how much more there, where it rolls upon itself and, since it is shut in without any vent, falls back upon the very men who stirred it up. We endured at once two discomforts opposite to each other: on the same road, on the same day, we suffered from both mud and dust.

That darkness, however, gave me something to think about. I felt a certain shock of the mind and a change in it, without fear, which the novelty no less than the foulness of the strange thing had produced. I do not speak now of myself, who am far from a tolerable man, much more from a perfect one, but of that man over whom fortune has lost her power. His mind too will be struck; his color will change.

For there are certain things, my dear Lucilius, that no virtue can escape; Nature reminds it of its mortality. And so it will draw the face together at sad sights, and shudder at sudden ones, and grow dizzy if, standing on the edge of a vast height, it looks down. This is not fear, but a natural affection that reason cannot conquer.

And so certain brave men, most ready to shed their own blood, cannot bear to see another's. Some collapse and faint at the handling and inspection of a fresh wound, others at an old and festering one. Some receive the sword more easily than they look upon it.

I felt, then, as I was saying, not indeed a perturbation, but a change. And then, at the first sight of the light restored, my cheerfulness came back, unbidden and unconsidered. Then I began to talk with myself how foolishly we fear some things more or less than others, when the end of all is the same. For what difference does it make whether a watch-tower falls upon a man or a mountain? You will find none. Yet there will be those who fear the latter ruin more, though both are equally deadly: so it is not the effect, but the cause, that fear regards.

Do you now suppose I am speaking of the Stoics, who hold that the soul of a man crushed by a great weight cannot endure and is at once scattered, because it had no free passage out? I, however, do not; those who say this seem to me mistaken.

Just as flame cannot be pressed down — for it slips away around the thing that bears upon it; just as the air is not harmed by a blow and a stroke, is not even cleft, but flows back around the thing to which it gave way — so the mind, which is made of the most tenuous stuff, cannot be seized or crushed within the body, but, by the benefit of its own subtlety, breaks out through the very things by which it is pressed. Just as the lightning, even when it has struck and flashed most widely, has its return through a tiny opening, so the mind, which is even more tenuous than fire, has its flight through the whole body.

The question, then, to be asked of it is whether it can be immortal. Of this at least be sure: if it survives the body, it can in no way be destroyed, for the same reason for which it does not perish — since no immortality has any exception, and nothing harmful befalls the eternal. Farewell.