Letter 59

I have taken great pleasure from your letter; allow me to use the word in its everyday sense, and do not recall it to its Stoic meaning. We hold that pleasure is a vice. So be it; yet we are accustomed to use the word to indicate a cheerful disposition of the mind.

I know, I say, that pleasure, if we square our words to our own canon, is a thing of ill repute, and that joy falls to no one but the wise man. For joy is an elevation of the mind that trusts in its own goods and true ones. Yet in common speech we say that we have taken great "joy" from someone's consulship, or his marriage, or the birth of his wife's child — things so far from being joys that they are often the beginnings of future sorrow. But it is part of joy never to cease and never to turn into its opposite.

And so when our Virgil says "and the evil joys of the mind," he speaks eloquently indeed, but not quite properly. For no joy is evil. He gave this name to pleasures, and expressed what he meant. For he signified men glad in their own harm.

Yet I had not without reason said that I had taken great pleasure from your letter; for although an untaught man may rejoice from an honorable cause, still, since his emotion is uncontrolled and will straightway swing into the opposite, I call it pleasure — moved by the opinion of a false good, immoderate and unmeasured. But to return to my purpose, hear what delighted me in your letter: you have your words in your power. Your style does not carry you away, nor drag you further than you had meant to go.

There are many who are called off to write what they had not intended by the charm of some pleasing word — which does not happen to you; all is compact and fitted to the matter. You say as much as you wish and signify more than you say. This is the mark of a greater thing: it shows that the mind too has nothing superfluous, nothing swollen.

Yet I find metaphors of words — not rash ones, but such as have made trial of themselves. I find images, which, if anyone forbids us to use, and judges them granted to poets alone, he seems to me to have read none of the ancients, among whom speech was not yet hunting for applause. Those men, who spoke simply and for the sake of demonstrating the matter, are full of comparisons, which I judge necessary — not for the same reason as for the poets, but that they may be props for our weakness, that they may bring both speaker and hearer into the presence of the matter.

See, I am at this very moment reading Sextius, a keen man, who philosophizes in Greek words but with Roman morals. An image he set down moved me: an army marching in a hollow square, where the enemy is to be suspected on every side, ready for battle. "The same," he says, "the wise man ought to do; let him spread out all his virtues on every side, so that wherever something hostile arises, there ready defenses may be, and at the nod of him who commands may answer without confusion." What we see done in those armies which great generals marshal — that all the troops feel the general's command at once, so arranged that the signal given by one runs through foot and horse alike — this, he says, is somewhat more necessary for us.

For those soldiers have often feared the enemy without cause, and the road most suspected to them was the safest; folly has nothing at peace. It has fear above as much as below. Both flanks tremble. Dangers follow it and meet it. It is afraid of everything, unprepared, and is taken aback by its very reinforcements. But the wise man, fortified against every onset, intent, will not give ground — not if poverty, not if grief, not if disgrace, not if pain makes its assault. Undaunted, he will go against them and among them.

Many things bind us, many weaken us. We have long lain in these vices; it is hard to wash them out. For we are not merely stained, but dyed through. Not to pass from one image to another, let me ask this, which I often consider with myself: why does folly hold us so stubbornly? First, because we do not repel it bravely nor strive with our whole force toward our safety; then because we do not believe enough in those things which have been discovered by wise men, nor drink them in with open breasts, and we take our stand but lightly upon so great a matter.

But how can anyone learn enough against the vices who learns only as much as the vices leave him free time for? None of us goes down into the depths. We have only plucked off the surface, and to have spent a scant amount of time on philosophy has seemed more than enough for men so busy.

This especially hinders us, that we are quickly pleased with ourselves; if we find someone to call us good men, prudent, holy, we acknowledge it. We are not content with moderate praise; whatever flattery has heaped upon us without shame, we seize as a thing owed. We assent to those who affirm us to be best, wisest, though we know that they often lie about many things. And we indulge ourselves so far that we wish to be praised for the very thing whose opposite we are at that very moment doing. A man hears himself called most merciful in the midst of his tortures, most generous in his plunderings, most temperate in his drunkenness and lusts. It follows, then, that we are unwilling to change, because we believe ourselves to be the best.

When Alexander was now roaming through India and laying waste with war nations not well known even to their neighbors, in the siege of a certain city, while he went round the walls seeking the weakest points of the fortifications, he was struck by an arrow; yet he persevered long in his seat and went on with what he had begun. Then, when the blood was checked and the pain of the dried wound grew, and the leg, hanging from his horse, had little by little gone numb, he was forced to leave off and said: "All swear that I am the son of Jupiter, but this wound cries out that I am a man."

Let us do the same. Flattery befools each of us according to his share. Let us say: "You indeed say that I am prudent, but I see how many useless things I covet, how many harmful things I desire. I do not even understand what satiety shows to the animals — what measure there should be in food, what in drink. How much I can hold I do not yet know."

Now I will teach you how to understand that you are not wise. The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and placid, unshaken; he lives on equal terms with the gods. Now consult yourself. If you are never sad, if no hope troubles your mind with the expectation of the future, if through days and nights the tenor of your mind is equal and even, uplifted and pleased with itself, you have reached the summit of the human good. But if you grasp after pleasures from every side and of every kind, know that you fall as far short of wisdom as you do of joy. You desire to reach this, but you go astray, hoping to arrive there amid riches, amid honors — that is, you seek joy amid anxieties. Those things which you so pursue, as though they would give you gladness and pleasure, are the causes of sorrows.

All men, I say, strive toward joy, but they know not whence to win a stable and a great one. One seeks it from banquets and luxury, another from ambition and the throng of clients about him, another from a mistress, another from the vain display of liberal studies and from letters that heal nothing; all these are deceived by delusive and brief delights — like drunkenness, which pays for the cheerful madness of a single hour with a long stretch of disgust, like applause and the favor of approving shouts, which is both won with great anxiety and must be atoned for with the same.

Reflect, then, that this is the effect of wisdom: an evenness of joy. The mind of the wise man is such as the universe above the moon: there it is always serene. You have, then, a reason to wish to be wise, if the wise man is never without joy. This joy is born only from the consciousness of the virtues.

None can rejoice but the brave, the just, the temperate. "What then?" you say. "Do the foolish and the wicked not rejoice?" No more than lions that have got their prey. When they have wearied themselves with wine and lusts, when night has failed them amid their vices, when the pleasures crammed into a narrow body beyond what it could hold have begun to fester, then the wretches cry out that line of Virgil: "For you know how we passed that last night amid false joys."

The luxurious pass every night amid false joys, and indeed as though it were their last; but that joy which attends the gods and the rivals of the gods is not interrupted, does not cease; it would cease if it were drawn from elsewhere. Because it is not the gift of another, it is not even at another's disposal. What fortune did not give, she cannot snatch away. Farewell.