Letter 78

That you are plagued by frequent catarrhs and the little fevers that follow long-standing and habitual catarrhs distresses me the more because I have had experience of this kind of ill health, which at first I made light of; my youth could still bear injuries and carry itself stubbornly against disease. Then I gave way and was brought to such a pass that I dripped away myself, reduced to the extreme of leanness.

Often I had the impulse to break off my life; the old age of my most indulgent father held me back. For I reflected not on how bravely I might be able to die, but on how little bravely he would be able to bear the loss. And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

What was then a comfort to me I will tell you, after I have first said this, that the very things which gave me rest were to me in place of medicine. Honourable consolation turns into a cure; whatever lifts up the mind also helps the body. My studies kept me alive. I count it among my debts to philosophy that I rose again and grew strong; to her I owe my life, and that is the least I owe her.

My friends contributed much to my recovery; by their encouragement, their watching, their conversation I was relieved. Nothing, Lucilius, best of men, so refreshes and helps a sick man as the affection of his friends; nothing so steals away the expectation and fear of death. I did not think that, if they survived me, I should be dying, but rather, I thought, that I should go on living through them. It seemed to me that I should continue to live not with them but in them. These things gave me the will to help myself and to endure every torment; for otherwise it is the most wretched thing of all, when you have cast away the spirit to die, not to have the spirit to live.

Turn, then, to these remedies. The physician will tell you how much to walk, how much to exercise; he will warn you not to give yourself up to idleness, toward which a feeble state of health inclines; to read aloud and so exercise the breath, whose passage and lodging are in distress; to go sailing and shake up your inner parts with the gentle tossing; what foods to use, when to call in wine for the sake of strength, when to leave it off lest it irritate and aggravate your cough. But I give you this precept, which is a remedy not for this disease only, but for the whole of life: despise death. Nothing is sad once we have escaped the fear of death.

There are three things grievous in every illness: the fear of death, the pain of the body, the interruption of pleasures. Of death enough has been said; I will say this one thing, that this fear belongs not to the disease but to our nature. Disease has put off the death of many, and it has been their salvation to seem to be perishing. You will die not because you are sick, but because you are alive. That fate awaits you even when you are cured; when you recover, you will be escaping not death, but ill health.

Let us now return to the particular drawback: disease brings great torments. But these are made bearable by their intervals. For the keenest pain finds its limit. No one can suffer greatly and for long; so has Nature, who loves us most, arranged it, that she has made pain either bearable or short.

The greatest pains lodge in the leanest parts of the body; the sinews and joints, and whatever else is slight, rage most fiercely, having conceived their disorders in narrow quarters. But these parts quickly grow numb and through the very pain lose the sensation of pain, whether because the breath, hindered from its natural course and changed for the worse, loses the force by which it thrives and warns us, or because the corrupted humour, when it has ceased to have anywhere to flow, presses itself out and takes away sensation from the parts it has overfilled.

Thus gout, both of the feet and of the hands, and every pain of the vertebrae and the sinews, gets its periods of rest at those times when it has dulled the parts which it tortures; the first prickings of all these afflictions are what trouble us, and their onset is checked by long continuance, and the end of pain is numbness. The pain of teeth, of eyes, of ears is for that very reason most acute, because it arises among the narrow parts of the body, and likewise, by Heaven, the pain of the head; but if it grows more violent, it turns to stupor and unconsciousness. Take comfort, then, in this with regard to severe pain: that you must necessarily cease to feel it, if you feel it too keenly.

This, then, is the comfort of vast pain, that you must necessarily cease to feel it, if you feel it too much. But what afflicts the inexperienced in the suffering of the body is this: they have not grown accustomed to being content with the mind. They had much to do with the body. Therefore the great and prudent man draws his mind apart from the body and dwells much with the better and divine part, and with this querulous and frail part only so far as is necessary.

"But it is troublesome," he says, "to go without one's accustomed pleasures, to abstain from food, to thirst, to hunger." These are grievous in the first stages of abstinence. Then the desire languishes, since the very organs through which it works grow faint; then the stomach turns peevish, then a loathing for the food we craved comes on. The very wants die away; and it is no hardship to lack what you have ceased to want.

Add that no pain but is either interrupted or at least eased. Add that one may guard against a pain to come and meet the threatening one with remedies. For there is none that does not send signs ahead, especially one that returns from a familiar quarter. The endurance of disease is bearable, if you have despised the worst that it threatens.

Do not make your troubles worse for yourself, and do not weigh yourself down with complaints. Pain is light, if opinion adds nothing to it. On the contrary, if you begin to encourage yourself and say, "It is nothing, or at least a trifle; let us hold out, it will soon stop," you will make it light by thinking it light. All things hang upon opinion; not ambition alone looks to it, and luxury and avarice. It is in accordance with opinion that we feel pain. Each man is as wretched as he has believed himself to be.

I think we should do away with complaints about past pains, and those words: "No one ever suffered worse. What tortures, how great evils I endured! No one thought I would recover. How often I was given up for lost by my own people, how often abandoned by the physicians! Men stretched on the rack are not so torn apart." Even if these things are true, they are past. What good does it do to go over past pains and to be wretched because you once were so? Besides, does not everyone add much to his own ills and lie to himself? And what was bitter to bear is sweet to have borne; it is natural to rejoice at the ending of one's troubles. Two things, then, must be cut away, the fear of what is to come and the memory of the old trouble; the latter no longer concerns me, the former not yet.

Set in the very midst of difficulties, let a man say: "Perhaps one day it will be a joy to remember even these things." Let him fight with his whole heart; if he yields, he will be conquered; if he strains against his pain, he will conquer. As it is, most men pull down upon their own heads the falling weight which they ought to have held up. If you begin to give way to that which presses upon you and leans hard, and to slip from under it, you will be crushed; but it must be pushed back.

How many blows do athletes take in the face, how many over their whole body? Yet they bear every torment out of desire for glory, and they endure these things not only because they fight, but in order that they may fight. The very training is a torment. Let us too overcome all things, the prize of which is not a crown or a palm, nor a trumpeter calling for silence to proclaim our name, but virtue and firmness of mind and a peace won for all the future, once fortune has been beaten in some one contest.

"I feel grievous pain." What then? Do you not feel it, if you bear it like a woman? As an enemy is more deadly to those who flee, so every chance misfortune presses harder on the one who gives way and turns his back. "But it is grievous." Why? Are we strong only to carry light burdens? Which would you rather, that the disease be long or sharp and short? If long, it has its respites, it gives time for recovery, it bestows much leisure, it must needs rise up and then go down; a short and headlong one will do one of two things: it will either be quenched or quench. And what difference is there whether it is not, or I am not? In either case there is an end of pain.

This too will help, to turn the mind to other thoughts and to withdraw from the pain. Think what you have done honourably and bravely; rehearse with yourself your good roles. Scatter your memory over the things you have most admired. Then let every bravest man and conqueror of pain come before you: the man who, while reading a book, ordered his varicose veins to be cut out; the man who did not stop laughing, and by that very laughter angered the cruelty of the torturer enraged at him. Shall pain not be conquered by reason, when it has been conquered by laughter?

Whatever you please you may now say, catarrhs and the violence of a continual cough that brings up portions of the entrails, and fever scorching the very vitals, and thirst, and limbs twisted with the joints turning this way and that; worse is fire, and the rack, and the red-hot plate, and what would renew the very swelling wounds and press deeper where it was driven in. Yet amid these someone did not groan. Too little; he did not beg. Too little; he did not answer. Too little; he laughed, and from the heart at that. After this, will you not laugh at pain?

"But," he says, "disease lets me do nothing, since it has drawn me away from all my duties." Your ill health lays hold of your body, not also your mind. Therefore it slows the runner's feet, it will hamper the cobbler's or the smith's hands; but if your mind is wont to be in use, you will counsel, you will teach, you will listen, you will learn, you will inquire, you will recall. Besides, do you think you do nothing if you are a temperate sick man? You will show that disease can be conquered, or at least borne.

There is, believe me, a place for virtue even upon a couch. It is not arms and the battle-line alone that give proofs of a spirit lively and unbroken by terrors; the brave man shows himself even under the bedclothes. You have something to do: wrestle well with disease. If it forces nothing from you, if it wins nothing from you by entreaty, you set forth a notable example. Oh, how great would be the material for glory, if we were watched when sick! Watch yourself; praise yourself.

Besides, there are two kinds of pleasures. The bodily ones disease checks, but does not take away. Indeed, if you weigh the truth, it sharpens them; it is more pleasant to drink when thirsty; food is more welcome to the hungry. Whatever comes after abstinence is devoured more greedily. But the pleasures of the mind, which are greater and surer, no physician denies to a sick man. Whoever pursues these and understands them well despises all the enticements of the senses.

"Oh, the unhappy sick man!" Why? Because he does not melt snow into his wine? Because he does not renew the coldness of his draught, mixed in a capacious cup, by breaking fresh ice into it besides? Because Lucrine oysters are not opened for him at the very table? Because there is no uproar of cooks around his dining-room, carrying in the very hearths along with the dishes? For luxury has now devised even this: lest any food grow lukewarm, lest anything be too little hot for a palate already grown callous, the kitchen follows the dinner.

"Oh, the unhappy sick man!" He will eat as much as he can digest. There will not lie in his sight a boar, banished from the table as cheap meat, nor will the breasts of birds be heaped on his platter, for to see them whole is now a thing to disdain. What harm has been done you? You will dine like a sick man, or rather, sometimes like a healthy one.

But all these things we shall bear easily, gruel, warm water, and whatever else seems unbearable to the soft and pampered and to those sick more in mind than in body; only let us cease to dread death. And we shall cease to dread it, if we have learned the bounds of goods and evils; then at last neither will life be a weariness nor death a terror.

For satiety with itself cannot lay hold on a life that surveys so many things various, great, and divine; it is sluggish leisure that is wont to bring one into hatred of oneself. To one who ranges over the nature of things the truth will never come to be a weariness; it is falsehoods that will cloy.

Again, if death approaches and calls, even though it be untimely, even though it cut short one's middle years, a man has had the enjoyment of the longest life. He has come to know nature. He knows that time does not increase the honourable; every life is incomplete to those for whom the honourable is incomplete; complete it is to those for whom the honourable is complete, wherever it ends.

Refresh yourself with these thoughts, and meanwhile give time to my letters. There will come a day at some time that will reunite us and bring us together again; even if it be brief, we shall not feel that brevity, when we know how to use it. For the present, though far apart, though scattered, we put much together; one day of the learned is more open and ample than the longest age of the ignorant.

Meanwhile hold to this, bite hard on this: not to give way to adversity, not to trust prosperity, to keep all the licence of fortune before your eyes, as though whatever it can do, it will do. Whatever has been long awaited comes more lightly. Farewell.