Letters From a Stoic (12 page)
Read Letters From a Stoic Online
Authors: Seneca
I
SHALL
reply later to the letter you sent me while you were on your journey – it was as long as the journey itself!
I must first take myself aside and deliberate what advice I should give.
For you yourself, before consulting me as you are doing, gave long thought to the question whether you should consult me at all, so I ought to be giving this question of advice far longer thought, on the principle that it takes you more time to solve a problem than to set it.
Particularly when one course is to your interest and another to mine – or does this make me sound like an Epicurean again?
No, if a thing is in your interest it is also in my own interest.
Otherwise, if any matter that affects you is no concern of mine, I am not a friend.
Friendship creates a community of interest between us in everything.
We have neither successes nor setbacks as individuals; our lives have a common end.
No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and turns everything to his own purposes.
You should live for the other person if you wish to live for yourself.
The assiduous and scrupulous cultivation of this bond, which leads to our associating with
our fellow-men and believes in the existence of a common law for all mankind, contributes more than anything else to the maintenance of that more intimate bond I was mentioning, friendship.
A person who shares much with a fellow human being will share everything with a friend.
What I should like those subtle thinkers – you know the ones I mean, my peerless Lucilius – to teach me is this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used and how many different meanings the word ‘man’ has.
Before my very eyes wisdom and folly are taking their separate stands: which shall I join, whose side am I to follow?
For one person ‘man’ is equivalent to ‘friend’, for another ‘man’ and ‘friend’ are far from being identified, and in making a friend one man will be seeking an asset while another will be making himself an asset to the other; and in the midst of all this what you people do for me is pull words about and cut up syllables.
One is led to believe that unless one has constructed syllogisms of the craftiest kind, and reduced fallacies to a compact form in which a false conclusion is derived from a true premise, one will not be in a position to distinguish what one should aim at and what one should avoid.
It makes one ashamed – that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.
‘Mouse is a syllable, and a mouse nibbles cheese; therefore, a syllable nibbles cheese.’ Suppose for the moment I can’t detect the fallacy in that.
What danger am I placed in by such lack of insight?
What serious consequences are there in it for me?
What I have to fear, no doubt, is the possibility, one of these days, of my catching a syllable in a mousetrap or even having my cheese eaten up by a book if I’m not careful.
Unless perhaps the following train of logic is a more acute one: ‘Mouse is a syllable, and a syllable does not nibble cheese; therefore, a mouse does not nibble cheese.’ What childish
fatuities these are!
Is this what we philosophers acquire wrinkles in our brows for?
Is this what we let our beards grow long for?
Is this what we teach with faces grave and pale?
Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity?
Counsel.
One person is facing death, another is vexed by poverty, while another is tormented by wealth – whether his own or someone else’s; one man is appalled by his misfortunes while another longs to get away from his own prosperity; one man is suffering at the hands of men, another at the hands of the gods.
What’s the point of concocting whimsies for me of the sort I’ve just been mentioning?
This isn’t the place for fun – you’re called in to help the unhappy.
You’re pledged to bring succour to the shipwrecked, to those in captivity, to the sick, the needy and men who are just placing their heads beneath the executioner’s uplifted axe.
Where are you off to?
What are you about?
The person you’re engaging in word-play with is in fear – go to his aid.…
*
All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side.
Lives that have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you that they look for hope and assistance.
They are begging you to extricate them from this awful vortex, to show them in their doubt and disarray the shining torch of truth.
Tell them what nature has made necessary and what she has made superfluous.
Tell them how simple are the laws she has laid down, and how straightforward and enjoyable life is for those who follow them and how confused and disagreeable it is for others who put more trust in popular ideas than they do in nature.
All right if you can point out to me where those puzzles are likely to bring such people relief.
Which of them removes cravings or brings them under control?
If only they were simply
unhelpful!
They’re actually harmful.
I’ll give you the clearest proof whenever you like of their tendency to weaken and enfeeble even eminent talents once applied to such quibbles.
And when it comes to saying how they equip people proposing to do battle with fortune and what weapons they offer them, one hangs one’s head with shame.
Is this the way to our supreme ideal?
Do we get there by means of all that ‘if X, Y, or if not Y, Z’ one finds in philosophy?
And by means of quibbles that would be shameful and discreditable even among persons occupying themselves with law reports?
When you’re leading the person you’re questioning into a trap, aren’t you just making it look as if he has lost his case on a purely technical point of pleading?
The praetor’s court, however, restores litigants losing in this way to their rightful position, and philosophy does the same for the people thus questioned.
Why do philosophers like you abandon the magnificent promises you have made?
After assuring me in solemn terms that you will see to it that my eyes shall no more be overwhelmed by the glitter of gold than by the glitter of a sword, that I shall spurn with magnificent strength of purpose the things all other men pray for and the things all other men are afraid of, why do you have to descend to the schoolroom A B C?
What do you say?
Is this the way to the heavens?
*
For that is what philosophy has promised me – that she will make me God’s equal.
That’s the invitation and that’s what I’ve come for; be as good as your word.
Keep clear, then, my dear Lucilius, as far as you can, of the sort of quibbles and qualifications I’ve been mentioning in philosophers.
Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness.
Even if you had a large part of your
life remaining before you, you would have to organize it very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary; as things are, isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!
I
WONDER
whether there’s anything I couldn’t be persuaded into now, after letting myself be persuaded recently into taking a trip by sea.
The sea was quite calm when we cast off.
The sky was certainly heavily overcast, with the kind of dark clouds that generally break in a squall or downpour.
But in spite of the uncertain, threatening skies, I thought it would be perfectly feasible to make it across the few miles from your Parthenope over to Puteoli.
And so, with the object of getting the crossing over quicker, I headed straight for Nesis over the open water to cut out all the intervening curves of the coast-line.
Now when I had got so far across that it made no odds whether I went on or turned back, first of all the smoothness which had tempted me to my undoing disappeared.
There was no storm as yet, but a heavy swell was running by then and the waves were steadily getting rougher.
I began asking the helmsman to put me ashore somewhere.
He kept saying the coast was a rugged one without a haven anywhere and that there was nothing he feared quite so much in a storm as a lee shore.
I was in far too bad a way, though, for any thought of possible danger to enter my head, as I was suffering the torments of that sluggish brand of seasickness that will not bring one relief, the kind that upsets the stomach without clearing it.
So I put pressure on him and compelled him, willy-nilly, to make for the shore.
Once we
were close in there was no waiting on my part for anything to be done in the manner commended by Virgil,
Bows faced seawards
or
Anchor cast from bow.
*
Remembering my training as a long-standing devotee of cold baths, I dived into the sea in just the way a cold-water addict ought to – in my woolly clothes.
You can imagine what I suffered as I crawled out over the rocks, as I searched for a route to safety or fought my way there.
It made me realize how right sailors are in being afraid of a lee shore.
What I endured, in my inability to endure my then self, is beyond belief.
You can take it from me that the reason Ulysses got himself wrecked everywhere was not so much because Neptune was against him from the day he was born, but because he was given to seasickness like me – it’ll take
me
twenty years to reach my destination, too, if I ever have to journey anywhere by sea!
As soon as I’d settled my stomach (for stomachs, as you know, aren’t clear of seasickness the moment they’re clear of the sea) and rubbed myself over with embrocation to put some life back into my body, I began to reflect how we are attended by an appalling forgetfulness of our weaknesses, even the physical ones which are continually bringing themselves to our notice, and much more so with those that are not only more serious but correspondingly less apparent.
A slight feverishness may deceive a person, but when it has developed to the point where a genuine fever is raging it will extract an admission that something is wrong from even a tough and hardened individual.
Suppose our feet ache, with little needling pains in the joints: at this stage we pass it off and say we’ve sprained an ankle or strained something in
some exercise or other; while the disorder is in its indeterminate, commencing phase, its name eludes us, but once it starts bending the feet in just the way an ankle-rack does and makes them both misshapen, we have to confess that we’ve got the gout.
With afflictions of the spirit, though, the opposite is the case: the worse a person is, the less he feels it.
You needn’t feel surprised, my dearest Lucilius; a person sleeping lightly perceives impressions in his dreams and is sometimes, even, aware during sleep that he is asleep, whereas a heavy slumber blots out even dreams and plunges the mind too deep for consciousness of self.
Why does no one admit his failings?
Because he’s still deep in them.
It’s the person who’s awakened who recounts his dream, and acknowledging one’s failings is a sign of health.
So let us rouse ourselves, so that we may be able to demonstrate our errors.
But only philosophy will wake us; only philosophy will shake us out of that heavy sleep.
Devote yourself entirely to her.
You’re worthy of her, she’s worthy of you – fall into each other’s arms.
Say a firm, plain no to every other occupation.
There’s no excuse for your pursuing philosophy merely in moments when occasion allows.
If you were sick you would take a rest from attending to your personal affairs and drop your practice in the courts.
And during a spell of improvement in your condition you wouldn’t look on any client as being so important that you’d undertake his case in court.
No, you’d devote your entire attention to recovering from your illness in the quickest possible time.
Well, then, aren’t you going to do the same in these circumstances?
Away with every obstacle and leave yourself free to acquire a sound mind – no one ever attains this if he’s busy with other things.
Philosophy wields an authority of her own; she doesn’t just accept time, she grants one it.
She’s not something one takes up in odd moments.
She’s an active, full-time mistress, ever present and demanding.
When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of all its property he told them that ‘he hadn’t come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them.’ Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: ‘It’s not my intention to accept whatever time is left over from you; you shall have, instead, what I reject.’
Give your whole mind to her.
Sit at her side and pay her constant court, and an enormous gap will widen between yourself and other men.
You’ll end up far in advance of all mankind, and not far behind the gods themselves.
Would you like to know what the actual difference between yourself and the gods will be?
They will exist for longer.
And yet to me what an indisputable mark it is of a great artist to have captured everything in a tiny compass; a wise man has as much scope before him as a god with all eternity in front of him.
There is one thing, too, in which the wise man actually surpasses any god: a god has nature to thank for his immunity from fear, while the wise man can thank his own efforts for this.
Look at that for an achievement, to have all the frailty of a human being and all the freedom from care of a god.
Philosophy’s power to blunt all the blows of circumstance is beyond belief.
Never a missile lodges in her; she has strong, impenetrable defences; some blows she breaks the force of, parrying them with the slack of her gown as if they were trivial, others she flings off and hurls back at the sender.