Letters From a Stoic (16 page)

While everyone around me was hurrying thus from all directions to the waterfront, I found a great deal of pleasure in refusing to bestir myself.
Although there would be letters for me from my people over there I was in no hurry to know what reports they might be carrying or what might be the state of my financial interests there.
For a long time now I have not been concerned about any profit or loss.
This particular pleasure was one that I ought to have been experiencing even if I were not an old man; but being old in fact made it all the greater, for it meant that however little money I might have I should still have more left to cover the journey than distance left to be covered – especially as the journey on which we have all set out is one which does not have to be travelled to the very end.
An ordinary journey will be incomplete if you come to a stop in the middle of it, or anywhere short of your destination, but life is never incomplete if it is an honourable one.
At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is a whole.
And there are many occasions on which a man should leave life not only bravely but for reasons which are not as pressing as they might be – the reasons which restrain us being not so pressing either.

Tullius Marcellinus, whom you knew very well, a man, old before his years, who found tranquillity early in life, began to meditate suicide after he had gone down with a disease which was not an incurable one but at the same time was a protracted, troublesome one, importunate in its demands.
He called together a large number of his friends, and each one offered him advice.
This consisted either of urgings (from the timid among them) that he should just take whichever course he himself felt urged to take, or of whatever counsel flattering admirers thought would be most likely to gratify someone meditating suicide, until a Stoic friend of mine, an outstanding personality for whom I can find no more fitting compliment than that of calling him a man of fighting courage, gave what I thought was the most inspiring advice.
This was how he began: ‘My dear Marcellinus,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t let this worry you as if you were having to make a great decision.
There’s nothing so very great about living – all your slaves and all the animals do it.
What is, however, a great thing is to die in a manner which is honourable, enlightened and courageous.
Think how long now you’ve been doing the same as them – food, sleep, sex, the never-ending cycle.
The desire for death can be experienced not merely by the enlightened or the brave or the unhappy, but even by the squeamish.’ Well, Marcellinus wanted no urging, only a helper.
His slaves refused to obey him in this, whereupon our Stoic talked away their fears, letting them know that the household staff could only be in danger if there had been any room for doubt as to whether their master’s death had been a voluntary one; besides, he told them, it was just as bad to let other people see you ordering your master not to kill himself as actually to kill him.
He then suggested to Marcellinus himself that it would not be an unkind gesture if, in the same way as at the end of a dinner the leftovers are divided among the attendants, something
were offered at the end of his life to those who had served throughout it.
Marcellinus had a generous and good-natured disposition which was no less evident where it meant personal expense, and he distributed accordingly little sums of money among his slaves, who were now in tears, and went out of his way to comfort them all.
He did not need to resort to a weapon or to shedding blood.
After going without food for three days he had a steam tent put up, in his own bedroom; a bath was brought in, in which he lay for a long time, and as fresh supplies of hot water were continually poured in he passed almost imperceptibly away, not without, as he commented more than once, a kind of pleasurable sensation, one that is apt to be produced by the gentle fading out of which those of us who have ever fainted will have some experience.

I have digressed, but you will not have minded hearing this story, since you will gather from it that your friend’s departure was not a difficult or unhappy one.
Although his death was self-inflicted, the manner of his passing was supremely relaxed, a mere gliding out of life.
Yet the story is not without its practical value for the future.
For frequently enough necessity demands just such examples.
The times are frequent enough when we cannot reconcile ourselves to dying, or to knowing that we ought to die.

No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die.
Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out.
Wouldn’t you think a man a prize fool if he burst into tears because he didn’t live a thousand years ago?
A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn’t going to be alive a thousand years from now.
There’s no difference between the one and the other – you didn’t exist and you won’t exist – you’ve no concern with either period.
This is the moment you’ve been pitched into – supposing you were to make it longer how
long would you make it?
What’s the point of tears?
What’s the point of prayers?
You’re only wasting your breath.

Here I imagine you’ll be expecting me to tell you the stories of examples set by heroic men?
Well, I’ll tell you about ones which children have set.
History relates the story of the famous Spartan, a mere boy who, when he was taken prisoner, kept shouting in his native Doric, ‘I shall not be a slave!’ He was as good as his word.
The first time he was ordered to perform a slave’s task, some humiliating household job (his actual orders were to fetch a disgusting chamber pot), he dashed his head against a wall and cracked his skull open.
Freedom is as near as that – is anyone really still a slave?
⁵⁴
Would you not rather your own son died like that than lived
by reason of spinelessness to an advanced age?
Why be perturbed, then, about death when even a child can meet it bravely?
Suppose you refuse to follow him: you will just be dragged after him.
Assume the authority which at present lies with others.
Surely you can adopt the spirited attitude of that boy and say, ‘No slave am I!’ At present, you unhappy creature, slave you are, slave to your fellow-men, slave to circumstance and slave to life (for life itself is slavery if the courage to die be absent).

Have you anything that might induce you to wait?
You have exhausted the very pleasures that make you hesitate and hold you back; not one of them has any novelty for you, not one of them now fails to bore you out of sheer excess.
You know what wine or honey-wine tastes like: it makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand flagons go through your bladder – all you are is a strainer.
You are perfectly familiar with the taste of oysters or mullet.
Your luxurious way of life has kept back not a single fresh experience for you to try in coming years.
And yet these are the things from which you are reluctant to be torn away.
What else is there which you would be sorry to be deprived of?
Friends?
Do you know how to be a friend?
Your country?
Do you really value her so highly that you would put off your dinner for her?
The sunlight?
If you could you would put out that light – for what have you ever done that deserved a place in it?
Confess it – it is no attachment to the world of politics or business, or even the world of nature, that makes you put off dying – the delicatessens, in which there is nothing you have left untried, are what you are reluctant to leave.
You are scared of death – but how magnificently heedless of it you are while you are dealing with a dish of choice mushrooms!
You want to live – but do you know how to live?
You are scared of dying – and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?
Caligula was once passing a
column of captives on the Latin Road when one of them, with a hoary old beard reaching down his breast, begged to be put to death.
‘So,’ replied Caligula, ‘you are alive, then, as you are?’ That is the answer to give to people to whom death would actually come as a release.
‘You are scared of dying?
So you are alive, then, as you are?’

Someone, though, will say, ‘But I want to live because of all the worthy activities I’m engaged in.
I’m performing life’s duties conscientiously and energetically and I’m reluctant to leave them undone.’ Come now, surely you know that dying is also one of life’s duties?
You’re leaving no duty undone, for there’s no fixed number of duties laid down which you’re supposed to complete.
Every life without exception is a short one.
Looked at in relation to the universe even the lives of Nestor and Sattia were short.
In Sattia, who ordered that her epitaph should record that she had lived to the age of ninety-nine, you have an example of someone actually boasting of a prolonged old age – had it so happened that she had lasted out the hundredth year everybody, surely, would have found her quite insufferable!
As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.
It is not important at what point you stop.
Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

Let me tell you the things that provided me with consolation in those days, telling you to begin with that the thoughts which brought me this peace of mind had all the effect of medical treatment.
Comforting thoughts (provided they are not of a discreditable kind) contribute to a person’s cure; anything which raises his spirits benefits him physically as well.
It was my Stoic studies that really saved me.
For the fact that I was able to leave my bed and was restored to health I give the credit to philosophy.
I owe her – and it is the least of my obligations to her – my life.
But my friends also made a considerable contribution to my return to health.
I found a great deal of relief in their cheering remarks, in the hours they spent at my bedside and in their conversations with me.
There is nothing, my good Lucilius, quite like the devotion of one’s friends for supporting one in illness and restoring one to health, or for dispelling one’s anticipation and dread of death.
I even came to feel that I could not really die when these were the people I would leave surviving me, or perhaps I should say I came to think I would continue to live because of them, if not among them; for it seemed to me that in death I would not be passing away but passing on my spirit to them.
These things gave me the willingness to
help my own recovery and to endure all the pain.
It is quite pathetic, after all, if one has put the will to die behind one, to be without the will to live.

There, then, are your remedies.
The doctor will be telling you how much walking you should do, how much exercise you should take; he will be telling you not to overdo the inactivity – as is the tendency with invalids – and recommending reading aloud to exercise the breathing (its passages and reservoir being the areas affected); he will recommend that you take a trip by sea and derive some stimulation for the internal organs from the gentle motion of the boat; he will prescribe a diet for you, and tell you when to make use of wine as a restorative and when to give it up in case it starts you coughing or aggravates your cough.
My own advice to you – and not only in the present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear.
There are three upsetting things about any illness: the fear of dying, the physical suffering and the interruption of our pleasures.
I have said enough about the first, but will just say this, that the fear is due to the facts of nature, not of illness.
Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation.
You will die not because you are sick but because you are alive.
That end still awaits you when you have been cured.
In getting well again you may be escaping some ill health but not death.
Now let us go back and deal with the disadvantage which really does belong to illness, the fact that it involves considerable physical torments.
These are made bearable by their intermittency.
For when pain is at its most severe the very intensity finds means of ending it.
Nobody can be in acute pain and feel it for long.
Nature in her unlimited kindness to us has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief.
The severest pains have their seat in the most attenuated parts of
the body; any area of slight dimensions like a tendon or a joint causes excruciating agony when trouble arises within its small confines.
But these parts of our anatomy go numb very quickly, the pain itself giving rise to a loss of all sensation of pain (either because the life force is impaired by being held up in its natural circulation and so loses its active power, the power which enables it to give us warning of pain, or because the diseased secretions, no longer able to drain away, become self-obliterated and deprive the areas they have congested of sensation).
Thus gout in the feet or the hands or any pain in the vertebrae or tendons has intermittent lulls when it has dulled the area it is torturing; these are all cases in which the distress is caused by the initial twinges and the violence of the pain disappears as time goes on, the suffering ending in a state of insensibility.
The reason why pain in an eye, an ear or a tooth is exceptionally severe is the fact that it develops in a limited area, and indeed this applies just as much to pains in the head; nevertheless if its intensity goes beyond a certain point it is turned into a state of dazed stupefaction.
So there is the comforting thing about extremities of pain: if you feel it too much you are bound to stop feeling it.

What in fact makes people who are morally unenlightened upset by the experience of physical distress is their failure to acquire the habit of contentment with the spirit.
They have instead been preoccupied by the body.
That is why a man of noble and enlightened character separates body from spirit and has just as much to do with the former, the frail and complaining part of our nature, as is necessary and no more, and a lot to do with the better, the divine element.
‘But it’s hard having to do without pleasures we’re used to, having to give up food and go thirsty as well as hungry.’ Tiresome it is in the first stages of abstinence.
Later, as the organs of appetite decline in strength with exhaustion, the cravings die down;
thereafter the stomach becomes fussy, unable to stand things it could never have enough of before.
The desires themselves die away.
And there is nothing harsh about having to do without things for which you have ceased to have any craving.

Another point is that every pain leaves off altogether, or at least falls off in intensity, from time to time.
Moreover one can guard against its arrival and employ drugs to forestall it just as it is coming on; for every pain (or at least every pain with a habit of regular recurrence) gives one advance warning of its coming.
In illness the suffering is always bearable so long as you refuse to be affected by the ultimate threat.

So do not go out of your way to make your troubles any more tiresome than they are and burden yourself with fretting.
Provided that one’s thinking has not been adding anything to it, pain is a trivial sort of thing.
If by contrast you start giving yourself encouragement, saying to yourself, ‘It’s nothing – or nothing much, anyway – let’s stick it out, it’ll be over presently’, then in thinking it a trivial matter you will be ensuring that it actually is.
Everything hangs on one’s thinking.
The love of power or money or luxurious living are not the only things which are guided by popular thinking.
We take our cue from people’s thinking even in the way we feel pain.

A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
And complaining away about one’s sufferings after they are over (you know the kind of language: ‘No one had ever been in such a bad state.
The torments and hardships I endured!
No one thought I would recover.
The number of times I was given up for lost by the family!
The number of times I was despaired of by the doctors!
A man on the rack isn’t torn with pain the way I was’) is something I think should be banned.
Even if all this is true, it is past history.
What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now
just because you were then?
What is more, doesn’t everyone add a good deal to his tale of hardships and deceive himself as well in the matter?
Besides, there is a pleasure in having succeeded in enduring, something the actual enduring of which was very far from pleasant; when some trouble or other comes to an end the natural thing is to be glad.
There are two things, then, the recollecting of trouble in the past as well as the fear of troubles to come, that I have to root out: the first is no longer of any concern to me and the second has yet to be so.
And when a man is in the grip of difficulties he should say