Reading Seneca is like reading a classical self help book something like the seven secrets of successful selling or ‘how to take command of your life: A beginner’s guide, that sort of thing but in ancient Rome. He’s not an agony uncle but rather:’ your agony what is it saying to you and if you were to die tonight would it contaminate your last hours’? I fear that the aura of gravitas and solid wisdom is due to its chilly elegance. The translation by Margaret Graver reads smoothly and one feels its crisp expression captures the original well.
And so, dear Lucilius, do what your letter says you are doing: embrace every hour. If you lay hands on today, you will find you are less dependent on tomorrow. While you delay, life speeds on by. Everything we have belongs to others, Lucilius; time alone is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, this fleeting, slippery thing—and anyone who wants to can dispossess us. Such is the foolishness of mortal beings: when they borrow the smallest, cheapest items, such as can easily be replaced, they acknowledge the debt, but no one considers himself indebted for taking up our time. Yet this is the one loan that even those who are grateful cannot repay.
Those two things that the Stoics do well, fleetingness and stasis, appear frequently. We only have this moment and good or bad it will pass. That is true yet the continuance and risk of passion give life its savour. To be forever weighing in the scales of significance each moment is too linear. What we want is not the single level in which we manage our emotions and the urge of life but the enlargement of context. There is more, there is insight where we leave the rubric.
You are hard at work, forgetting everything else and sticking to the single task of making yourself a better person every day. This I approve, and rejoice in it too. I urge you, indeed plead with you, to persevere. All the same, I have a warning for you. There are those whose wish is to be noticed rather than to make moral progress. Don’t be like them, altering your dress or way of life so as to attract attention. The rough clothes, the rank growth of hair and beard, the sworn hatred of silverware, the pallet laid on the ground: all these and any other perverse form of self-aggrandizement are things you should avoid.
Here we have the Classical curation of a profile. Being a serious person takes work and you mustn’t slacken for a moment. He rejoices in the efforts of Lucillius and recommends moderation in all things. Yes, quite so, you’re only old once and it’s never too soon to start.
