Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Indeed, my Lucilius, he is lazy and careless who is led to the memory of a friend only when reminded by some locality; nevertheless, familiar places sometimes evoke the longing stored in our minds, not restoring an extinct memory, but stirring it up from its sleep, just as either a familiar servant of the lost one, or a garment, or a house renews the grief of those in mourning, even if it has been mitigated by time. Behold, Campania, and especially Naples and the sight of your beloved Pompeii, it is incredible how fresh a longing for you they have created; you are entirely before my eyes. At this very moment I am parting from you. I see you blinking back your tears and not resisting enough your emotions as they break out in the midst of your very self-restraint. I seem to have lost you only just now.

​For what is not ‘just now’, if you look back? Just now as a boy I sat at the feet of Sotion the philosopher; just now I began to plead cases; just now I ceased to wish to plead; just now I ceased to be able to. Infinite is the swiftness of time, which appears more clearly to those who look back. For it deceives those intent on the present; so gentle is the passage of its headlong flight.

​Do you ask the cause of this? Whatever of time passes is in the same place; it is viewed equally, it lies together. All things fall into the same abyss. And besides, there cannot be long intervals in a thing which is entirely short. A single point is what we live, and even less than a point. But nature has mocked even this minimum with a certain appearance of a longer space; of this she made one part infancy, another childhood, another youth, another a certain decline from youth to old age, and another old age itself. In how narrow a span has she placed how many steps!

​Just now I escorted you; and yet this ‘just now’ is a good portion of our life, whose brevity we should consider destined to fail us at some point. Time did not use to seem so swift to me; now its incredible course appears, whether because I feel the finish lines approaching, or because I have begun to pay attention and calculate my loss.

​Therefore, I am the more indignant that some people spend the greater part of this time—which cannot suffice even for necessary things, even if it has been guarded most diligently—on superfluous things. Cicero says that, even if his life were doubled, he would not have time to read the lyric poets; put the dialecticians in the same category; they are more gloomily foolish. The former behave playfully by profession, while the latter think they are actually accomplishing something.

​Nor do I deny that those things should be looked into, but only looked into and greeted from the threshold for this one purpose, lest we be deceived and judge that there is some great and secret good in them. Why do you torture and torment yourself in that question, which it is more elegant to have despised than to have solved? It is the mark of a man who is secure and traveling at his leisure to seek out tiny trifles; when the enemy presses from behind and the soldier is ordered to march, necessity shakes out whatever peaceful leisure had gathered.