Moral Letters to Lucilius

​What you ask of me was clear to me, so well had I learned the matter, of itself. But for a long time I have not retested my memory, and so it does not follow me easily. What happens to books that stick together from neglect, I feel has happened to me; my mind must be unfolded, and whatever has been deposited in it must be shaken out from time to time, so that they may be ready whenever use demands. Therefore, let us defer this for the present; for it requires much labor and much diligence. As soon as I hope for a longer stay in the same place, then I will take that matter into my hands.

​For there are some things which you can write even in a gig. Some require a couch, leisure, and privacy. Nevertheless, even in these busy days something should be done, and indeed throughout them all. For new occupations will never fail to succeed; we sow them, and so from one many go forth. Then we give ourselves a delay: “when I have finished this, I will apply myself with my whole heart,” and “if I settle this troublesome business, I will give myself to study.”

​You must not study philosophy only when you have leisure; all other things must be neglected so that we may attend to this, for which no time is large enough, even if life is prolonged from boyhood to the longest limits of human age. It does not matter much whether you abandon philosophy or interrupt it; for it does not remain where it was interrupted, but in the manner of those things which fly apart when stretched, it runs back to its very beginnings because it has departed from continuity. We must resist occupations, and they must not be unraveled but removed. No time indeed is too little suited for salutary study; yet many do not study among those very things for the sake of which they ought to study.

”Something will happen to hinder.” Indeed, not to him whose mind is cheerful and active in every business; for those who are still imperfect, joy is cut in two, but the wise man’s joy is woven together, broken by no cause, by no fortune, and he is always and everywhere tranquil. For he does not depend on what belongs to another, nor does he expect the favor of fortune or of man. His happiness is home-born; it would go out of his mind if it entered from without; it is born there.

​Sometimes something from without intervenes by which he is reminded of mortality, but it is light and merely grazes the surface of the skin. Let some inconvenience, I say, be added; yet that greatest good remains fixed. I mean it this way: from without there are some inconveniences, just as in a body that is sometimes robust and solid there are certain eruptions of pimples and small ulcers, but there is no evil in the depths.

​This, I say, is the difference between a man of consummated wisdom and another who is making progress, which is between a healthy man and one emerging from a severe and long-lasting illness, for whom a lighter attack of the disease takes the place of health: unless this latter attends, he is immediately worsened and rolls back into the same disease; the wise man cannot relapse, nor indeed can he fall ill any further. For good health is for the body a temporary thing, which the physician, even if he has restored it, does not guarantee, and he is often summoned back to the same patient who had called him. But the mind is cured once and for all.

​I will tell you how I understand a healthy mind: if it is content with itself, if it trusts itself, if it knows that all the prayers of mortals, all the benefits that are given and sought, have no weight in a happy life. For that to which something can be added is imperfect; that from which something can be taken away is not perpetual; he whose joy is to be perpetual, let him rejoice in his own. But all those things which the crowd gapes at flow to and fro. Fortune gives nothing in absolute ownership. But these fortuitous things also delight only when that reason has tempered and mixed them; this is what commends even external things, the use of which is unpleasant to those who are greedy for them.

​Attalus used to use this image: “Have you ever seen a dog catching pieces of bread or meat thrown by its master with open mouth? Whatever it has caught, it immediately swallows whole and always gapes in hope of what is to come. The same thing happens to us: whatever fortune has thrown to us while we are waiting, we let down immediately without any pleasure, erect and astonished for the plundering of another.” This does not happen to the wise man; he is full. Even if something comes his way, he receives and stores it away securely.

​He enjoys a joy that is greatest, continuous, and his own. Someone has a good will, has made progress, but one from whom much is lacking to reach the summit; this man is depressed and exalted by turns, and now is lifted to heaven, now is brought down to earth. For the unskilled and ignorant there is no end to their falling headlong; they fall into that Epicurean chaos, empty and without end.

​There is still a third class of those who play around wisdom, which they indeed have not touched, but yet have in sight and, so to speak, within range; these are not shaken, nor do they even slip back. They are not yet on dry land, but they are already in harbor.

​Therefore, since there are such great differences between the highest and the lowest, since their own wave follows those in the middle too, and there follows a huge danger of returning to worse things, we must not indulge in occupations. They must be shut out; if they have once entered, they will substitute others in their place. Let us resist their beginnings. They will not begin more easily than they will stop. FAREWELL.