Seneca: Letters from a Stoic

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     A post with my notes from ‘Seneca: Letters from a Stoic’ Background: Seneca (c.4 B.C. - A.D. 65) was a Roman advisor to Emperor Nero. These are a collection of letters written near the end of his life to his friend, Lucilius, It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the man who hankers after more.Live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself. Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. The two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.

    Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving.The time of life that offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement; even the age that stands on the brink has pleasures of its own. How nice it is to have outworn one’s desires and left them behind!

       Death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one.

 It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent.

It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent.

 Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

       Socrates: How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away. I do no agree with those who recommend a stormy life and plunge straight into the breakers, waging a spirited struggle against worldly obstacles every day of their lives. The wise man will put up with these things, not go out of his way to meet them.It does not profit a man much to have managed to discard his own failings if he must ever be at loggerheads with other people’s.

      It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own.

 Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. You would have to organise your life very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary; isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time is so desperately short. 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.

      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.Philosophy 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. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me.

 We are wrong in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin, when the result of either is that you did not exist?

     The person you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live 

There is nothing the wise person does reluctantly. They escape necessity because they will what necessity is going to force on them.

That's all for now. for the 'Meditations' recommendation which led me to Seneca

My final notes from the back-half of ‘Seneca: Letters from a Stoic’. Prove - and an easy task it is - that so-called pleasures when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments. Wouldn’t one be a fool if they burst into tears for not living a thousand years ago? One is as much a fool for shedding tears for not being alive a thousand years from now. There’s no difference - you didn’t exist and you won’t exist - you’ve no concern with either period.

     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.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 you round it off with a good ending.Thinking of departed friends is to me, something sweet and mellow. For when I had them with me it was with the feeling that I was going to lose them, and now that I have lost them I keep the feeling that I have them with me still.

Tiresome it is to go without pleasures in the first stage of abstinence. Later, as the organs of appetite decline in strength with exhaustion, the desires themselves die away. And there is nothing harsh about having to do without things for which you have ceased to crave.

In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.

      On the account of physical exercise, I am grateful for old age, for the exercise costs me little trouble. I only have to stir and I’m very weary, and that after all is the end of exercise even for the strongest. Drunkenness inflames and lays bare every vice, removing the reserve that acts as a check on impulses to wrong behaviour. For people abstain from hidden things far more often through feelings of inhibition when it comes to doing wrong than through any will to good.

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 has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief.

        There is really only one liberal study that deserves the name - because it makes a person free - and that is the pursuit of wisdom.

The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estate, rather than work out how much a man needs in order to have enough. He teaches me how I may avoid losing a fraction of my estate, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.

The musical scholar teaches me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord. I would rather he brought about harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune.

      Death you’ll think as the worst of all bad things, though in fact there's nothing bad about it at all except the things which comes before it - the fear of it.

The ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like but the amount you ought to take.One’s essentials are acquired from nature with little bother; it is only the luxuries that call for toil and bother.Nature does not give us virtue. The process of becoming virtuous is an art. We are born for it, but not with it.

      We need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind.What could be more foolish than a man being afraid of people’s words? The utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly.

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realise how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.

People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.

      There is nothing surprising about deriving different material for our own interests from identical subject-matter. In one and the same meadow the cow looks for grass, the dog for a hare and the stork for a lizard.

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