Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  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

  There may be pleasure in the memory

  Of even these events one day.*

  He should put his whole heart into the fight against them. If he gives way before them he will lose the battle; if he exerts himself against them he will win. What in fact most people do is pull down on their own heads what they should be holding up against; when something is in imminent danger of falling on you, the pressure of it bearing heavily on you, it will only move after you and become an even greater weight to support if you back away from it; if instead you stand your ground, willing yourself to resist, it will be forced back. Look at the amount of punishment that boxers and wrestlers take to the face and the body generally! They will put up none the less with any suffering in their desire for fame, and will undergo it all not merely in the course of fighting but in preparing for their fights as well: their training in itself constitutes suffering. Let us too overcome all things, with our reward consisting not in any wreath or garland, not in trumpet-calls for silence for the ceremonial proclamation of our name, but in moral worth, in strength of spirit, in a peace that is won for ever once in any contest fortune has been utterly defeated.

  ‘I’m suffering severe pain,’ you may say. Well does it stop you suffering it if you endure it in a womanish fashion? In the same way as the enemy can do far more damage to your army if it is in full retreat, every trouble that may come our way presses harder on the one who has turned tail and is giving ground. ‘But it’s really severe.’ Well, is courage only meant to enable us to bear up under what is not severe? Would you rather have an illness that’s long drawn out or one that’s short and quick? If it’s a long one it will have the odd interval, giving one opportunity for rallying, granting one a good deal of time free of it, having of necessity to pause in order to build up again. An illness that’s swift and short will have one of two results: either oneself or it will be snuffed out. And what difference does it make whether I or it disappears? Either way there’s an end to the pain.

  Another thing which will help is to turn your mind to other thoughts and that way get away from your suffering.
Call to mind things which you have done that have been upright or courageous; run over in your mind the finest parts that you have played. And cast your memory over the things you have most admired; this is a time for recollecting all those individuals of exceptional courage who have triumphed over pain: the man who steadily went on reading a book while he was having varicose veins cut out: the man who never stopped smiling under torture albeit that this angered his tormentors into trying on him every instrument of cruelty they had. If pain has been conquered by a smile will it not be conquered by reason? And here you may mention anything you care to name, catarrh, a fit of uninterrupted coughing so violent that it brings up parts of the internal organs, having one’s very entrails seared by a fever, thirst, having limbs wrenched in different directions with dislocation of the joints, or – worse than these – being stretched on the rack or burnt alive, or subjected to the red-hot plates and instruments designed to re-open and deepen swelling wounds. There have been men who have undergone these experiences and never uttered a groan. ‘He needs more, he hasn’t asked for mercy… he needs more, he still hasn’t answered… he needs more, he has actually smiled, and not a forced smile either.’ Surely pain is something you will want to smile at after this.

  ‘But my illness has taken me away from my duties and won’t allow me to achieve anything.’ It is your body, not your mind as well, that is in the grip of ill health. Hence it may slow the feet of a runner and make the hands of a smith or cobbler less efficient, but if your mind is by habit of an active turn you may still give instruction and advice, listen and learn, inquire and remember. Besides, if you meet sickness in a sensible manner, do you really think you are achieving nothing? You will be demonstrating that even if one cannot always beat it one can always bear an illness. There is room for heroism, I assure you, in bed as anywhere else. War and the battle-front are not the only spheres in which proof is to be had of a spirited and fearless character: a person’s bravery is no less evident under the bed-clothes. There is something it lies open to you to achieve, and that is making the fight with illness a good one. If its threats or importunities leave you quite unmoved, you are setting others a signal example. How much scope there would be for renown if whenever we were sick we had an audience of spectators! Be your own spectator anyway, your own applauding audience.

  Pleasures, moreover, are of two kinds. The physical pleasures are the ones which illness interferes with, though it does not do away with them altogether – indeed, if you take a true view of the matter, they are actually sharpened by illness, a man deriving greater pleasure from drinking something when he is thirsty and finding food all the more welcome through being hungry, anything set before one after one has had to fast being greeted with a heightened appetite. But no doctor can refuse his patient those other, greater and surer pleasures, the pleasures of the mind and spirit. Anyone who follows these and genuinely knows them pays no attention whatever to all the enticements of the senses. ‘How very unfortunate he is,’ people say, ‘to be sick like that!’ Why? Because he isn’t melting snow in his wine? Because he isn’t breaking ice into a bumper goblet to keep the drink he has mixed in it chilled? Because Lucrine oysters aren’t being opened before him at his table? Because there isn’t any bustling of cooks about the dining-room, bringing in not just the viands themselves but the actual cooking apparatus along with them? For this is the latest innovation in luxurious living, having the kitchen accompany the dinner in to the table so as to prevent any of the food losing its heat and avoid anything being at a temperature insufficiently scalding for palates which are nowadays like leather. ‘How very unfortunate he is to be sick,’ they say. In fact he’ll be eating just as much as he’ll digest. There won’t be a whole boar lying somewhere where people can see it, conveying the impression that it has been banished from the table as being too cheap and ordinary a piece of meat to be on it, nor will he have his trolley piled high with – now that people think it not quite nice to see the whole bird – carved breast of fowl. And what’s so bad about your being deprived of that? You may be eating like a sick man, but you’ll at last be eating in the way a healthy man should.

  But given one thing we shall find it easy to put up with the potions and warm drinks and all the rest of it – all the things that seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body; the one requirement is that we cease to dread death. And so we shall as soon as we have learnt to distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world. Then and then only shall we stop being weary of living as well as scared of dying. For a life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure. Truth will never pall on someone who explores the world of nature, wearied as a person will be by the spurious things. Moreover, even if death is on the way with a summons for him, though it come all too early, though it cut him off in the prime of life, he has experienced every reward that the very longest life can offer, having gained extensive knowledge of the world we live in, having learnt that time adds nothing to the finer things in life. Whereas any life must needs seem short to people who measure it in terms of pleasures which through their empty nature are incapable of completeness.

  Let these reflections promote your recovery, and meanwhile do find time for our correspondence. Time will bring us together again one of these days; and when, as it will, the reunion comes, however short it may last, knowing how to make the most of it will turn it into a long one. As Posidonius said, ‘In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.’ In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.

  LETTER LXXXIII

  YOU demand an account of my days – generally as well as individually. You think well of me if you suppose that there is nothing in them for me to hide. And we should, indeed, live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts – which someone can! For what is to be gained if something is concealed from man when nothing is barred from God? He is present in our minds, in attendance in the midst of our thoughts – although by ‘attendance’ I do not mean to suggest that he is not at times absent from our thoughts. I shall do as you say, then, and gladly give you a record of what I do and in what order. I shall put myself under observation straight away and undertake a review of my day – a course which is of the utmost benefit. What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.

  Today has been unbroken. No one has robbed me of any part of it. It has been wholly divided between my bed and my reading. A very small part of it has been given over to physical exercise – and on this account I’m grateful for old age, for the exercise costs me little trouble. I only have to stir and I’m weary, and that after all is the end of exercise even for the strongest. Interested in having my trainers? One’s enough for me – Pharius, a likeable young fellow, as you know, but he’s due for a change. I’m looking now for someone rather more youthful. He in fact declares that we’re both at the same climacteric since we’re both losing our teeth. But I’ve reached the stage where I can only keep up with him with difficulty when we’re out for a run, and before many days are out I won’t be able to keep up with him at all. See what daily exercise does for one. When two people are going in opposite directions there’s soon a big distance between them: he’s coming up at the same time as I’m going d
ownwards, and you know how much quicker travel is in the second of these directions. But I’m wrong: the age I’m at isn’t one that is ‘going downwards’ – it’s one that’s in headlong descent.

  However, you’d like to hear how today’s race ended? Well, we made it a tie, something that doesn’t often happen with runners. After this, more a spell of exhaustion than of exercise, I had a cold plunge – cold, with me, meaning just short of warm! Here I am, once celebrated as a devotee of cold baths, regularly paying my respects to the Canal on the first of January and jumping into the Maiden Pool in just the same way as I read, wrote and spoke some sentence or other every New Year in order to ensure good luck in the coming year; and now I’ve shifted my scene of operations, first to the Tiber, then to my own pool here, which, even when I’m feeling my heartiest and don’t cheat, has had the chill taken off it by the sun; it’s a short step to a hot bath! The next thing is breakfast, which consists of some dry bread; no table laid, and no need to wash the hands after such a meal. I then have the briefest of naps. You know this habit of mine, of dropping off for a moment or two, just slipping off the harness, as you might say. I find it enough to have simply stopped being awake. Sometimes I know I’ve been asleep, sometimes merely guess I have been….*