XII

Seneca to his Lucilius, greeting. Wherever I turn, I see evidence of my old age. I had gone to my suburban estate and was complaining about the expense of a building that was falling apart. The steward told me that the fault was not his negligence, that he was doing everything he could, but that the house was old. This villa grew up under my own hands: what is going to become of me, if stones as old as I am are already so rotten?

Angry with him, I seize the next opportunity for a bout of irritation. 'It is obvious,' I say, 'that these plane trees are being neglected: they have no leaves. How knotty and twisted their branches are, how sad and shabby their trunks! This would not happen if someone dug around them and watered them.' He swears by my guardian spirit that he does everything, that his care fails in no respect, but that the trees are simply old ladies. Between ourselves, I had planted them; I had seen their very first leaf.

Turning toward the door, I said, 'Who is that fellow? That decrepit old man who has quite properly been moved next to the entrance? He is looking outside, after all. Where did you find him? What pleased you about taking in someone else's corpse?' But he replied, 'Don't you recognize me? I am Felicio, the boy to whom you used to bring little Saturnalia gifts; I am the son of your steward Philositus, your little favorite.' 'Excellent,' I said, 'this fellow is raving: has that little boy actually become my former pet? Well, it certainly can be so: his teeth are falling out right now.'

I owe this to my suburban estate: wherever I turned, my old age appeared before me. Let us embrace it and love it; it is full of pleasure, if you know how to use it. Fruits are most delightful when their season is passing; childhood has its greatest charm at its end; for those devoted to wine, the final drink is the most pleasing, the one that sinks them and puts the finishing touch on drunkenness.

Every pleasure postpones until its end whatever is most delightful in it. The most pleasant age is one already on the downward slope, though not yet at the brink, and I judge that even the age standing on the last roof tile has pleasures of its own; or else this very thing takes the place of pleasures: needing none. How sweet it is to have exhausted one's desires and left them behind!

'It is troublesome,' you say, 'to have death before one's eyes.' In the first place, death should be before the eyes of an old man just as much as of a young one—for we are not summoned according to the census; secondly, no one is so old that it is unreasonable for him to hope for one more day. A single day, however, is a step in life. An entire lifetime consists of parts and has circles drawn around smaller circles: there is one that embraces and encloses them all—this extends from birth to the final day; there is another that bounds the years of youth; another encloses all childhood within its circuit; then there is the year by itself, containing within itself all the seasons whose multiplication makes up a life; the month is enclosed by a narrower circle; the day has the narrowest circuit, yet even it runs from beginning to end, from sunrise to sunset.

For this reason Heraclitus, whose obscurity of expression earned him his nickname, said, 'One day is equal to every other.' Different people interpreted this differently. One said that a day is equal in its hours, and he is not wrong; for if a day is a period of twenty-four hours, all days must necessarily be equal to one another, because the night possesses what the daylight has lost. Another said that one day is equal to all others in likeness: the longest span of time contains nothing that you cannot also find in a single day—light and night; and in the world's alternating changes these same things make more, not different, at one time shorter and at another longer.

And so every day should be ordered as though it were bringing up the rear and completing and fulfilling our life. Pacuvius, who had made Syria his own by long possession, after performing funeral rites for himself with wine and those funeral banquets, would be carried from dinner to his bedroom while, amid the applause of his favorites, this refrain was sung to musical accompaniment: 'His life has been lived, his life has been lived.'

Not a day passed on which he did not have himself carried out as though for burial. What he did from a guilty conscience, let us do from a good one, and as we are about to go to sleep let us say joyfully and cheerfully: 'I have lived, and I have completed the course that Fortune gave me.' If God adds tomorrow, let us receive it gladly. The happiest man, and the secure possessor of himself, is the one who awaits tomorrow without anxiety; whoever has said 'I have lived' rises each day to a profit.

But now I must close the letter. 'So,' you say, 'will it come to me without any little allowance?' Do not be afraid: it brings something with it. Why did I say something? It brings a great deal. For what saying could be finer than the one I hand over to it to carry to you? 'It is an evil to live under necessity, but there is no necessity to live under necessity.' Why should there be? Many roads to freedom lie open on every side, short and easy. Let us give thanks to God that no one can be held in life: we are permitted to trample necessity itself underfoot.

'Epicurus said that,' you reply; 'what have you to do with another man's property?' Whatever is true is mine. I shall continue to press Epicurus upon you, so that those people who swear allegiance to mere words and judge not what is said but who said it may learn that the best things are common property. Farewell.