Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

My thought for today is something which I found in Epicurus (yes, I actually make a practice of going over to the enemy’s camp – by way of reconnaissance, not as a deserter!).

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. What difference does it make how much there is laid away in a man’s safe or in his barns, how many head of stock he grazes or how much capital he puts out at interest, if he is always after what is another’s and only counts what he has yet to get, never what he has already. You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.

Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

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. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.

When his whole attention is absorbed in concentration on the work he is engaged on, a tremendous sense of satisfaction is created in him by his very absorption. There is never quite the same gratification after he has lifted his hand from the finished work. From then on what he is enjoying is the art’s end product, whereas it was the art itself that he enjoyed while he was actually painting. So with our children, their growing up brings wider fruits but their infancy was sweeter.

The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.

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 do not exist?

When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation. Can you find the rule I am laying down a harsh one when the greatest of Greek poets has restricted to a single day, no more, a person’s right to cry – in the passage where he tells us that even Niobe remembered to eat?fn26 Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the benefit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all – that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!

A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

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?

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.fn30

It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honourable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues. We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber. Haven’t you noticed how the theatre murmurs agreement whenever something is spoken the truth of which we generally recognize and unanimously confirm?

The poor lack much, the greedy everything. The greedy man does no one any good, But harms no person more than his own self.fn55