Seneca: Letter I

This is Seneca’s first letter, which was not in the Campbell book. The translation is from Elaine Fantham in the Oxford World Classic version. I didn’t have Fantham’s book when I started, thus I am out of order. ‘Twas ever so.

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In this letter Seneca responds to Lucilius’s declaration that he is determined to make the best use of his time.

Yes, do just that, dear Lucilius: liberate yourself, and gather and save up the time which until now was being taken from you by force or stealth or simply slipping away unnoticed… some periods of time are snatched from us, some are stolen, and some simply seep away. Yet the most shameful loss is the loss due to carelessness.

He goes on to say that most of life disappears into failure, much in futility, and that all is a distraction. He doesn’t elaborate on what he means by failure and futility and distraction, but I feel he’s suggesting that if we don’t pay attention to our use of time, to what we are doing, then life will simply slip away and we are likely to reach the end of it with the central question in our mind being, “Wha’ hoppen?”

Everything else is beyond our grasp, only time is ours.

And it is slippery and fleeting, akin to holding an oiled eel. Take hold of every hour, Seneca says, and use it well. Get hold of today: you can’t depend on tomorrow. And this: Dum differtur vita transcurrit. In the vernacular, ‘Life is what happens while you’re doing something else.’ To steal from French, the more things change, the more they stay the same: Seneca said his thing two thousand years ago, and it is just as valid today, perhaps more so, given the complications life is so full of in modern times.

But is time really ours? I think we might well say that time happens while we are doing something else (leaving aside the question of whether time exists, humans having confused duration with a needed concept that lacks reality). We can only control what we do, how we act. We start at point A and proceed to point B, and then the clock says an hour has passed. But the clock is simply reading out an arbitrary division of duration. What matters is what we did during that hour, and how we did it. Were we sloppy in our action and thought? Were we focused, making the best use of our minds and bodies for that hour? We can never have that hour back, not even one second of it, and we can not reclaim it later for a redo. Literally every moment of our lives is now or never.

Seneca says ‘we deceive ourselves by looking for death ahead of us, whereas a great part of death has already taken place.’ The years we’ve lived are in death’s hands.

We might expect that after forty or fifty years that thought becomes a reasonable thing. At that point life is half over, more or less. On the other hand, at the age of twenty our life might be almost one hundred percent over because tomorrow a meteor will streak from space and do us in. We just don’t know, and because we don’t know, it doesn’t matter. What we have, all we have, all we can count on, is today, right now, this minute. Knowing that gives a certain urgency to the question, “How do I want to live? What’s the best way for me to live?”

Seneca considers time a great gift. I’m not so sure. We might better think that ‘now’ is the gift. It’s all we’ve got.

Seneca: Letter III–Friendship

In this letter Seneca discusses friendship.

How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many of them could you sit with and talk about your thoughts and worries and deliberations? How many of them could you sit with in silence and be comfortable?

Seneca asks, regarding the quality of friendship, “Why should I keep back anything when I’m with a friend? Why shouldn’t I imagine I’m alone when I’m in his company?”

I’m reminded of the Finns, apparently not a talkative people, for whom it is quite normal to be able to sit for hours with another person and say nothing and feel quite comfortable.

Seneca’s approach to friendship is pragmatic. His basic rule is that you must judge people first, then decide if you want to develop a friendship. Seneca considers ‘friendship’ a serious matter.

But if you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.

Seneca notes, “Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself.” That seems a tall order, particularly in the rush today where we pay more attention to distractions than to ourselves.

Seneca’s prescription carries a serious implication. If you are to develop such friendships it becomes necessary to live honestly with yourself, so that there is nothing you would hide even from an enemy.

Even so, Seneca says to avoid the bartender syndrome (though not in so many words). He notes there are people who will tell everything to any person they meet, ‘unburdening themselves of whatever is on their minds into any ear they please’. Having been a bartender, every drinker’s dearest most confidential friend, I can appreciate his thought. He also chides those who confide nothing to their friends, and want not to confide in themselves their own deep secrets. Seneca regards both of these paths as faults.

Balance is what he seeks in friendship. It would seem possible only in true friendship, certainly not in today’s shallow concept promulgated by Facebook and the like. The popular sense of friendship in the public arena is fine as long as we know what it means, and do not mistake it for the real thing.

Most of what passes for friendship these days seems to develop by accident. We become bosom buddies with people who a few days before were strangers. We share some small passion for this, that, or the other and immediately relate to another we discover sharing the same passion. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Too often it seems we become friends before we become acquaintances.

Seneca would have us withhold ourselves and wait until we can form a reasoned judgment of the character of the person, and then decide whether to form a friendship. It sounds all a bit cold, but I suspect that in the long run we would have stronger friends and friendships, perhaps even profound ones.

But it is not just that such a process is unfamiliar to most of us. It is not just that lives lived now are fraught with busyness and distractions that we allow or seek or cannot escape. I think it may also be that most people simply lack the intellectual strength and tools to engage in such a process. After all, if we judge Presidential candidates based on the cut of their hair or the size and shape of their jaw, betting the future of an entire nation on such judgment, we can hardly consider ourselves equipped to judge the character of those we would have as friends. Rather, we let people come and go through our lives, often not understanding why they arrive or why they leave. Thinking and self-reflection seem to be increasingly lost skills. I’m not sure that without them we can have friends.

One can of course object that Seneca’s prescription eliminates the flow of emotion, the rush and flood of feeling that can accompany the onset of friendships. These can be quiet or they can be raging. I think that Seneca appreciates the place of emotion in relationships, else one could not welcome someone ‘heart and soul’ into a friendship. It’s important to not let emotion be the sole or even primary driver. I think that if one starts with emotion it becomes much harder to establish and maintain a lasting relationship, whereas starting from rational faculties perhaps a more honest emotional component can take root.

Our culture mitigates against the sort of thing that Seneca promotes. We want things to happen now. We want to be liked. We want it to happen now. Americans tend not to think in terms of long time. We’re bombarded by advertising that says get it now, do it now, buy it now; that seeks to make us feel guilty if we’re not ‘pretty’ or ‘handsome’, or don’t have the latest gadget or the latest version of the latest gadget. The idea of taking time to assess whether someone would make a good friend, would be someone to trust with the mundane bits of our lives as well as the important parts, the idea of doing that just doesn’t fit into the cultural picture. Besides, we don’t have the time, do we? We have to get to the next thing we’ve been told we have to get to, that we’ve been told is important.

A cynic might say that American life is simply a series of one-night stands with advertiser’s fantasies. The truth might be that American life is closer to a series of two-minute stands.

The good life takes time and thought, and despite all the shiny things the corporate fantasists offer, the one thing they don’t want you to have is time: time to think, time to reflect, time to judge.

Step back. Think. Seek balance. Your friends will last longer.