“I’m too busy to read.” Seneca has heard it all before, and he isn’t buying it. In this short letter he explains how he keeps his time his own: he lends himself to his duties instead of surrendering to them, and wherever he goes, he keeps the best company there is, the great minds of […]
Letter 61 On Meeting Death Cheerfully
Seneca is old now, and he writes this short letter as if death might call him away before he finishes the sentence. It isn’t gloomy. It’s the calm of a man who has stopped wanting what he wanted as a boy, who tries to live each day as if it were a complete life, and […]
Letter 60 On Harmful Prayers
Be careful what the people who love you wish for you. In this short, fiery letter, Seneca “files a complaint” against the prayers of our families, who wish us wealth, status, and plenty, and against our own endless appetite for more. Nature, he reminds us, is satisfied with very little. And he ends with a […]
Letter 59 On Pleasure and Joy
What’s the difference between pleasure and joy? In Letter 59 Seneca draws a sharp line: pleasure is a passing high that can flip into its opposite, while real joy comes from inside, never stops, and can’t be taken away. Along the way he praises Lucilius’s writing, borrows a great image of a wise person as […]
Letter 58 On Being
Letter 58 begins as a word-nerd’s lament, with Seneca grumbling that Latin is too poor to translate Greek philosophy, and then becomes a guided tour of Plato’s six ways of saying that something “is.” But Seneca won’t let philosophy stay abstract. From Plato’s ideas he draws a practical lesson: the things that excite our appetites […]