15 - The Day, and Those Who Live It Backwards

Two letters about the shape of a day: one in which Seneca submits his own to inspection, and one in which he examines the people who have turned theirs upside down. The first begins with a request Lucilius has made for an account of how Seneca spends his time, generally and day by day. Seneca takes the request as a compliment — it assumes there is nothing in his days he would need to hide — and turns it immediately into a principle. We should live as if we were in public view and think as if someone could look into the innermost recesses of our hearts, because someone can. What is gained by concealing something from other people when nothing is hidden from God, who is present in our minds and in attendance among our thoughts? So he agrees, and starts by putting himself under observation. The practice he recommends alongside the report is the review of the day, and the reason he gives for it is the sharpest sentence in the letter: what really ruins our characters is that none of us ever looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and even that only occasionally, and never about what we have done — although every plan for the future depends on the past. Then the account itself, and it is deliberately unimpressive. Today has been unbroken; nobody has robbed him of any part of it; it has been divided entirely between his bed and his reading. A very small portion went to physical exercise, and here he says he is grateful for old age, because the exercise costs him almost nothing. He only has to stir and he is tired — which is, after all, the point at which exercise ends even for the strongest man. He has one trainer, a likeable young fellow named Pharius, and one is plenty. The letter then turns to the question of drink and how a man should hold himself against it. The second letter opens on the shortening of the year's daylight. It has contracted a good deal, Seneca says, though there is still a generous amount left for anyone willing to rise with it — and more commendable still is the man who waits for the light and intercepts the sun's first rays. What follows is a portrait of the opposite, drawn with obvious relish. Shame on the man who lies dozing when the sun is already high, whose waking hours begin in the middle of the day, and who for many of his acquaintances is still keeping early hours at that. There are people who have inverted the functions of day and night altogether, and who do not part eyelids leaden from the previous day's drinking until night has fallen again. Their way of living, he observes, resembles the situation of those peoples whom nature has planted on the far side of the world beneath our feet — the ones for whom, in Virgil's lines, the reddening Evening is only beginning to light its lamps at the hour when Dawn's panting horses first breathe on us. But these antipodes live in the same city as we do. Marcus Cato said of such men that they had never seen the sun rise or set. Seneca puts the objection as a question and does not soften it: can you imagine that people like this know how one ought to live, when they do not even know when one ought to live? And can they really fear death in the way everybody else does, when what they have retreated into during their own lifetimes is precisely this? They are as strange, he concludes, as the birds that fly by night. 📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140442103?... As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.