12 - Illness, Pain, and Endurance

Two letters in which Seneca uses his own body as the evidence, and turns two miserable episodes into an argument about what philosophy is owed. The first opens with a piece of self-mockery. He wonders whether there is anything he could not now be talked into, having recently been talked into a short sea crossing. The water was calm when they cast off, though the sky was heavily overcast with the kind of cloud that breaks into a squall. Wanting to shorten the trip, he steered straight across open water instead of following the coastline, and once he was far enough out that going on and turning back came to the same thing, the smoothness that had tempted him disappeared. There was no storm yet, but a heavy swell was running. He begged the helmsman to put him ashore; the helmsman objected that the coast was rugged, without a haven, and that a lee shore was the thing he feared most in bad weather. By then Seneca was too ill for danger to register — this was the sluggish kind of seasickness that upsets the stomach without ever relieving it — and he forced the man in. Close to shore he did not wait for anchors or manoeuvres: as a long-standing devotee of cold bathing, he simply dived in. The letter then converts the episode into a demand. A man who was seriously ill would drop everything to recover; the same urgency belongs to acquiring a sound mind, which nobody attains while busy with other things. Philosophy does not accept the time left over — she grants time. She is not something taken up in odd moments but a full-time occupation, present and demanding. Seneca illustrates it with Alexander, who told a state offering him part of its territory that he had not come to Asia to accept whatever they cared to give, but to let them keep whatever he chose to leave them. Philosophy says the same to every other occupation: you shall have what I reject. Give her your whole mind and an enormous gap opens between you and other men — you will end far ahead of mankind and not far behind the gods. The difference, he says, is only that they will exist for longer. And in one respect the wise man surpasses a god: the god owes his freedom from fear to his nature, while the wise man owes it to his own effort. To have all the frailty of a human being and all the freedom from care of a god is the achievement. Philosophy's power to blunt the blows of circumstance is beyond belief: no missile lodges in her, some blows she parries with the slack of her gown as though they were trivial, and others she flings back at whoever sent them. The second letter answers Lucilius, who has a persistent catarrh and the low fevers that come with it, and Seneca's authority here is unpleasantly earned. He had the same thing. While young he was defiant about it and refused to let it interfere, and then it took him completely: reduced to total emaciation, he reached a point where the discharges were close to carrying him off. More than once he wanted to end his life on the spot, and what stopped him was his father — the kindest of fathers, then an old man. Considering not how bravely he was capable of dying but how far from bravely his father was capable of bearing the loss, he ordered himself to live. There are times, he writes, when even to go on living is an act of courage. What follows is his account of what actually helped, and he insists the mechanism is not metaphorical: consoling thoughts, so long as they are not discreditable ones, contribute to a cure, because whatever raises the spirits benefits the body too. It was his Stoic studies that saved him. For having got out of bed at all he credits philosophy, and he puts it in the form of a debt — he owes her his life, and that is the least of what he owes her. His friends made a large contribution as well, through their cheerfulness and their company. The letter is the closest thing in the collection to a confession that the doctrine was not an ornament but the thing that kept him alive. 📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140442103?... As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.