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Ep. 8: Nothing Is Ours Except Time · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  Picture an old man at a writing desk in Rome.
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  The year is somewhere around AD 62 to 64.
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  I imagine a lamp not yet needed, because it's still morning,
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  and a few sheets laid out in front of him.
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  He is ailing, he is in his sixties, and he has spent most of his adult life near the
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  most dangerous young man in the world.
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  His name is Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca the Younger.
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  He was born around 4 BC and he would die in AD 65.
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  He had been tutor to Nero, and then one of the men who helped steer the empire while
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  Nero was still learning to be emperor.
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  Along the way he had become very rich.
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  That detail matters, and we'll come back to it.
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  Something has recently changed around him.
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  Burrus, the commander of the praetorian guard and Seneca's partner in managing the
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  young emperor, has died.
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  With Burrus gone, the court feels less like a partnership and more like a room where
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  one man holds all the cards.
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  Seneca tries to withdraw.
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  He steps back from public life, as far as a man like that is allowed to step back.
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  And what does he do with his retirement?
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  He writes letters.
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  Last time we left Athens, and the founding generations of the Stoa,
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  behind us.
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  Today we arrive in Rome, where a different kind of man opens his letters with a
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  ledger of lost hours.
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  The letters are addressed to Lucilius.
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  He is younger than Seneca, a Roman of the equestrian class,
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  serving as an imperial procurator in Sicily.
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  That means he is a civil servant, managing the emperor's business on an island
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  across the water.
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  He is also, it seems, someone with literary ambitions, a man who wants to write
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  poetry.
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  Seneca calls him his friend, and the letters read like the words of a man who wants
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  that friend to do better with his one life.
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  Here is a strange fact about the collection.
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  We have only Seneca's half.
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  Whatever Lucilius wrote back, his questions, his reports, his small defenses,
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  has not survived.
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  So we read one side of a conversation, and we have to guess the other side from the
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  echoes.
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  People who study these letters still argue about what they are.
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  Were they real letters, folded and sent across the sea?
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  Were they a literary work, shaped from the start with readers in mind?
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  Or both at once?
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  I don't think anyone can settle that for us this morning, so let's leave the
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  question open and simply listen.
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  The first letter begins plainly.
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  Seneca writes, in Richard Mott Gummere's translation: "Greetings from Seneca to his
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  friend Lucilius."
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  Then he gets straight to business, and the business is accounting.
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  He tells Lucilius to set himself free for his own sake, and to gather and save his
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  time, "which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away,
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  or has merely slipped from your hands."
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  Notice what he's doing.
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  He's keeping books.
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  Time is taken from us in three ways.
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  Some of it is forced from us, by people and duties that simply demand it.
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  Some of it is filched, taken quietly while we aren't looking.
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  And some of it merely slips away.
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  Seneca says the most disgraceful kind of loss is the one "due to carelessness."
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  Then comes a line that, I think, would make any of us wince.
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  He writes that if you pay close heed, you will find "that the largest portion of our
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  life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing,
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  and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose."
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  Doing ill.
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  Doing nothing.
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  Doing what is beside the point.
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  That's the whole page of the ledger, and he hasn't even reached the second paragraph
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  yet.
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  And then he asks a question that sounds like a man standing in a marketplace.
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  "What man can you show me who places any value on his time,
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  who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?"
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  Dying daily.
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  This is where the letter turns.
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  Most of us picture death as something ahead of us, waiting at a corner.
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  Seneca says no, we are mistaken when we look forward to it.
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  He writes, "the major portion of death has already passed.
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  Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands."
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  Sit with that for a moment.
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  The years behind you are not lost somewhere pleasant.
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  They are already spent, already out of your reach.
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  Only the hour in front of you is still yours to handle.
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  So he gives Lucilius a short instruction: "hold every hour in your grasp."
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  And then the line that has lasted two thousand years: "While we are postponing,
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  life speeds by."
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  I like to imagine Seneca writing that sentence slowly.
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  He's a man who knows what it is to stand close to power and to put things off,
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  because the court will always give you a reason to put things off.
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  Next week.
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  After this crisis.
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  When the emperor is calmer.
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  That's my interpretation, not something the letter says.
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  But the sentence reads to me like it was written by someone who has watched a great
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  many tomorrows disappear.
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  Now the sentence at the center of the letter.
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  Seneca writes: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
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  Here is where the Roman bookkeeper comes through.
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  He says nature entrusted us with the ownership of this single thing,
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  and that it is so fleeting and slippery that anyone who wants to can push us out of
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  possession.
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  Then he points at his fellow Romans, who are careful about every coin.
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  They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced,
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  to be charged in the reckoning.
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  But they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that
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  precious commodity, time.
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  And then he closes the thought with a sentence like a gavel.
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  "And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay."
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  Think about how strange that is, for a man in his position.
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  Seneca was wealthy, and I mean vast wealth, the kind that made people talk.
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  And here he is, telling a younger friend that nothing is ours except time.
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  I think he would feel the irony of that, and some readers in his own day certainly
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  did.
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  We'll let the irony stand, because I don't believe he tries to hide from it.
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  Look at what he does next.
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  Lucilius, we can imagine, has asked him a pointed question.
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  How do you practice what you preach?
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  And Seneca doesn't climb onto a pedestal.
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  He answers in the language of the ledger.
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  "I confess frankly," he writes, "my expense account balances."
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  But he does not claim he wastes nothing.
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  He says he cannot boast of that.
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  What he can do is tell Lucilius what he is wasting, and the cause and manner of the
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  loss.
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  That is a remarkably honest thing to say.
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  He is not a perfect sage handing down commandments.
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  He is a man who still loses hours, and who at least keeps an account of where they
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  go.
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  He compares himself to people reduced to slender means through no fault of their
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  own, whom everyone forgives, but no one comes to rescue.
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  Then the letter ends, quickly, with a little ripple of wisdom from an old poem.
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  Seneca writes, "I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough
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  for him."
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  He advises Lucilius to keep what is really his, and not to wait.
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  Because, as the ancestors believed, "it is too late to spare when you reach the
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  dregs of the cask."
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  That proverb comes from Hesiod, the Greek poet, from his Works and Days.
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  The idea is simple and a little grim.
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  The wine at the top of the jar is good.
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  The wine at the bottom is thin and sour.
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  If you only start to economize when you can see the bottom,
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  you are saving the worst of it.
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  Seneca says the amount left is slight, and the quality is vile.
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  And then, in a single word, he signs off.
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  Farewell.
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  What does this passage teach, set beside this life?
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  Here is what I take from it, and it's my reading, not a rule.
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  Seneca did not write about time from a place of safety.
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  He wrote from the edge of a court where one man's mood could end another man's life,
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  and where hours were claimed by flatterers, officials and fear.
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  In that setting, a ledger of time is not a clever metaphor.
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  It is a way of staying awake.
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  And he doesn't pretend to have it solved.
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  His own books balance, he says, but he still wastes time.
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  A teacher who admits that is easier to trust, I think, than one who claims he never
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  slips.
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  So when the morning is still new, and nothing has yet been spent,
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  that's a good moment to hear him once more.
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  "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
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  Then let the day begin.