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Ep. 13: Live as Long as You Ought, Not as Long as You Can · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  An old man walks into a town he hasn't seen in a long time.
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  I imagine the streets first.
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  The particular feel of a place you knew when you were young,
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  a doorway that looks smaller than it should.
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  Seneca doesn't give us any of that.
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  He tells us only what happened inside him.
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  He writes to his friend Lucilius: "After a long space of time I have seen your
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  beloved Pompeii.
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  I was thus brought again face to face with the days of my youth."
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  Richard Gummere, whose translation we're using, notes that Pompeii was probably the
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  birthplace of Lucilius, which would explain the word "your."
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  Then comes the strange part, the part anyone who has walked back into their own past
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  will recognize.
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  Seneca writes: "And it seemed to me that I could still do, nay,
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  had only done a short time ago, all the things which I did there when a young man."
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  The decades fold up.
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  For a moment, the boy and the old man are standing in the same place.
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  This is Ep.
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  13 of The Morning Stoic, and I want to say plainly what this morning's letter is
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  about.
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  It's Letter 70, and it's one of the most debated letters in all of Stoicism,
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  because it argues about when a life may be ended by its owner.
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  I'm going to treat it strictly as ancient history and ancient ethics.
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  It is an argument from Rome, not advice.
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  If that isn't a subject for your morning, skip this one, and we'll be back tomorrow
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  with something else.
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  First, the man and his moment.
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  In an earlier episode we met Seneca's asthma, the attacks he called a rehearsal for
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  dying.
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  That was a letter about the body.
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  This one is about something larger, and it was written at a darker time.
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  The letters are generally placed in his last years, after he had stepped back from
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  political life in the year 62.
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  He had once been Nero's tutor and then one of the most powerful men around him.
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  Now he was an older man, rich and famous, in the orbit of an emperor who could turn
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  on anyone.
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  Hold that in mind.
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  Under Nero, treason trials were real, informers were real, and a summons from the
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  palace could end with a forced death.
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  Seneca himself would die in the year 65.
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  Tacitus says Nero ordered it.
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  Other historians say Seneca chose it rather than face execution for his alleged part
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  in a conspiracy.
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  We have to read Letter 70 knowing that the writer lived inside that fear.
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  The letter's title is "On the proper time to slip the cable."
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  That's a sailor's image, and the letter is full of ships.
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  From the memory of Pompeii, Seneca turns to the sea.
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  He writes: "We have sailed past life, Lucilius, as if we were on a voyage."
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  And he quotes the poet Vergil: "Lands and towns are left astern."
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  I find this the loveliest stretch of the letter.
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  He says that on this journey, where time flies with the greatest speed,
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  we put below the horizon first our boyhood, then our youth,
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  then the years between youth and middle age, and next, the best years of old age
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  itself.
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  Each one sinks behind the stern, and you only notice it once it's gone.
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  I imagine Seneca at a window, looking at the water, thinking of the boy who once did
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  all those things in Pompeii.
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  Then he turns the image toward what lies ahead.
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  He writes: "Fools that we are, we believe this bourne to be a dangerous reef; but it
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  is the harbour, where we must some day put in, which we may never refuse to enter."
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  Death, he says, is not the rock that wrecks the ship.
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  It's the harbour the ship was always bound for.
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  And he draws a comparison between sailors.
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  Some, he says, are "tricked and held back by sluggish winds,"
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  and grow weary and sick of the calm, while others are carried quickly home by steady
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  gales.
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  That's the comfort he's offering, and it's a real one.
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  A short life isn't a failed life.
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  A long life isn't automatically a rich one.
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  Someone who has reached the harbour early, he says, has no more right to complain
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  than a sailor who has made a quick voyage.
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  I think many people who've buried someone young have wished for words like that,
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  even while doubting them.
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  But Seneca doesn't stop at comfort.
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  He moves from the voyage to a claim about how a life should be judged,
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  and here is the sentence this episode is named for.
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  He writes: "For mere living is not a good, but living well.
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  Accordingly, the wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can."
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  Taken by itself, that line can sound like plain good sense.
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  A life should be measured by its quality, by who you are with,
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  what you do, and how you carry yourself.
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  Seneca says the wise man "always reflects concerning the quality,
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  and not the quantity, of his life."
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  Many Stoics, and many people who've never read a word of Stoicism,
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  would nod.
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  The trouble is where he takes the thought next.
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  A little further on, he writes: "It is not a question of dying earlier or later,
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  but of dying well or ill."
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  I need to slow down here, because this is the hinge.
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  Seneca was writing under Nero, about tyranny, arbitrary power,
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  and forced death.
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  His examples are of people who believed they were already condemned,
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  and he is arguing about what dignity remains to someone when a ruler holds the power
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  over life.
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  That is the world behind this sentence.
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  It is not a general rule for a bad week, a hard season, or a long illness.
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  And many readers, in his own time and in ours, reject his conclusion.
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  They hold that a life remains worth living in conditions Seneca thought intolerable,
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  and that the argument is simply wrong.
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  Even inside the letter, Seneca admits the ground isn't firm.
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  At one point he writes: "No general statement can be made, therefore,
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  with regard to the question whether, when a power beyond our control threatens us
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  with death, we should anticipate death, or await it."
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  He says there are many arguments pulling in either direction.
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  And he acknowledges opponents.
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  He writes: "You can find men who have gone so far as to profess wisdom and yet
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  maintain that one should not offer violence to one's own life."
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  So he knew that other thoughtful people disagreed with him,
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  and he argued with them anyway.
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  Gummere's own note adds that the Stoics themselves interpreted this problem in
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  different ways.
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  Some held that a noble purpose was needed.
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  Others held that almost any reason would do.
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  And the note points back to Plato's Phaedo, where Socrates says a philosopher must
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  not take his own life against the will of God.
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  Seneca also names Cato in this letter, and why Roman Stoics kept returning to Cato
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  is a story for soon.
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  We'll get to that.
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  There is one more thing to say about Socrates, because Seneca uses him.
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  He points out that Socrates spent thirty days in prison awaiting his sentence,
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  and says he did so to show himself submissive to the laws and to give his friends
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  something to learn from in his last days.
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  Seneca's Socrates is a man who waits, and who makes his waiting mean something.
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  So even the author of this letter doesn't tell one simple story about how to meet an
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  unjust end.
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  Why does a letter like this survive?
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  Partly because it's honest about a fear that was ordinary in Nero's Rome.
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  Seneca saw friends and fellow senators swept away, and he was trying to say
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  something about freedom in a world where freedom was thin.
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  I admire the nerve of the attempt.
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  I don't think it settles the question, and I don't think it was meant to hand a rule
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  to anyone.
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  It's a record of a mind pressed hard by its age.
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  If you're struggling, call or text 988 in the U.S.
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  (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or your local line.
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  So I'll leave Seneca where the letter began, with an old man who goes back to a town
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  of his youth and finds the years folded up beside him.
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  He sees the whole voyage at once, the lands and towns left astern,
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  and a harbour ahead that he calls ordinary, not frightening.
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  Whatever we make of the argument he builds from there, that first image of time
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  passing is one of the gentlest he ever drew.
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  Thanks for starting your morning here.