On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

Summary

A free therapy session with a Stoic to improve the quality of, happiness and tranquillity in our lives. Seneca touches on time, grief and peace of mind over 3 essays. Worth rereading until the day I die.

Key Takeaways

• We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.
• People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
• You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
• The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
• We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. 
• Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
• It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil.
• Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.
• No man is despised by another unless he is first despised by himself.
• If you must fill your time, write something in a simple style for your own use and not for publication: less toil is needed if you study only for the day.
• Unproductive idleness nurtures malice.
• You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.
• You must consider whether your nature is more suited to practical activity or to quiet study and reflection, and incline in the direction your natural faculty and disposition take you. Inborn dispositions do not respond well to compulsion, and we labour in vain against nature’s opposition.
• It is far better to devote yourself to a few authors than to get lost among many.
• It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them mad.
• Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.

What I got out of it

Reading On the Shortness of Life made me want to make an audio recording of the text. It’s an essay that I want to read/listen to as often as possible.

All 3 essays are great and suitable for different circumstances/struggles. It felt like Seneca was giving me a therapy session and his thoughts reminded me of Hagakure.

I’ll definitely revisit this book. It has a ton of depth. What stuck with me on my first read:

• How to counter boredom: study and the practical application of that which you’re practising (for). Let curiosity and your natural disposition guide you in what to focus on.
• “We can choose whose children we would like to be,” and “Devote yourself to a few authors than get lost among many.” We don’t control our circumstances but we control our actions. Learn not what is easy, but that which has stood the test of time. Constantly upgrade your input sources.
• Learn wisdom from the past and (from) the mistakes made by others to extend your lifespan. This is something that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger hammer on too.
• Focus on what comes naturally to you. “Inborn dispositions do not respond well to compulsion, and we labour in vain against nature’s opposition.”
• Memento mori (“Remember that you have to die”) and “Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” I know the importance of this will escape my mind in a day or two so I need to create a system to remind myself of this constantly. 
• Take breaks. “Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.”

Summary & Quotes

On the Shortness of Life

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.

Can anyone dare to complain about another’s pride when he himself never has time for himself?

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

I would like to fasten on someone from the older generation and say to him: ‘I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundredth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarrelling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left: to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.’

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

It is the sign of a great man, and one who is above human error, not to allow his time to be frittered away: he has the longest possible life simply because whatever time was available he devoted entirely to himself. None of it lay fallow and neglected, none of it under another’s control; for being an extremely thrifty guardian of his time he never found anything for which it was worth exchanging.

The man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion. For the rest, Fortune can dispose as she likes: his life is now secure. Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold.

If each of us could have the tally of his future years set before him, as we can of our past years, how alarmed would be those who saw only a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them! And yet it is easy to organize an amount, however small, which is assured; we have to be more careful in preserving what will cease at an unknown point.

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.

Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. For this last is the one over which Fortune has lost her power, which cannot be brought back to anyone’s control.

The man who must fear his own memory is the one who has been ambitious in his greed, arrogant in his contempt, uncontrolled in his victories, treacherous in his deceptions, rapacious in his plundering, and wasteful in his squandering. And yet this is the period of our time which is sacred and dedicated, which has passed beyond all human risks and is removed from Fortune’s sway, which cannot be harassed by want or fear or attacks of illness. It cannot be disturbed or snatched from us: it is an untroubled, everlasting possession.

Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own.

None of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how to die. None of them will exhaust your years, but each will contribute his years to yours. With none of these will conversation be dangerous, or his friendship fatal, or attendance on him expensive. From them you can take whatever you wish: it will not be their fault if you do not take your fill from them. What happiness, what a fine old age awaits the man who has made himself a client of these! He will have friends whose advice he can ask on the most important or the most trivial matters, whom he can consult daily about himself, who will tell him the truth without insulting him and praise him without flattery, who will offer him a pattern on which to model himself.

We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become. These will offer you a path to immortality and raise you to a point from which no one is cast down. This is the only way to prolong mortality – even to convert it to immortality.

Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil.

The state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.

When you see a man repeatedly wearing the robe of office, or one whose name is often spoken in the Forum, do not envy him: these things are won at the cost of life.

Consolation to Helvia 

I shall expose and reopen all the wounds which have already healed. Someone will object: ‘What kind of consolation is this, to bring back forgotten ills and to set the mind in view of all its sorrows when it can scarcely endure one?’ But let him consider that those disorders which are so dangerous that they have gained ground in spite of treatment can generally be treated by opposite methods.

This will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife. What shall I achieve? That a soul which has conquered so many miseries will be ashamed to worry about one more wound in a body which already has so many scars.

Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.

I’ve come across people who say that there is a sort of inborn restlessness in the human spirit and an urge to change one’s abode; for man is endowed with a mind which is changeable and unsettled: nowhere at rest, it darts about and directs its thoughts to all places known and unknown, a wanderer which cannot endure repose and delights chiefly in novelty. This will not surprise you if you consider its original source. It was not made from heavy, earthly material, but came down from that heavenly spirit: but heavenly things are by nature always in motion, fleeing and driven on extremely fast.

How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.

You will hardly find a single country still inhabited by its original natives: everywhere the people are of mixed and imported stock. One group has followed another: one longed for what another scorned; one was driven out from where he had expelled others. So fate has decreed that nothing maintains the same condition forever.

For how little have we lost, when the two finest things of all will accompany us wherever we go, universal nature and our individual virtue.

Only the most worthless of our possessions should come into the power of another. Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature’s greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain.

There is no evil in poverty, as anyone knows who has not yet arrived at the lunatic state of greed and luxury, which ruin everything. For how little is needed to support a man! And who can lack this if he has any virtue at all? As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distinctions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.

Nature has not made any of man’s essentials laborious as well.

It is his fault, not nature’s, if he feels poor. Even if you give him back all he has lost, you’ll be wasting your time; for once he is back from exile he will feel a greater lack compared with his desires than he felt as an exile compared with his former possessions.

The man who restrains himself within the bounds set by nature will not notice poverty; the man who exceeds these bounds will be pursued by poverty however rich he is. Life’s necessities are found even in places of exile, superfluities not even in kingdoms.

It is the mind that creates our wealth, and this goes with us into exile, and in the harshest desert places it finds sufficient to nourish the body and revels in the enjoyment of its own goods.

When once virtue has toughened the mind it renders it invulnerable on every side.

If greed, the most overmastering plague of the human race, has relaxed its grip, ambition will not stand in your way. If you regard your last day not as a punishment but as a law of nature, the breast from which you have banished the dread of death no fear will dare to enter. If you consider that sexual desire was given to man not for enjoyment but for the propagation of the race, once you are free of this violent and destructive passion rooted in your vitals, every other desire will leave you undisturbed. Reason routs the vices not one by one but all together: the victory is final and complete.’

No man is despised by another unless he is first despised by himself.

We are naturally disposed to admire more than anything else the man who shows fortitude in adversity.

By returning you did not gain the pleasure of your son’s presence, but you lost the habit of bearing his absence.

The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.

All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it. And so I am leading you to that resource which must be the refuge of all who are flying from Fortune, liberal studies. They will heal your wound, they will withdraw all your melancholy. Even if you had never been familiar with them you would have need of them now.

Return now to these studies and they will keep you safe. They will comfort you, they will delight you; and if they genuinely penetrate your mind, never again will grief enter there, or anxiety, or the distress caused by futile and pointless suffering. Your heart will have room for none of these, for to all other failings it has long been closed. Those studies are your most dependable protection, and they alone can snatch you from Fortune’s grip.

Whatever you do, inevitably your thoughts will turn to me constantly, and none of your other children will come to your mind more often, not because they are less dear to you but because it is natural to touch more often the part that hurts. So this is how you must think of me – happy and cheerful as if in the best of circumstances. For they are best, since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks, now delighting in more trivial studies, now in its eagerness for the truth rising up to ponder its own nature and that of the universe.

On Tranquility of Mind 

Some of my vices appeared clearly on the surface, so that I could lay my hand on them; some were more hidden away in the depths; some were not there all the time but return at intervals. These last I would say are the most troublesome: they are like prowling enemies who pounce on you when occasion offers, and allow you neither to be at the ready as in war nor at ease as in peace.

All virtues are fragile to start with and acquire firmness and strength with time.

I’m afraid that habit, which induces firmness in things, may drive this fault more deeply into me: long association brings love of evil as well as good.

‘Let no one rob me of a single day who is not going to make me an adequate return for such a loss. Let my mind be fixed on itself, cultivate itself, have no external interest – nothing that seeks the approval of another; let it cherish the tranquillity that has no part in public or private concerns.’

If you must fill your time, write something in a simple style for your own use and not for publication: less toil is needed if you study only for the day.

What you need is not those more radical remedies which we have now finished with – blocking yourself here, being angry with yourself there, threatening yourself sternly somewhere else – but the final treatment, confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.

The Greeks call this steady firmness of mind ‘euthymia’ (Democritus wrote a good treatise about it), but I call it tranquillity, as there is no need to imitate and reproduce the form of Greek words: the point at issue must be indicated by some term which should have the sense but not the form of the Greek name.

Remaining in a state of peace with no ups and downs: that will be tranquillity. Let us consider in general how this can be achieved: you will then extract what you like from the communal remedy.

They are all in the same category, both those who are afflicted with fickleness, boredom and a ceaseless change of purpose, and who always yearn for what they have left behind, and those who just yawn from apathy. 

There are those too who toss around like insomniacs, and keep changing their position until they find rest through sheer weariness. They keep altering the condition of their lives, and eventually stick to that one in which they are trapped not by weariness with further change but by old age which is too sluggish for novelty. 

There are those too who suffer not from moral steadfastness but from inertia, and so lack the fickleness to live as they wish, and just live as they have begun. In fact there are innumerable characteristics of the malady, but one effect – dissatisfaction with oneself. This arises from mental instability and from fearful and unfulfilled desires, when men do not dare or do not achieve all they long for, and all they grasp at is hope: they are always unbalanced and fickle, an inevitable consequence of living in suspense. They struggle to gain their prayers by every path, and they teach and force themselves to do dishonourable and difficult things; and when their efforts are unrewarded the fruitless disgrace tortures them, and they regret not the wickedness but the frustration of their desires. 

Then they are gripped by repentance for their attempt and fear of trying again, and they are undermined by the restlessness of a mind that can discover no outlet, because they can neither control nor obey their desires, by the dithering of a life that cannot see its way ahead, and by the lethargy of a soul stagnating amid its abandoned hopes.

When the pleasures have been removed which busy people derive from their actual activities, the mind cannot endure the house, the solitude, the walls, and hates to observe its own isolation. 

From this arises that boredom and self-dissatisfaction, that turmoil of a restless mind and gloomy and grudging endurance of our leisure, especially when we are ashamed to admit the reasons for it and our sense of shame drives the agony inward, and our desires are trapped in narrow bounds without escape and stifle themselves. From this arise melancholy and mourning and a thousand vacillations of a wavering mind, buoyed up by the birth of hope and sickened by the death of it.

For unproductive idleness nurtures malice, and because they themselves could not prosper they want everyone else to be ruined.

For the human mind is naturally mobile and enjoys activity. Every chance of stimulation and distraction is welcome to it – even more welcome to all those inferior characters who actually enjoy being worn out by busy activity.

We must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling ‘How long must I face the same things?’

You want to know what remedy I can recommend against this boredom. The best course, as Athenodorus says, would be to busy oneself with the practical activity of political involvement and civic duties.

For just as some people spend the day sun-bathing, exercising and the care for their bodies, and for athletes it is of the highest practical importance to spend most of their time cultivating the strength of their limbs, to which alone they have devoted themselves, so for you, who is training your mind for the contests of public life, by far the finest approach is regular practice. For when one intends to make himself useful to his fellow citizens and fellow men, he is at the same time getting practice and doing good if he throws himself heart and soul into the duty of looking after both the community and the individual.

The energies of lions and other animals are restricted by cages, but not of men, whose finest achievements are seen in retirement. However, let a man seclude himself on condition that, wherever he conceals his leisure, he is prepared to serve both individuals and all mankind by his intellect, his words and his counsel. Service to the state is not restricted to the man who produces candidates for office, defends people in court, and votes for peace and war: the man who teaches the young, who instils virtue into their minds (and we have a great shortage of good teachers), who grips and restrains those who are rushing madly after wealth and luxury, and if nothing more at least delays them – he too is doing a public service, though in private life.

If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.

This, I think, is what Virtue and Virtue’s disciple should do: if Fortune gets the better of someone and deprives him of the means of action, he should not immediately turn his back and bolt, dropping his weapons and looking for a place to hide (as if there were any place where Fortune could not find him), but he should apply himself more sparingly to his duties and choose something carefully in which he can serve the state.

If Fortune has removed you from a leading role in public life you should still stand firm and cheer others on, and if someone grips your throat, still stand firm and help though silent. The service of a good citizen is never useless: being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait.

Much the best course, therefore, is to combine leisure with some activity whenever a fully energetic life is impossible owing to the hindrances of chance or the state of the country; for you will never find absolutely every road blocked to some form of honourable activity.

We must take a careful look first at ourselves, then at the activities which we shall be attempting, and then at those for whose sake and with whom we are attempting them.

It is essential to appraise oneself, because we usually overestimate our capabilities.

We must appraise the actual things we are attempting and match our strength to what we are going to undertake. For the performer must always be stronger than his task: loads that are too heavy for the bearer are bound to overwhelm him. Moreover, certain tasks are not so much great as prolific in producing many other tasks: we must avoid those which give birth in turn to new and manifold activities, and not approach something from which we cannot easily withdraw. You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.

We must be especially careful in choosing people, and deciding whether they are worth devoting a part of our lives to them, whether the sacrifice of our time makes a difference to them. For some people actually charge us for our services to them.

You must consider whether your nature is more suited to practical activity or to quiet study and reflection, and incline in the direction your natural faculty and disposition take you.

Inborn dispositions do not respond well to compulsion, and we labour in vain against nature’s opposition.

But nothing delights the mind so much as fond and loyal friendship. What a blessing it is to have hearts that are ready and willing to receive all your secrets in safety, with whom you are less afraid to share knowledge of something than keep it to yourself, whose conversation soothes your distress, whose advice helps you make up your mind, whose cheerfulness dissolves your sorrow, whose very appearance cheers you up!

In choosing our friends for their characters we shall take care to find those who are the least corrupted: mixing the sound with the sick is how disease starts.

You must especially avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and who grasp at every pretext for complaint. Though a man’s loyalty and kindness may not be in doubt, a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.

Let us turn to private possessions, the greatest source of human misery. For if you compare all the other things from which we suffer, deaths, illnesses, fears, desires, endurance of pains and toils, with the evils which money brings us, the latter will far outweigh the others.

Men’s bodies are better fitted for warfare if they can be compressed into their armour than if they bulge out of it and by their very bulk are exposed on every side to wounds. So the ideal amount of money is that which neither falls within the range of poverty nor far exceeds it.

Let us get used to banishing ostentation, and to measuring things by their qualities of function rather than display. Let food banish hunger and drink banish thirst; let sex indulge its needs; let us learn to rely on our limbs, and to adjust our style of dress and our way of living not to the newfangled patterns but to the customs of our ancestors. Let us learn to increase our self-restraint, to curb luxury, to moderate ambition, to soften anger, to regard poverty without prejudice, to practise frugality, even if many are ashamed of it, to apply to nature’s needs the remedies that are cheaply available, to curb as if in fetters unbridled hopes and a mind obsessed with the future, and to aim to acquire our riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune.

Even in our studies, where expenditure is most worthwhile, its justification depends on its moderation.

It is far better to devote yourself to a few authors than to get lost among many.

You must reflect that fettered prisoners only at first feel the weight of the shackles on their legs: in time, when they have decided not to struggle against but to bear them, they learn from necessity to endure with fortitude, and from habit to endure with ease.

In no respect has nature put us more in her debt, since, knowing to what sorrows we were born, she contrived habit to soothe our disasters, and so quickly makes us grow used to the worst ills. No one could endure lasting adversity if it continued to have the same force as when it first hit us.

So you have to get used to your circumstances, complain about them as little as possible, and grasp whatever advantage they have to offer: no condition is so bitter that a stable mind cannot find some consolation in it.

Think your way through difficulties: harsh conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them.

Let us not envy those who stand higher than we do: what look like towering heights are precipices.

He will live badly who does not know how to die well.

He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.

For by foreseeing anything that can happen as though it will happen he will soften the onslaught of all his troubles, which present no surprises to those who are ready and waiting for them, but fall heavily on those who are careless in the expectation that all will be well.

Should it surprise me if the perils which have always roamed around me should someday reach me?

‘What can happen to one can happen to all.’ If you let this idea sink into your vitals, and regard all the ills of other people (of which every day shows an enormous supply) as having a clear path to you too, you will be armed long before you are attacked.

The next thing to ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities: that is, not to long either for what we cannot achieve, or for what, once gained, only makes us realize too late and after much exertion the futility of our desires. In other words, let our labour not be in vain and without result, nor the result unworthy of our labour; for usually bitterness follows if either we do not succeed or we are ashamed of succeeding.

Their roaming is idle and pointless, like ants crawling over bushes, which purposelessly make their way right up to the topmost branch and then all the way down again. Many people live a life like these creatures, and you could not unjustly call it busy idleness.

It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them mad.

‘Anyone who wishes to live a quiet life should not engage in many activities either privately or publicly’ – meaning, of course, useless ones. For if they are essential, then not just many but countless things have to be done both privately and publicly. But when no binding duty summons us we must restrain our actions. For a man who is occupied with many things often puts himself into the power of Fortune, whereas the safest policy is rarely to tempt her, though to keep her always in mind and to trust her in nothing.

Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation. We remove him not from the chances that befall mankind but from their mistakes, nor do all things turn out for him as he wished but as he reckoned – and above all he reckoned that something could block his plans. But inevitably the mind can cope more easily with the distress arising from disappointed longings if you have not promised it certain success.

We should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

All things considered, it is the mark of a greater mind not to restrain laughter than not to restrain tears, since laughter expresses the gentlest of our feelings, and reckons that nothing is great or serious or even wretched in all the trappings of our existence.

There is also another not inconsiderable source of anxieties, if you are too concerned to assume a pose and do not reveal yourself openly to anyone, like many people whose lives are false and aimed only at outward show. For it is agonizing always to be watching yourself in fear of being caught when your usual mask has slipped.

On the contrary, how full of pleasure is that honest and naturally unadorned simplicity that in no way hides its disposition!

But there is no danger of virtue being held cheap as a result of close observation, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to suffer agonies from everlasting pretence.

We should also withdraw a lot into ourselves; for associating with people unlike ourselves upsets a calm disposition, stirs up passions again, and aggravates any mental weakness which has not been completely cured. 

However, the two things must be mingled and varied, solitude and joining a crowd: the one will make us long for people and the other for ourselves, and each will be a remedy for the other; solitude will cure our distaste for a crowd, and a crowd will cure our boredom with solitude.

The mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration, but given amusing diversions.

Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.

Law-givers established holidays to give people a public mandate to enjoy themselves, thinking it necessary to introduce a sort of balance into their labours; and, as I said, certain great men gave themselves monthly holidays on fixed days, while others divided every day into periods of leisure and work.

We must go for walks out of doors, so that the mind can be strengthened and invigorated by a clear sky and plenty of fresh air. At times it will acquire fresh energy from a journey by carriage and a change of scene, or from socializing and drinking freely.

So here you have, my dear Serenus, the means of preserving your tranquillity, the means of restoring it, and the means of resisting the faults that creep up on you unawares. But be sure of this, that none of them is strong enough for those who want to preserve such a fragile thing, unless the wavering mind is surrounded by attentive and unceasing care.