Little about Seneca
What, then? Shall you not rather transfer your efforts to making it clear to all men that the search for the superfluous means a great outlay of time, and that many have gone through life merely accumulating the instruments of life?
There is something almost embarrassing about how direct that question is. Many have gone through life merely accumulating the instruments of life. Preparing to live. Postponing everything. Even if we paid strict attention, life would soon get ahead of us; but as we are now, life finds us lingering and passes us by as if it belonged to another.
He does not begin with luxury, but with time. With the morrow. With the small, casual deferrals that seem harmless. Have a few beers, do it tomorrow! What makes me think I am assured of a tomorrow?
And then, almost unexpectedly, the scene shifts.
My friend Maximus and I have been spending a most happy period of two days, taking with us very few slavesone carriage loadand no paraphernalia except what we wore on our persons. The mattress lies on the ground. Two rugs. Dried figs. Writing tablets. If I have bread, I use figs as a relish; if not, I regard figs as a substitute for bread.
It is such a quiet picture. A farmers cart. A barefoot driver. Nothing that would impress a passing crowd. And yet nothing could have been subtracted from the luncheon. The soul is never greater than when it has laid aside all extraneous things, and has secured peace for itself by fearing nothing, and riches by craving no riches.
This is not an attack on pleasure. It feels more like a clearing of the sky after too much weather. A sorting. A reminder that gold plate that goes with a man on his travels does not make him good. That which can fall to the lot of any man, no matter how base or despised he may be, is not a good. Wealth tumbles into the hands of certain men as a shilling tumbles down a sewer. Virtue stands above all such things.
What moves me most is his honesty. He blushes in the rattle trap. He approves and applauds thriftiness, yet still worries what other travelers think. The simple life is not a performance. It is an inward shift, and sometimes a slow one.
I should certainly delight in the simple pleasures, he writes, while never confusing them with the challenge of the most perfecting joy.
Treat each day as a last day. There is living, and then there is putting off the living. Between figs and feasts, between craving and contentment, the difference is not what lies on the table, but what lies at rest within the soul.