Seneca on the shortness of life
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
The essay is a letter to a man named Paulinus, who ran the grain supply of Rome, and its opening is the thesis: we are not given a short life, we make it short. There is enough of it for the largest undertakings if it is all invested. It feels brief because most of it is handed to other people and other aims, and we only notice at the end.
🏛️ Seneca's evidence is how differently we treat money and time. Nobody lets a stranger walk off with their property. Everybody lets a stranger walk off with their afternoon. He goes through the preoccupied one by one: the advocate living on applause, the man worn out by attending on the powerful, the collector, the one planning a retirement he keeps postponing. Their common fault is that they live in the future. They arrange life and do not get round to it.
Against them he sets the person who keeps time for themselves and spends it on philosophy, in the company of the dead thinkers, who are always in and never send you away poorer. He closes by telling Paulinus to leave the grain accounts and keep some of his life for himself.
✨KEY IDEAS
Life is long enough, if it is not squandered.
We guard property like misers and hand out time like spendthrifts.
A man may have existed for eighty years and lived for very few of them.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectation: it hangs on tomorrow and loses today.
You can adopt yourself into any household of the past and inherit what it thought.
📝READING NOTES
Paraphrase from a modern translation. The essay itself is ancient and free to quote, the translation I read is not, so there are no quotation marks here. Read on 12 and 13 July, the hottest weekend of the year, with the balcony door open and Pallet flat on the tiles.
Reading it in a low week
On the Sunday I wrote flat, not sad in the journal. This is not the obvious text for that. It is a scolding. But a scolding from two thousand years away is oddly bearable, and the diagnosis fitted: I could not have said what the previous week had been spent on.
What I take
- Time is the one account that only goes down. I had this from the first letter in February, as ⚓ Time is the only thing I own. Here it gets its long form, and the permanent note 💎 Time is the only thing I own that cannot be earned back is fed by both.
- Busyness is no defence. His preoccupied people are all industrious.
- The audit. He asks the reader to add up the days given to creditors, patrons, quarrels and running about town. I tried it on one week of my calendar. Sobering, though not as bad as he would predict.
What I leave
- He was one of the richest men in Rome. Advising a civil servant to retire to philosophy costs him nothing. Somebody has to count the grain. Paulinus's job fed a city, and Seneca waves it off as a waste of a good mind.
- His leisure rests on other people's time. He does not seem to notice who is cooking.
- He despises nearly every use of a life except his own. A man who arranges his books or follows the games is, to him, as lost as a drunk. I do not accept that the only unwasted hour is a studious one. Saturday at the climbing wall is not preparation for anything.
- He assumes the time is yours to reclaim. For most people, then and now, a good part of it is sold.
So: the ledger yes, the contempt no. See 📖 Seneca on time as the only possession for the shorter and better version, and 📖 Burkeman on finitude for the reply I read the following week.
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : On the Shortness of Life, written about AD 49, read in a modern translation
- Seneca argues that : life is not short, we waste most of it, and what remains feels short
- by stating that : people protect money and give away time, live in expectation of a later that does not come, and could have enough life if they kept it for themselves and for thought