Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
December 23, 2005“Life is Long If You Know How to Use It!” Last night, Matteo, my flatmate, before leaving for Italy, gave me this book by Seneca (c. 5 BC -AD 65) as a Christmas gift.
It is a small book with big ideas: how to come to terms with the brevity of life? The reading is stimulating and reminds me of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Foucault’s the technology of the self quite often. I really like the kind of the books worth reading at any age from one’s tender 10 to ripe 80. The places of reading them are not restricted either: they can be consumed at an unimaginitive desk, or in a moving train, or in a tediously long waiting queue, or even in a toilet allowing one to be highly pensive and self-reflective! Thank you, Matteo, and I also enjoyed quite a lot discussing “Modernism as a problem” with you in our funny little kitchen in Butlers Wharfs, though conclusions were hardly reached on most occasions.
It is not that we have a short time to live , but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.
From: Seneca: On the Shortness of Life, pp.1-2 Trans. by C D N Costa / Cover Design: Phil Baines for the Great Ideas series, 2004, Penguin Group, 1997
