‘On the Shortness of Life’: Life Is Long—If You Know How to Use It
‘On the Shortness of Life’, by Seneca, reviewed.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger — or Seneca, as most of us know him — is something of an interesting character. Known best as one of the three great Roman Stoics (the others being Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus), he was also a dramatist, tutor to the emperor Nero, and one of the richest, if not the richest, men in all of Rome. Those latter facts will excite a raised eyebrow in most of us. How could the billionaire teacher of one of history’s greatest villains (Cassius Dio describes how Nero fastened naked boys to stakes to ‘satisfy his brutal lust under the appearance of devouring parts of their bodies’) be admired not just as a great moral philosopher but almost as a kind of saint? Rest assured, reader, that may have been puzzled by this apparent contradiction.
Many philosophers failed to live up to their own standards, however; and the fact is that whatever the extent to which Seneca practiced what he preached, he was a fine philosopher whose work, including To Mother Helvia, On Consolation, and On Clemency, contains wise, practical advice on topics like anger, vengeance, and grief. Perhaps his most famous work, however, is On the Shortness of Life, a moral essay addressed to his father-in-law, Paulinus, in around 49 A.D. In this treatise, Seneca argues that a life of any length is sufficient if lived wisely. His point is contained in the following quotation, which some editions of the essay display on their front: ‘We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it … Life is long if you know how to use it.’
There is an irony for Seneca in the way in which we go to great lengths to protect our property and our money while we allow others to fritter away something that has much greater value.
Seneca’s central theme in his essay is value. He argues that we fail to see that, though time is an abstraction, unable to be touched or even felt moment to moment, it is the most precious resource we have. For Seneca, it is ironic that we go to great lengths to protect our property and money while we let others fritter away something that has much greater value, because it can never be retrieved once lost: ‘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.’ The wise person — the sage — understands this, and so does not waste his time fretting about events that are out of his control. Conscious of the value of time, he lives in the present, with the goal of conforming to nature in the Stoic fashion. In the fullness of the present moment, he achieves not just virtue, but happiness.
Conscious of the value of time, the sage lives in the present.
Seneca raises the Roman literary style of the age to an especially high register. His prose is distinct, aphoristic, sometimes funny, full of rhetorical questions, and always readable. ‘The great obstacle to living is expectancy,’ he writes, in typical style, ‘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.’ This style served as a model for John Calvin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne, who coined the word ‘essay’ and popularised it as a literary form in the 16th century.
‘Ueritatem dies aperit,’ writes Seneca in On Anger: ‘Time discloses the truth.’ This is often the conclusion reached by those who study the classics, and who find in the experience or advice of the writers of Greece and Rome commentaries on human nature which seem as true today as they were back then. We find in On the Shortness of Life one of the finest, most concise literary reminders to find our purpose, to live mindfully, and not to waste our time martyring ourselves over trivial things, or fretting over what we cannot control. Such advice is easier to give and to receive than to put into practice, of course; but we can say with certainty that consciousness of the shortness of our lives is a condition for making it long.
