Today’s Quotation is care of Seneca. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

A note from the translator of this week’s Quotomania, James Romm:

This quote gives a good sense of why Seneca is so enjoyable to read in Latin or translate. His short clauses fairly crackle with energy; metaphors pop in and out elusively as though playing hide and seek. At times the language is so seductive that one hardly cares what's being said, though the message is usually, as here, a powerful and soul-searching one.

Seneca lived in the Rome of the first century AD and served under emperor Nero as a kind of chief minister, even while composing works of Stoic philosophy. The riddle of a committed moralist who abetted an immoral regime has fascinated readers for centuries, and ultimately cannot be solved except with reference to the paradoxes and contradictions of of human nature. In the work from which this quote comes, "On the Shortness of Life," Seneca inveighs against those who waste their time on business and legal dealings, yet he certainly gave much of his own time to such occupations during his political career. Many have accused him of hypocrisy, but when he writes as passionately as he does here, with the intensity of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, one wants to believe he's sincere.

Death was a constant preoccupation for Seneca, as seen in this quote. "We are dying every day," he said at two different points in his surviving writings (of which there are a vast number). That is, our life is a journey toward death, from the moment we're born. If we truly understood that, we wouldn't waste precious hours on meaningless things -- in modern terms, scrolling through social media or channel surfing. "Life's too short" is an expression we use but we don't really grasp the problem it represents. Life's not short in itself, writes Seneca in "On the Shortness of Life," but we make it so by the way that we live. If we lived to the fullest at all times, we would lengthen our lives and even enjoy a kind of immortality. His essay, retitled in my translation as "How to Have a Life," teaches us how to achieve this.

Seneca addressed his essay to his father-in-law, Pompeius Paulinus, who was serving Rome as praefectus annonae, the official in charge of managing Rome's grain supply. Though the essay is meant to reach a wide readership, he deals at one point with Paulinus's circumstances in very specific terms. How can you think about whether mice are getting into the silos, he asks, when you could be contemplating the motions of stars, the origins of the cosmos, the fate of the soul after death? It's a wonderful passage that reminds us how we're surrounded by dross if we don't lift our minds toward the heavens. Unfortunately Seneca never deals with the problem that mice may very well destroy the grain supply if everyone has their eyes on the Milky Way.

I've translated four small volumes of selections from Seneca and have one more in the works. In spending time with his essays I feel I'm following his most urgent advice in "On the Shortness of Life:" "Those who make time for wisdom are the only ones truly alive," he writes there; "they not only attend to their own lifespan but add every age to their own." That's a powerful incentive to read more Seneca.