Form
This essay is not concise—but perhaps one of the reasons I say so is because it is laden with examples and anecdotes from the first century A.D. This makes it historically interesting but difficult to relate to and tricky to evaluate from my 21st century perspective. When I come to a text that is clearly archaic, a translucent banner descends over my reading of it, so that whenever I turn the page I see “OLD & REVEREND” blaring over the author’s words.
That said, I still gleaned some craft from the form of the essay. Seneca begins with a common complaint: Life is too short. But by the end of the first paragraph, he’s flipped the complaint back on the complainer: Life, if you know how to use it, is actually long. This is the perfect format for the introduction of a persuasive essay.
(1) Convince the reader there is a hopeless-seeming (in this case, universal) problem with the world.
(2) After making the situation look as convincingly grim as possible, identify the cause of the problem and promise a solution.
The remainder of the essay expands on these two, simple claims. But his expansion is also strategic, which leads me to the third step of the persuasive format:
(3) Hint at the solution at the beginning, but leave the details of its practical implementation until the latter half of the essay. This keeps the reader in suspense and also gives you time to flesh out your argument and convince the reader of the worldview behind the argument, so that by the time he reaches the practical part, he is eager to follow your instructions.
Content (I summarize and interpret the essay here, but you can also read “On the Shortness of life”.)
Let’s see how Seneca employs this method.
He begins by listing all of the situations that make life seem so short: “exhausted by ambition,” “worn out by voluntary servitude in thankless attendance upon the great,” “following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new,” “tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own.” After these generalities, he gives concrete examples of historical figures, including Augustus and Cicero, using anecdotes and quotations to demonstrate that their might did not lead to happiness. But it’s not just the workaholics who waste their lives but also the “gentlemen” who spend their time in idleness, “so enfeebled … by the exessive lassitude of a pampered mind that they cannot find out by themselves whether they are hungry!”
Seneca proposes that a common attitude towards time brings these seeming-opposite categories of men together: namely, that they waste it. What does this waste look like? Ignoring the past, they become “engrossed” in the present fleeting moment, and put off the future. Because they have no consciousness of their life as a whole, “life vanishes into an abyss … if there is nothing for it to settle upon, it passes out through the holes and chinks of the mind.” Such a life is short because to such men the past and future don’t exist, but only the present. And the present is nothing more than the blink of an eye!
At this point, Seneca states point blank that the key to a happy life is to read philosophy. As I read this, I rolled my eyes. Good grief. Of course, a philosopher would say that. But I think he is making a broader point than what I immediately assumed.
Let’s go back to his long discourse on wasted lives. If “those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled,” isn’t the key to the happy life simply to do the opposite? Then, the key to the happy life is to remember the past, use the present, and anticipate the future. Ultimately, Seneca’s solution isn’t just a trite “Go read Plato” but an urge to adopt a new attitude towards time. The wise man “makes his life long by combing all times into one.” Rather than being conscious only of the present moment, the wise man uses the present to connect the past to the future. He retains consciousness of all three by making them work with one another. Once all periods of his life are in harmony with one another, his life gains coherence and meaning.
Seneca’s exhortation to read philosophy is a means to this end. The philosophers spent their lives trying to come up with good, true, and beautiful frameworks for life. They might have disagreed with each other on almost every point, but what they shared was an overarching thirst for integrity—a need to make word and deed one and the same, to stand whole upon an eternal truth and not be moved.
This is what Seneca wants, and what he urges Paulinus, his interlocutor, to pursue. “Hope leads to new hope, ambition to new ambition” when you allow yourself to be engrossed. Remain conscious of the bigger picture. Only there will you find peace.
In a beautiful passage near the end, Seneca tells us to turn our eyes from the ground and ask “what shape God has; what fate awaits your soul; where Nature lays us to rest when we are freed from the body; what the principle is that upholds all the heaviest matter in the centre of this world, suspends the light on high, carries fire to the topmost part, summons the stars to their proper changes … Now, while the blood is hot, we must enter with brisk step upon the better course. In this kind of life there awaits much that is good to know—the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of living and dying, and a life of deep repose.” These things are forever full of wonder and worth pursuing.
Seneca ends with a warning. He describes a rich man’s funeral, full of “huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works.” There is sadness in his words as Seneca comments on this practice: “in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span.” In Rome, the only funerals conducted in this way were those of little children. His point? Once we have wasted our lives in ephemeral pursuits, no measure of pomp and circumstance can buy it back. So, carpe diem! Whether the day be here, gone, or to come, seize it with all your might.