Seneca, Moral Letters 30.4

Accordingly, I listened to Bassus with the deepest pleasure; he was casting his vote concerning death and pointing out what sort of a thing it is when it is observed, so to speak, nearer at hand. 

 

I suppose that a man would have your confidence in a larger degree, and would have more weight with you, if he had come back to life and should declare from experience that there is no evil in death; and so, regarding the approach of death, those will tell you best what disquiet it brings who have stood in its path, who have seen it coming and have welcomed it.

 

Bassus may be included among these men; and he had no wish to deceive us. He says that it is as foolish to fear death as to fear old age; for death follows old age precisely as old age follows youth. He who does not wish to die cannot have wished to live. For life is granted to us with the reservation that we shall die; to this end our path leads. 

 

Therefore, how foolish it is to fear it, since men simply await that which is sure, but fear only that which is uncertain!

 

Death has its fixed rule—equitable and unavoidable. Who can complain when he is governed by terms which include everyone? The chief part of equity, however, is equality. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 30 

 

I work in a field where authority is based on prestige instead of merit, and so I still find myself slipping back into the assumption that the best answers are always accompanied by the most impressive credentials. I need to remind myself how the man who understands is the man who is committed to the doing, not merely to the seeming. 

 

At the same time, it isn’t gritty experience alone that will impart wisdom, for it must be combined with a commitment to critical reflection. Twenty years as a lawyer doesn’t impart a sense of justice, and forty years as a politician doesn’t allow a man to define service. From all that has happened to him, how humbly and patiently has he reasoned about what it truly means? 

 

So too, a man who is dying does not automatically become an expert on the significance of death. No, he must choose to contemplate his particular state, and relate it back to a universal awareness of his human purpose, without being swayed by his narrow preferences or profits. Then you may find a man who is trustworthy. 

 

Bassus knows what it is about, because he takes his circumstances and collectedly reveals the good to be found within. I have not yet had a conversation with a man who has returned from the grave, though I have had several opportunities to learn from a man who is fast approaching the grave, and the lesson tends to be that endings do not have to be feared. 

 

I am quick to neglect how Nature has intended everything as a part within the whole, and why each piece of my existence is a necessary aspect of that existence. It was right that I came to be from something else, and now it is right that I pass away for the sake of something else. I was meant to be young, and now I am meant to be old. Creation plays itself out through transformations, so finding joy in dying is as valuable as finding joy in living. 

 

I show my egotism when I insist on making myself an exception to a rule that applies to the harmony of everyone and everything else. That I must die is inevitable, and is beyond my power; how I will encounter dying is according to my judgments, and so is within my power. 

 

There is a certain beauty in recognizing not only how death is equitable, or fair, but also in grasping how death treats us all with complete equality, or lacking in any dispensations. 

—Reflection written in 11/2012 

IMAGE: Anonymous English, Youth and Old Age Meet Near a Church (c. 1850)