If you're going to Rome, have Seneca join you as your guide to the thought of the ancient city.
Seneca's Dialogues and Essays, which Oxford University Press published, contains nine essays that if read in Rome will lead you to imagine the great thinker is with you in the Forum. Three especially good essays are On the Happy Life, On the Tranquility of Mind and On the Shortness of Life.
The Roman thinker is vivid, deep and penetrating in his analyses of the complexities of life, making the Stoic philosophy from two millennia ago still worth learning.
Many know the meaning of the Latin saying carpe diem: "seize the day”. In the hands of Seneca, carpe diem isn’t just a dumb bromide from a pedantic teacher seemingly disconnected from the lives of his students. His urgency about recognizing the gift of life and using it while the time lasts is fresh, insightful, earnest.
“‘Recall the number of times when you had a fixed plan, how few days ended as you had intended, when you ever had time to spend on yourself, when your face ever kept its normal expression, when your mind did not succumb to fear, what work you have accomplished in so long a lifetime, how many people plundered your life without your realizing what you were losing, how much was taken from you by pointless sorrow, foolish happiness, greedy desire, the enticements of socializing, how little of what you had was left for you; you will understand that you are dying before your time,’” he says, mimicking a conversation between himself and a Stoic philosopher from a previous era and seemingly talking directly with the reader.
“So what is the reason for this?” he asks the reader directly. “You live as through you were going to live forever…you waste hours as though you were drawing from a well that was full to overflowing.”
The possibility is that one wastes his/her life as death – the inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable certainty – approaches as every second passes. It is well known that the biggest regret among people near death is that they realize the bitter truth of a wasted life.
“How late it is to begin living only when one must stop!” Seneca says. “What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to put off well-considered plans to one’s fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to want to begin life at a point that few have reached!”
Seneca underlines the paradox that expectations plant the seeds of their own death. The greatest obstacle to living is expectation, which depends on tomorrow and wastes today.
The irony reaches the core of Stoic philosophy. Amid his urging to seize the day, Seneca pronounces tranquility as a key goal of the life well lived in the essay On Tranquility.
The great Roman thinker thereby underlines the complexity of our mortality. Live life to the fullest, seemingly underlining robust activity as fulfillment, yet peace is found in tranquility, suggesting rest and withdrawal.
Seneca’s solution is to carefully select activities, pointing to joy, reason and happiness as the hinges. The happy life is the one in harmony with its own nature.
The happy life and travel are in alignment, I find. And travel to Rome is enriched with Seneca by your side.