Dear Fellow Mortal,
Ask almost anyone past forty how fast the years are going, and you will hear the same answer: faster than they used to.
Seneca felt it too.
Passing through the towns of his youth, he found himself thinking that everything, from his school days to his early career to saying goodbye to a friend, had happened only a moment ago.
His response is not nostalgia. It is impatience with anything that wastes the little time we have, including some of the philosophy of his own day.
So this week’s question: why does life go by so fast?
Sundays with Seneca
A year of Seneca’s letters, one each Sunday. Each meditation pairs one of his letters with the question at its heart and a practice for the week ahead: 52 Stoic questions for mortals. ***This series is available to members.
The Letter
Seneca to Lucilius, greetings.
It is lazy and careless to remember a friend only when some landscape stirs the memory. Yet there are times when familiar places revive a longing stored away in the soul. They do not bring back dead memories, but wake sleeping ones, just as the sight of a lost friend’s cloak or house renews a mourner’s grief, even after time has softened it.
And now Campania, especially Naples and your beloved Pompeii, has struck me with a wonderfully fresh longing for you. I see you plainly before me. I am on the point of parting from you. I see you choking back tears and failing to master the feelings that rise just when you try to hold them down. I seem to have lost you only a moment ago.
