With all the chaos that has occurred during the past week—symbolized by the futility of returning to Daylight Savings Time, wherein an angst-ridden hour is stolen from us—I’m frustrated that the human lifetime is so brief that many of us will not live to see the United States return to its former status as an imperfect yet enviable place. One of the books I’ve turned to for solace as the world spirals into global conflict is a thin volume by Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC–65 AD), the Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, titled On the Shortness of Life. (It’s from the Penguin Books Great Ideas series, and the cover designs by We Made This are as inspired as the authors selected, including Thomas Paine, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, George Orwell). With three more years (and possibly more beyond that) of living with the untenable, I am comforted by this concise introductory passage on time management that follows:
“Most human beings … complain about the meanness of nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because this spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us just when we are getting ready for it. Nor is the man in the street and their unthinking mass of people who groan over this—as they see it—universal evil: the same feeling lies behind complaints from even distinguished me. Hence the dictum of the great of doctors [Hippocrates]: “Life is short, art is long.” Hence too the grievance, most improper to a wise man, which Aristotle expressed when he was taking nature to task for indulging animals with such existences that they can live through five or 10 human lifetimes, while a far shorter limit is set for men who are born to a great and extensive destiny. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for higher achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth, however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.”
Cover design by Phil Baines
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