On the shortness of life, immortality and leaving something to be remembered by.
Just earlier today I’d received a letter in the post from someone dear.
And just a moment ago, reading Michel du Montaigne’s Essais, I stumbled upon this passage:
“I have dedicated it [the Essais] to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive.”
The letters I write share that same sentiment. They betray the furtive desire that I give the reader something of myself. That I be remembered. That I have created something worthy of remembrance.
Each letter contains some small piece of myself, and it is only with great difficulty and frustration that I write. No word suffices, no turn of phrase. Each letter, then, is something incomplete. As if it were even possible to leave behind with you, in it, the variegated and streaming thoughts, the sentiments, the visions. As if it were possible that I leave myself behind with you.
The very least I can do is, at the same time, the most.
On The Shortness of Life
I’ve always felt the gravity of time.
Even with several lifetimes, it would never be enough to glimpse the entirety of what there is. There are too many things to be done, too many things to be seen. And so says our Seneca:
“Cicero declared that if the number of his days were doubled, he should not have time to read the lyric poets.” – [Letter 49.5]
I’ve always, more or less, felt that desire to make good use of my time, and I often lose track of it – getting entangled in questions of what to do, where to go, for what purpose.
There’s a certain inability to rest that we inherit, as it were, from our shared humanity.
“How inimical are the wishes of our loved ones!”
Seneca, Letter 60.1 (my translation)
Nothing ever suffices, no man is content with what little he needs; the vast majority of our vices, indeed, our actions, are defined by some attempt at our own immortality, or at the very least our own perpetuation.
Our values and our beliefs are largely conditioned by others, and it is in accordance with mistaken values that we squander whole lives.
While we’re young, we don’t know any better. When we’re old, we refuse to.
The folly doesn’t lie in the acquisition of these things – wealth is, really, pardon the phrase, ‘morally indifferent’. To be wealthy is preferable to poverty. The moral question arises with regard to how we obtain it, what we do once we have it.
On Leisure and Toil: A Life Between the Two
We are caught, as it were, between two great forces: leisure and toil.
“The two sects of Epicureans and Stoics differ widely in most respects, and on this point among the rest, nevertheless, each of them consigns us to leisure, although by a different road. Epicurus says, ‘The wise man will not take part in politics, except upon some special occasion;’ Zeno says, ‘The wise man will take part in politics, unless prevented by some special circumstance.’” – Seneca, De Otio, III.
The former we are at leisure to possess always; the second we force upon ourselves voluntarily. The vast majority of our time is spent in preoccupation with things that, in the gran scheme of life are meaningless.
I mean this only in so far as we are preoccupied with things that are entirely conditioned by general opinion, e.g., wealth, reputation. Toil with no end but mundane, superficial gains.
The vast majority of our unhappiness results from some feeling of deprivation – that we lack something essential, whether in ourselves or in our possessions, that we are somehow unfulfilled by the entirety of the world.
Naturally, we are unfulfilled, but it is nothing ‘of the world’ that can sate this desire, and it is a particularly human folly to think that anything external to us can extinguish these, for lack of a better term, ‘primitive’ desires.
What’s worse is that amidst all of this ‘preoccupation’ we hardly do anything worthwhile, and nonetheless think that we have pursuits of great consequence. We have vices that need pruning; we neglect ourselves.
There is a world outside of our minute concerns, afflicted with the tangible woes and ills of the human condition; we do little to abate it. We neglect our duty to others.
“The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men; if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbours, and, failing them, to himself: for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind.” – Seneca, De Otio, III.
On Immortality
There is a line from the musical Hamiltonwith which, if you’ll forgive my poor taste, I’m deeply enamoured. It’s the final soliloquy of Alexander Hamilton’s character, and it’s something I’ve thought much of the last few months:
“Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.
I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me…”
Lin Manuel Miranda could have just as well been inspired by Keats –
“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance…”
John Keats, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be“
The same reason with which we navigate the world, which fulfills and brings to fruition our motivations, with which we subjugate nature, with which we construct vast cities, aedifices, institutions, is particularly infirm in this regard: we ruin ourselves in pursuit of our misguided values.
We spend whole lives in the pursuit of living, and all the while remark how little is left – as if nature were unjust in allotting us the few years we make little good use of.
“Near is your forgetfulness of all things, and near the forgetfulness of you by all.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.21