Finding Joy in Life's Final Season — Letters from a Stoic

A visit to his country estate hits Seneca with the same message everywhere he looks: he is old. The house is crumbling. The plane trees he planted himself are gnarled and dying. The slave he remembers as a child now stands at the door, a broken old man.

Rather than look away, Seneca turns toward it. Old age, he argues, has its own pleasures, not despite the decline, but because of it. Fruit is sweetest when almost over. Youth is most charming at its close.

The final drink completes the evening. His advice is to treat every day as Pacuvius, the Roman governor of Syria, treated every evening: carried from the dining room to his chamber with music playing, as if to burial, having declared that he had lived his life. Pacuvius did it from a morbid place. Seneca wants Lucilius to do it from a glad one.

Go to sleep each night having said: 'I have lived.' Every morning you wake after that is a bonus. The letter closes with a line Seneca calls worth the whole letter: 'It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint.' And a provocation: the best ideas belong to everyone, not their original speakers, so he'll keep borrowing from Epicurus without apology.