Time Slips Away Like Water — Letters from a Stoic

Time doesn't feel fast until you look backwards. Letter 49 opens with Seneca passing through Campania and being struck by a sudden sharp sense of Lucilius's absence, memories not dead but dormant, roused by a familiar landscape. Then the meditation on time itself: it was but a moment ago that he sat in the philosopher Sotion's school as a boy, but a moment ago he began pleading in the courts, but a moment ago he lost the desire to. All past time lies in the same place. It all looks the same from a distance.

Everything slips into the same abyss. His conclusion is sharp: life is a point, nay, even less than a point, and nature has mocked us by making it seem longer through its division into stages. How many steps for how short a climb. The practical application is anger. Given how little time there is, how can any of it be spent on dialectical puzzles?

A soldier under siege doesn't sit solving riddles. Seneca is under siege. What he needs, and what he asks philosophy to deliver, is courage to face hardship, calm before the unavoidable, and a way of understanding that the good in life depends not on its length but on how it is used. Death may come tonight.

Life may not return tomorrow. Say this clearly, and say it often.