About this ebook
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who tutored the emperor Nero, wrote some of the most widely read pages on time in Western literature. This book gathers the best of them, including his complete essay On the Shortness of Life.
“We do not have too little time; we waste a great deal of it.” Seneca wrote those words to a friend who ran the grain supply of Rome, and they still describe the full, scattered days many of us live. He knew that life from the inside. He was one of the most powerful men in Nero’s Rome and one of the richest, and he wrote about time after years of public business, at a court where his own position was growing dangerous.
Readers have kept him close for two thousand years. Montaigne counted him one of the two authors he valued most and quoted him throughout his Essays. When Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia pressed Descartes on how to live a happy life, he proposed that they read Seneca together. Shakespeare’s generation learned tragedy from Seneca’s plays, and Hamlet mentions him by name. Today he is read alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius as one of the great Stoics, and of the three he wrote most directly about time.
His advice is personal and practical. Time is the only thing we truly own, he says, yet we let anyone take it. We guard our money and hand out our hours. He tells his friend Lucilius to keep part of every day for himself, to read a few good books well, to stop putting life off until the next task is done, and to look back over each day before sleep.
Reclaim Yourself brings together 29 short readings from Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius and his essays, each headed by a sentence from its own pages, so you can open the book anywhere. It then gives the complete text of On the Shortness of Life. Kaede Hozumi’s new translation from the Latin keeps Seneca’s sharp, quotable sentences and the warmth of a man writing to a friend, and a short introduction and notes explain the people and customs a Roman reader would have known.
Start with the first letter and see how much of your own week Seneca already describes.
