Little time

The story

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome, adviser to the emperor and the author of plays that are still performed. He had more time and more money than almost anyone of his age. Yet around the year 49 he wrote a short book to his father-in-law Paulinus about how short life is.

Except that is not what it is about. On the very first page he turns the complaint around. Most people, he writes, lament that life is so short. But life is not short. It is long enough to achieve great things, if you use it. The trouble is that we waste it. We let it run through our fingers, busy with tasks that are not our own.

Then comes a comparison that is the heart of the whole book. Nobody would let a stranger take his money. We are careful with what we own, lock doors, count coins, quarrel over inheritances. But our time we hand out to anyone who asks for it. We are stingy with what can be replaced and wasteful with the one thing that cannot be recovered.

Seneca had a name for people who live that way: the busy. He did not mean those who work hard. He meant those who fill their days with other things so as not to ask themselves what they want from them. Those who say they will start living when they turn fifty, when business is settled, when the children are grown. He points out how late it is to begin living just as life is running out.

Paulinus, to whom the book is addressed, was in charge of Rome's grain supply. Seneca advised him to leave the post and devote the rest of his life to himself. We do not know whether he did.

Seneca himself died in the year 65, ordered to take his own life by the emperor he had once tutored. By then he had written most of what makes us still read him.

The object on the poster is a candle. It burns at the same speed whatever you do by its light.