On the Shortness of Life

“This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life.

Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, came down so hard on his fellow Romans for pursuing political careers they didn’t really care about, holding elaborate banquets they didn’t especially enjoy, or just ‘baking their bodies in the sun’: they didn’t seem to realise that in succumbing to such diversions, they were squandering the very stuff of existe