Seneca Moral essays
Seneca: How many funerals pass our houses? yet we do not…
How many funerals pass our houses? yet we do not think of death. How many untimely deaths? we think only of our son’s coming of age, of his service in the army, or of his succession to his father’s estate.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Seneca’s moral essays. The reading beside it is ours.
Death is never a surprise in the abstract. We pass hospitals, read obituaries, hear about sudden losses, and still plan as if our own lives run on a private exemption. We assume the promotion will come, the child will reach the next milestone, the trip can wait until next year. Seneca is not telling us to become gloomy. He is exposing the strange gap between what we know and how we live. Mortality is not an emergency notification; it is the background condition of every ordinary day. Remembering that changes priorities. It makes a postponed call feel less trivial, an unfinished apology more urgent, and an evening with people we love more valuable. Do not panic about the future. Just stop treating it as guaranteed. Today, do one thing you have delayed because you assumed there would always be more time.
Related passages
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