"Whatever your destination, you will be followed by your failings," wrote Seneca (4 BCE - 65 CE) in a letter urging us to lay aside our spirit of self to feel renewed. Otherwise, "You are running away in your own company."

It is the advice he never heeded. Born in Córdoba, Spain, at the same time as Christ, Seneca rose to power during Emperor Caligula's rule and, despite execution sentences and banishments, played advisor to several Roman emperors.

But Seneca never seemed to relinquish the trappings of power and wealth, and as a result, although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous stoics, he was quite possibly the worst example of stoicism.

A bust done 'in the style' of Seneca. This concept, known as "Pseudo-Seneca," are a series of sculptures and manuscripts that the philosopher influenced without actually being of or by him. A metaphor for Seneca's existence. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen.

His writing is collected in Letters from a Stoic, a collection of letters and essays that demonstrate deep complexity.

For example, Seneca extols the virtues of "going into oneself" to phrase Rilke yet recommends a voracious reading of other "geniuses" to bolster one's mind. Can those things co-exist?

Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing, to my way of thinking, is better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company... You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.   Read a more modern take on this concept of rest and pause in Pico Iyer's Art of Stillness or Alan Lightman's In Praise of Wasting Time or my own study of rest and play.

Solitude is ideal. However, Seneca also urges us to surround ourselves with the kind of people who bring the fullness of being and banish the void.   I wonder what Seneca would have thought of contemporary novelist Haruki Murakami's constant search for that void. I wonder how they would each define the concept. I get the sense that Murakami felt safety and ease from non-being whereas perhaps more like Seneca, Vladimir Nabokov feared this nothingness.

Thank you for writing so often. By doing so, you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we're together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace, however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters which carry marks and signs of the absent friend that are real? For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition.   There is a delightful entry in Wislawa Szymborska's book Nonrequired Reading where the Polish poet describes a book about graphology, the study of one's character using handwriting. I immediately thought of Seneca's comment equating handwriting to a "feeling" of a person.

On the other hand, too many individuals dilute our morality. Seneca urges avoidance of the masses.

You ask me to say what you should consider particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself yet without risk. I am ready to confess my frailty in this respect. I never come back home with quite the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace, someone or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

[...]

Associating with people in large numbers is harmful: there is not one that will not make some vice or other attractive to us or leave us carrying the imprint of it or bedaubed all unawares with it.

Seneca was well known for his complexity (some might say hypocrisy). He practiced and preached a stoic life while living a life of great material wealth and prosperity.

Yet he praises pleasure from the simplest things, like ridding oneself of busyness and ambition.

You rush hither and thither with the idea of dislodging a firmly seated weight when the dashing about just adds to the trouble it causes you. [...] Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may have been banished to the ends of the earth, yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be ink, a hospitable home.

Seneca's life and works summon the thoughts of another philosopher, Simone Weil, who, like the Romans, suffered from chronic ill health. Unlike Seneca, however, Weil insisted on living within the bounds of her radically leftist beliefs. She ultimately died as she forced herself to follow the diet of the French prisoners of war and refused to treat her tuberculosis. Weil lived in the early 20th century and died at age thirty-four.   Their philosophies, though both banishing the need for material wealth, were quite different in scope. Read more from Weil here. And, might I add, Seneca is as loquacious as Weil is succinct. Very different styles.

Ultimately, Seneca's reluctance to follow his stoic principles cost him his life. "Whatever your destination, you will be followed by your failings," foretold his own destiny. He was executed (ordered to commit suicide) when the Emperor feared his power had grown too great. Seneca did little to extinguish that fear.

"El Suicidio de Seneca," 1871 by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez. Learn more.

Contradictions notwithstanding, Seneca's stoic beliefs - that we should live in accordance with nature, that reason and rationality should be our guides, and (contradictory to Epicureanism) that matters of the soul and mind subsume the body, and that all men are brothers - are extremely important today.

And yet, when reading Seneca and contemplating his contradictions, I am reminded of this passage in Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzo's wisdom when reflecting on voices from the past and reading too much value into them merely based on the patina of time:

The old masters are right to be honoured for opening the path to future enlightenment. The fact that they have passed unscathed through centuries of criticism and come down to us still covered with glory commands our respect. But we should be foolish indeed if we valued their achievement simply on the score of age.
From Okakura Kakuzo's The Book of Tea

Enjoy this entertaining, aphoristic collection of letters from this fascinating character alongside the writings of stoic philosopher (and Emperor) Marcus Aurelius, who lived 200 years before Seneca but did not turn to stoicism until the end of his life and, thus, offers a more consistent portrait of its tenets.