Seneca and Suicide

 

The Roman philosopher Seneca was accused of taking part in a conspiracy against Nero, and was ordered to commit suicide. Seneca accepted the sentence and his wife chose to die with him. The husband and wife open their veins, but death does not follow swiftly.

Seneca, Montaigne, and paying attention...

As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out: 

The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you: It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly … What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that. 

If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it - and "you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow." 

The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put "a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence." More recently, the critic Colin Burrow has remarked that astonishment, together with Montaigne's other key quality, fluidity, are what philosophy should be, but rarely has been, in the Western tradition.