[Stoicism] - Dịch Seneca (24): Bàn về cái chết

Lời tựa:

Như đã giới thiệu trong series, Seneca thực sự là nguồn cảm hứng Stoicism của mình. Đọc Seneca không chỉ là về triết học mà còn là một trải nghiệm nghệ thuật, khi những bài học, triết lý quan trọng được phản ánh qua những hình ảnh quen thuộc, bình dị và đời thường, thể hiện cái tinh tế trong quan sát của một thiên tài với sự từng trải của cuộc đời.     
                      
Với hy vọng giới thiệu Stoicism đến với các bạn trẻ Việt Nam, xin gửi tới các bạn bản dịch những bức thư quan trọng nhất trong cuốn "Moral Letters to Lucilius", tác phẩm đã làm nên tên tuổi của Seneca và là một trong bộ ba cuốn sách nền tảng của Stoicism. 

Những bức thư đạo đức là tuyển tập các bức thư của triết gia Seneca về Chủ nghĩa Khắc Kỷ, nhằm trang bị cho con người hành trang để đối mặt và mỉm cười trước sóng gió của cuộc đời, đạt được sự bình thản trong tâm trí. Cuốn sách không chỉ về triết học, mà còn về trải nghiệm nghệ thuật, khi những bài học, triết lý quan trọng được phản ánh qua những hình ảnh quen thuộc, bình dị và đời thường, thể hiện cái tinh tế trong quan sát của một thiên tài.    
                       
Do không phải anh dịch thuật, nên bản dịch này hoàn toàn tập trung vào việc truyền tải thông điệp và hy vọng có thể giúp bạn cảm thấy dễ dàng hơn trong việc tiếp cận với bản tiếng Anh, để có thể thấy cái hay cái đẹp trong việc sử dụng ngôn từ của Seneca (dù thực ra bản tiếng Anh cũng chỉ là một bản dịch). Một anh bạn người Ý của mình đã chia sẻ Seneca được đưa vào chương trình giảng dạy tại Ý như một bậc thầy về việc sử dụng ngôn từ. Vì vậy, xin cam đoan tất cả những gì khiến bạn cảm thấy trúc trắc từ bản dịch là bởi khả năng hạn chế của mình, và rất mong nhận được đóng góp của các cao nhân để bản dịch được hoàn thiện hơn. Sau khi hoàn thành mình sẽ tạo file pdf và chia sẻ free cho mọi người.

Bức thư số 24

From Seneca to Lucilius
Greetings
1 You write that you are worried about the outcome of a lawsuit that an enemy’s rage has brought against you. You suppose that I will urge you to fix your thoughts on the best and to ease your mind with comforting expectations. After all, what need is there to take an advance on future troubles, ruining the present with fear of the future? When troubles come is time enough to bear them. Surely it is foolish to be miserable now just because you are going to be miserable later on!

2 But what I will do is lead you down a different road to tranquility. If you want to be rid of worry, then fix your mind on whatever it is that you are afraid might happen as a thing that definitely will happen. Whatever bad event that might be, take the measure of it mentally and so assess your fear. You will soon realize that what you fear is either no great matter or not long lasting.

3 Nor do I need to cast about very long for examples to strengthen you with. Every age supplies them. Wherever you direct your powers of recall, amid civic or external affairs, individuals will come to mind who were either morally advanced or exceptionally bold. Suppose you are convicted: can anything worse happen to you than being sent into exile, or being thrown in prison? Is there anything more terrifying than being burned—than dying? Take up each of these things in turn, and summon to mind those who have thought little of them. You will not have to conduct a search; rather, you have a number to choose from. 4 Rutilius endured his conviction as if the only thing that troubled him was being misjudged. Metellus endured exile bravely; Rutilius even gladly. While Metellus made sure that he would return for his country’s sake, Rutilius refused to return in order to oppose Sulla, who at that time was meeting with no opposition. Socrates lectured while in prison, and although there were people there to arrange an escape, he refused to leave; instead, he stayed, meaning to do away with humankind’s two greatest fears: death and imprisonment.

5 Mucius put his hand in the flames. It is a hard thing to be burned; how much harder when the burning comes about through your own agency! You see a man with no schooling, without benefit of any instructions concerning death or pain, equipped only with a soldier’s toughness, exacting punishment from himself for vain endeavor. He witnessed his own right hand sizzling on the enemy’s brazier. His flesh was peeling away from the bones, and yet he did not remove it until after the enemy had put out the fire beneath it. There are happier things he could have done in that camp, but no braver thing. Observe how much fiercer virtue is in confronting perils than cruelty in imposing them: Porsenna found it easier to pardon Mucius for trying to assassinate him than Mucius did to pardon himself for failing.

6 “These stories,” you say, “are the constant refrain in all the schools. I expect the minute you get to making light of death you’ll tell me about Cato.” Why shouldn’t I tell you about Cato’s last night, how he was reading a book by Plato with his sword right next to his head? Those were the two things he had selected to equip himself against his final hour, the one so that he would be willing to die, the other so that he would be able. Once he had settled his affairs—insofar as such fractured and desperate affairs could be settled—he decided to take such action that no man would either have the privilege of killing Cato or the opportunity of saving him. 7 Drawing his sword, which up to that day he had preserved unstained with any act of violence, he said, “Fortune, you have achieved nothing by resisting all my endeavors. Until now I have fought for my country’s freedom and not my own. My purpose in acting with such determination was not to live free but to live among the free. Now that hope is lost for humankind, let Cato be taken away to safety.” 8 Then he struck the blow that meant death to his body; and when the doctors bound it up, with little left of blood, little of strength, but of spirit as much as before, and hostile now not only toward Caesar but also toward himself, he thrust his naked hands into the wound and did not release, but hurled from him, that noble spirit heedless of all domination.

9 I am not piling up these examples just for literary exercise, but to exhort you not to fear those things that seem most alarming. It will be easier for me to do that if I show you that it is not only powerful men who have made light of this instant when the spirit is expelled: some who are debased in other ways have shown themselves equal to the bravest in this regard. For instance, there was Scipio the father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompey. Driven back to Africa by a contrary wind, and seeing his ship captured by the enemy, he impaled himself on his sword; and when people asked where the general was, he said, “All’s well with the general.” 10 This saying made him equal to his ancestors and kept up the glorious reputation preordained for the Scipios in Africa. It was a great thing to conquer Carthage; a greater thing to conquer death. “All’s well with the general”: how else should a general die? How else Cato’s general?

11 I am not sending you back to your history books, and neither am I going to collect examples from every age of men who made light of death, though there are many such. Look to our own times, times that we say are all too indolent and pampered: they will supply us with people of every station, every class, every time of life, who cut short their misfortunes by dying. Believe me, Lucilius, so little terror is there in death that by its good graces nothing else holds terror either. So listen unperturbed to your enemy’s prosecution. 12 Your clear conscience gives reason to be confident; still, since many external factors have a bearing on the outcome, hope for the best but prepare yourself for the worst.

Remember above all to get rid of the commotion. Observe what each thing has inside, and you will learn: there is nothing to fear in your affairs but fear itself. 13 You see with children how people they love and know, people they play with, frighten them terribly if they see them wearing masks: well, the same thing happens with us, who are just slightly bigger children. In our case, though, the mask needs to be removed not only from people but from events as well, and their true face revealed.

14 “Why are you making me a show of swords and torches, of torturers clamoring in your train? Away with this façade you set before you, to terrify the fools! You are only death, whom recently my slave and even my serving maid despised. Why this great display of whips and racks spread out again before my eyes? Why the instruments of torture specially designed for every joint? Why a thousand more devices for dismembering a person bit by bit? Lay down your astonishing devices; bid the groans be silent, and the cries, the shrill vociferations extorted by the lash! You are only pain, whom that arthritic fellow there despises, whom the dyspeptic endures at fancy meals, whom the merest girl endures in childbirth. If I can bear you, you are slight; if I cannot, you are short.”

15 Ponder these words in your mind. You have heard them many times, and said them too. But whether it was true what you have heard and said is true—that, you must prove by results. For the most shameful of the accusations against us is that we deal in the words of philosophy but not the actions. Well, then! Death, exile, pain loom over you: is this the first time you have realized it? You were born for this! Whatever can happen, let’s think about as something that will happen.

16 I know you are sure to have done already the things I am advising you to do. My further advice to you at this point is that you not allow your concern over this matter to overwhelm your mind, for that will deaden it, and you will have less energy when it is time to rouse yourself. Turn your thoughts away from your personal situation and toward that of people in general. Tell yourself that this paltry body is mortal, and that it is frail. It is not only unjust assaults or superior forces that threaten it with pain: its very pleasures turn into torments. Banquets cause it indigestion; drinking bouts cause tremors and dullness of the nerves; lusts bring on deformations of the hands and feet and all the joints.

17 “I shall become poor.” I will be one among many. “I shall be exiled.” I’ll think of myself as a native of my place of exile. “I shall be bound.” What of it? Am I now unfettered? Nature has chained me to this heavy weight that is my body. “I shall die.” What you are saying is this: I shall no longer be susceptible to illness, to imprisonment, to death.

18 I am not so silly as to sing to you here the Epicurean song, about how fears of hell are empty, how Ixion is not spinning on his wheel nor Sisyphus shouldering his rock uphill, how no one’s entrails can be devoured and regenerated daily. No one is such a child as to be afraid of Cerberus and the dark and the skeleton figures of ghouls. Death either consumes us or sets us free. If we are released, then better things await us once our burden is removed; if we are consumed, then nothing is waiting for us at all: both goods and evils are gone. 19 Allow me at this point to remind you of your own poem, advising you first to decide that you wrote it not just for other people but also for yourself. It is shameful to say one thing and mean another; how much more shameful to write one thing and mean another! I remember you once expanded on the theme, “We do not meet death all at once; we move toward it bit by bit.” 20 We die every day, for every day some part of life is taken from us. Even when we are still growing, our life is shrinking. We lost our infancy, then childhood, then youth. All our time was lost in the moment of passage, right up to yesterday, and even today is divided with death as it goes by. As the water clock does not empty out its last drop only but also whatever dripped through it before, so our last hour of existence is not the only time we die but just the only time we finish dying. That is when we arrive at death, but we have been a long time coming there. 21 When you had explained all this in your usual ringing tones (you always were a great speaker, but never more intense than when giving voice to the truth), you said, Death is not one event; the death that takes us is our last.

I’d rather you read yourself than my letter! It will then be obvious to you that the death we fear is our last one, but not our only one. 22 I see where you’re looking! You are peeking to see what I have tucked into this letter, what spirited saying of some author or what useful precept. I’ll send you something from the same material I just had in hand. Epicurus reproaches those who desire death as much as those who fear it, saying,

It is absurd to run after death out of disgust with life, when it is you, with your manner of living, who have made death something to run after.

23 Similarly in another passage he says, What could be more absurd than to seek death when it is fear of death that has made your life unquiet? To this may be added another saying of his, to the same effect: 

So great is the foolishness, no, the madness of human beings, that some are driven toward their death by fear of death. 

24 By reflecting on any of these, you will strengthen your mind to endure either death or life. For we need to be admonished and strengthened both against excessive love of life and against excessive hatred of it. Even when reason advises one to make an end of oneself, the act should not be undertaken heedlessly or in haste. 25 A man of courage and wisdom should not flee life but merely depart from it. Also, and especially, one must avoid that state which has come over many people: a craving for death. For just as there is for other things, dear Lucilius, so there is an ill-considered longing for death that frequently grips men who are noble and of an adventurous disposition, and frequently also those who are timid and shiftless. Th e first kind scorn life; the second kind are weighed down by it. 26 Others find that they have become satiated with seeing and doing the same things, and do not hate life so much as they are disgusted by it. We slip into it even at the instigation of philosophy, when we say,

“How much more of the same things? I mean, how long will I wake and sleep, eat and grow hungry, grow cold and grow hot? Nothing has an ending: everything is connected to the rest of the world. Things chase each other in succession: night comes on the heels of day, day on the heels of night; summer yields to autumn, autumn is followed hard by winter, which then gives way to spring. Everything passes only to return. I do nothing that is new, see nothing that is new. Sometimes this too produces nausea. There are many who feel, not that life is hard, but that it is pointless.

Farewell.

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