The Ordered Day by James Ker;

Author:James Ker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Examining Day, Self, Life (Seneca, Moral Letters 83)

Benefits of a Day-Review (83.1–2)

What exactly is Lucilius asking of Seneca when he asks him to describe “single days . . . in their entirety” (singulos dies . . . et quidem totos) (1)?2 The younger friend is holding Seneca to a claim he had made in the very first of the Moral Letters, which concerns the need to reclaim oneself through reclaiming one’s time: “I can say what I lose and why and how: I can give the reasons for my poverty [causas paupertatis meae reddam]” (4). In another letter, Seneca goes on to boast that “you cannot imagine in your mind how much progress I see single days [singulos dies] bringing me” (6.3). Letter 83 is certainly an instance of what Donato Gagliardi describes as the successive “deepening” of the topic of time in the course of Seneca’s correspondence.3

It is not only the topic of time that deepens. Letters 1 and 2 form a tight sequence proceeding from Lucilius’s use of time to his reading practices, and now letter 83 on days is followed by letter 84, in which Seneca addresses reading again, only this time arguing for the benefits of writing also, suggesting “that whatever has been collected in reading, the pen may reduce into a body [stilus redigat in corpus]” (2).4 The complementarity of letters 83 and 84 is not lost on Foucault, who sees the writing of a person’s “days” and “body” as “two strategic points that will later become the privileged objects of what could be called the writing of the relation to the self.”5 The temporal and bodily dimensions of these same letters have also been situated by Victoria Rimell within the array of “enclosures Seneca has us envisage—from houses and workshops to temporal, bodily, textual, and linguistic confines”—spaces “alternately oppressive and inviting” in Seneca’s Neronian world.6

In the opening of letter 83, Seneca elaborates on why it is good to review one’s time use like this. One benefit is that it can reveal the state of one’s conscience: “You judge me favorably if you think there is nothing in all of this that I would conceal. Certainly we ought to live just as if we were living in full view, and we ought to think just as if someone could peer right into our heart. And he can!” (1), “he” here referring to God. Unlike the epistolary addressee, however, God resides with us permanently: “He is present in our minds and he intervenes amid our thoughts [interest animis nostris et cogitationibus medius intervenit]. I say ‘intervenes’—as if he ever left!” (1). Another benefit is the self-improvement that Seneca says will ensue as he reflects on how he has been employing and organizing his past time:

And so I will do what you command and will write to you, willingly, about what I do and in what order [quid agam et quo ordine libenter tibi scribam]. I will observe myself at once and, a most useful thing, I will review my day [diem meum recognoscam].

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