Seneca had taken lodgings directly above a public bath. Roman baths were not quiet wellness centres but the social hubs of the city: gym, bar, market and meeting place in one, in operation from morning into the evening.
What he heard he wrote down to his friend Lucilius. The weightlifters grunting and forcing out their breath. The masseur slapping shoulders with a flat hand, each stroke a different note. The ball players calling out the score. The brawler, the thief being caught, the man who liked the sound of his own voice in the water. The shrieking when armpit hair was plucked. The sellers of drink, sausage and cake, each with their own cry.
And then he wrote: I swear all that noise means no more to me than the sound of running water.
Further down the same letter he admits that he moved.
The confession comes in passing and without apology. Why should I torment myself, he writes, when it is so much simpler to leave.
The letter is included as number fifty-six in the collection to Lucilius, written in the years after his withdrawal from court. It is one of the few ancient texts about concentration, and it ends with a piece of advice that carries the rest: the real quiet is not that of the place but that of a man who is no longer divided.
Something outside you makes noise. You can blame the racket, or examine why it gets into you and not into someone else.
The tempting sorting is that a Stoic ought not to be bothered by noise. Seneca writes first that he is not, and then that he moved, and that order is the whole point.
The sound below his window lay outside him, and moving lay inside. Both are sorted correctly. What he is after lies in between: noise only troubles you once your attention is already scattered, and a collected mind does not make the world quieter but makes it less dependent on quiet.
The confession strengthens that rather than weakening it. He is not claiming invulnerability; he is describing an exercise he has not yet passed himself, and moving house in the meantime.
That is the most usable form this teaching can take. Work on your attention, and meanwhile simply take your phone out of the bedroom.
The letter can be used to tell people their circumstances do not matter, and that is untrue. Whoever lives in a noisy flat, with thin walls and no possibility of moving, has not a concentration problem but a housing problem.
And there is a difference between Seneca's distraction and today's. The bathhouse did not call his name and did not know what he had read yesterday. Modern distraction is designed to win, and against design attention only helps so long as you also arrange the surroundings. That is exactly what Seneca did when he moved.
What is distracting you today? And is it really the noise, or were you already so divided that anything could interrupt you?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions