He had taken lodgings directly above a public bath, and wrote to his friend Lucilius about what he heard all day. 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 letter dates from the sixties of the first century, written after Seneca's withdrawal from Nero's court. 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. The letter belongs to the one hundred and twenty-four letters to Lucilius, procurator of Sicily, which Seneca wrote in about three years and which became his major work. The honesty at the end is characteristic: he is not claiming invulnerability, he is describing an exercise he has not yet passed himself.
You can blame the noise, or examine why the noise gets into you and not into someone else.
The sound below his window was not his, and moving house was. Both are true. What he was after lies in between: that noise only troubles you once your attention is already scattered, and that a collected mind does not make the world quieter but makes it less dependent on quiet. His confession that he moved anyway strengthens the point rather than weakening it.
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