The Love You Take is Equal to the Love You Make.

More thoughts on seclusion and society this week (Letter IX). Seneca seems to be fond of the topic.

This time, though, he's focused particularly on the question of friendship. "The wise man is content with himself," the Stoical dictum goes. "He is so in the sense that he is able to do without friends, not that he desires to do without them."

"Self-contented as he is," admits Seneca, "he does need friends - and wants as many of them as possible - but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends. The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids." The only company the truly wise man needs "is his own company. [...] He is self-content and yet he would refuse to live if he had to live without any human company at all."

The upshot of all of this, as I read it, is that ideally, one associates with others not out of lack - not out of a sense of having a need that someone else must fill (i.e. friendship from a motive of self-service) - but out of excess. One is content with oneself and yet desires to share life, in all its fullness, with others. Seneca quotes Epicurus (arch-rival of all Stoics, father of the Epicurean school): "Any man who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world." Finding another similar quotation from a comic poet, Seneca proclaims that "these are sentiments of a universal character."

Much earlier in the letter, Seneca quotes a quick line from Hecato, which really sums all this up very nicely, I think: "If you wish to be loved, love." Simple, sensible and profound, and yet impossibly hard to live out.

Sensible because, of course, friendship should never be a means to a selfish end. Impossible because I don't think I've ever felt sufficient in myself. Losing (or moving away from) a friend is always hard, and making a new friend always improves the quality of my own life, no matter how hard I try to bear both with (as Seneca advises) "equanimity."

I can see the value in the ideal, but all ideals are, by definition, not real. My sense of my own finitude tells me I will never be wholly self-sufficient, and I will always mourn the loss of a friend. Any other response would be, it seems to me, too Stoical.