While We Are Postponing Life Speeds

The very first letter in the Epistulae Morales, setting the tone for the entire collection. Seneca opens his correspondence with Lucilius not with pleasantries but with an urgent warning: time is the one resource that cannot be recovered. He urges Lucilius to audit his days as carefully as a miser counts coins. The letter establishes time as the central preoccupation of Seneca's late philosophy, a thread that runs through both the Letters and On the Shortness of Life.