Joyfully decrepit! Seneca, Epistles 3.26.1-3

Seneca tells Lucilius to embrace decrepit old age, especially if you are fortunate enough to keep your mind (as many in our time are not, alas). Many of the things you lose with it are offset, he finds, by concomitant advantages.

Modo dicebam tibi in conspectu esse me senectutis: iam vereor ne senectutem post me reliquerim. Aliud iam his annis, certe huic corpori, vocabulum convenit, quoniam quidem senectus lassae aetatis, non fractae nomen est: inter decrepitos me numera et extrema tangentis. Gratias tamen mihi apud te ago: non sentio in animo aetatis iniuriam, cum sentiam in corpore. Tantum vitia et vitiorum ministeria senuerunt: viget animus et gaudet non multum sibi esse cum corpore; magnam partem oneris sui posuit. Exsultat et mihi facit controversiam de senectute: hunc ait esse florem suum. Credamus illi: bono suo utatur. Ire in cogitationem iubet et dispicere quid ex hac tranquillitate ac modestia morum sapientiae debeam, quid aetati, et diligenter excutere quae non possim facere, quae nolim prodesse habiturus, adqui si nolim quidquid non posse me gaudeo (†): quae enim querela est, quod incommodum, si quidquid debeat desinere defecit?

I was only just telling you that I am now in sight of old age. Already I begin to worry about leaving it behind! We need a different word for these years of mine, and certainly for my body, since age suggests merely life that is spent, not broken: you must count me among the decrepit, whose age leaves them hobbling on their last legs. Nonetheless, there is room for gratitude here: I do not feel the injury of age in my mind the way I feel it in my body. Only my vices and the parts of my body that served them have withered. My mind is still thriving, and rejoicing that it has little left to do with the body. It has already cast aside a great part of its burden. It rejoices and argues that I have mistaken the character of age, saying that now is the season of its greatest blooming. Let us believe it, allowing it to make its case to us. My mind bids me retire to the realm of thought, there to inquire what part of my current tranquility and modest habits I owe to wisdom, and what part to age. I am also ordered diligently to discount things I cannot do, or do not wish to do, as I would find no profit in them and am glad to be incapable of engaging what I don't desire. What fuss or problem is it to us, if something that ought to cease has finally ended?

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(†) This passage appears corrupt in the MSS. Gummere provides the following as the best reading: et diligenter excutere, quae non possim facere, quae nolim ^†prodesse habiturus ad qui si nolim quidquid non posse me gaudeo^†. I have followed it closely, rendering adqui as a conjunction (cf. atqui, ἀλλὰ δή) and finding myself tricked into believing that the sentence makes sense.