On life, reading and the acquisition of knowledge - Seneca's first letter

This is a post I wrote around a year or two ago, and I started it by talking a bit about my life at the time, and the reasons why I wasn't posting as much as I used to. I went through all the depression cause by my job and my financial situation and how I was trying to get back on my feet through learning, reading and trying to figure out just how the hell I could dig myself out of the pit in which I was in.

Nowadays, things have improved quite a lot. I changed jobs, a change that resulted in a better state of mind and a much better financial situation, all of which helped me get out of the pit I mentioned above. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about my life, my path in it and what I am aiming towards. Therefore, I will remove the previous details about my unhappy state, since they are no longer true.

Before things changed however I began writing about Seneca's first letter in what I believe it was an analysis of its meaning made in an attempt to learn something from his great mind and have an easier time understanding and making stoicism part of my life.

This was nothing but a "project" I started without expecting it to get out of my personal notebook. So, I wrote it and forgot about it. I found it again, however, when I came back to my country after my working trip in Germany. I wanted to do something with it, but I was busy with other ideas and other work so I postponed working on it, up until now.

To better explain what this is, and to give a bit of a "warning" to those willing to read through my very simplistic and probably incorrect interpretation of these letters, I'm gonna say the following things: this is by no means a proper critique of these writings, nor the work of a professional critic when it comes to stoicism, philosophy or any other literary work. I am but an amateur that likes to read and write, who decided to try and make a written commentary of these letters in an attempt to better understand them and learn something new. So, if you feel annoyed by my lack of objectivity and my clumsiness when it comes to the interpretation of these texts, I invite you to close the tab, and read the works of those much better than me in this domain, to actually learn something much more refined. If, however, you'd like to continue exploring this amateurish interpretation, feel free to do it, and if you think there's something you can provide, such as a different perspective, a more unique or just different opinion, or anything at all that can be useful and add a bit of extra knowledge, it will be appreciated both by myself and, I'm sure, by other readers.

One last thing: This is all based on the book "Letters from a Stoic", a book translated by Robin Campbell and published by Penguin Books.

With that out of the way, I shall begin, of course, with the first (or second, as it appears to be in the book) letter which begins like this:

"JUDGING from what you tell me and from what I hear, I feel that you show great promise. You do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move after another. Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."

This is the beginning of the letter and it already helps you get an idea for what kind of values Seneca has. First, he expresses admiration for Lucilius for the fact that he does not "tear from place to place" and does not "unsettle" himself with one move after another. Now, what can that mean?

It can, of course, have a literal meaning. It can refer to a person who is unable to stay in his own house, in his own community, within his own circle of friends. It can refer to a person who is unable to appreciate what he has, who is not aware of what he has, and who moves from place to place, from group to group, from relationship to relationship, without a particular goal in mind.

It can also have a deeper meaning. It can refer to a person who is unable to put order in his thoughts, and his life, who cannot do what is needed in order to put his affairs in order. A person who doesn't know himself first, but who is constantly seeking more, is a person who will never understand the value of what he gets, when and if he gets it. Without order in your thoughts, you cannot understand them, and you cannot acquire new knowledge that can be useful to you. Without order in your group of friends, you cannot achieve friendships that will last, only ephemeral interactions that will never go beyond the superficial level. Without order in your feelings, you cannot get into and maintain an intimate relationship with another person, only selfish adventures that are over as soon as you feel the urge to move towards the next one.

Or it can be both.

That idea is reinforced by Seneca in the continuation of his letter. He continues by saying "Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."

When I first read that paragraph, I thought that Seneca advises Lucilius to develop an adversity for the new, for the never ending acquisition of new books and the constant chase for knowledge, for one cannot understand everything, and therefore must limit himself or herself to only a few authors whose genius is, as he says, "unquestionable", in order to gain a proper understanding of what those authors are teaching.

However, after reading everything again, I noticed that Seneca is only advising him to extend his stay among those writers, and not to make it permanent. His following argument, "To be everywhere is to be nowhere", refers to the idea that passing knowledge that goes as quickly as it comes is of no use to he who does not take the necessary time to properly understand it.

This can be seen in our days as well, and I might be one of those people who fall into this trap, although I fix my mistakes with the few authors I really admire. I too buy books whenever I have the chance and I have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. But, from time to time, when I find an author I like, who wrote a book that I consider to be spectacular, I take my time, and once I finish it, I make sure to pick it up again once its teachings have faded from my mind. Then I read it again, but with more experience under my belt and, hopefully, a better understanding of life.

It is true that this desire to consume anything that comes our way, be it videos, movies, TV shows, magazines, books, or anything else of the kind, while fun, very fun, does not help us gain much in terms of valuable information that can stay with us for a good portion of our life. Sure, we will remember some of the movies we watch and some of the things we see in them, and even some of the things we read or listen to, but those things we remember are usually very superficial and are randomly in our memory regardless of whether we deeply thought about them or not.

Seneca proceeds to give other examples for his argument. Those who spend their lives travelling abroad and going from place to place, he says, will discover a lot of places in which they will find hospitality, but no real friendships, or a place to call "home". The same applies, to those who do not take their time to "acquire" a more intimate relationship with a great writer, but goes from one to another without taking the proper time to think about their work. "Food that is vomited as soon as it is eaten is not assimilated into the body and does not do one any good", says he, referring, probably, to the casual "memorization" of information with the only objective of it being "regurgitated" later for whatever reason, with no deep understanding of what has been memorized. His examples continue: "Nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent changes of treatment; a wound will not heal over if it is being made the subject of experiments with different ointments; a plant which is frequently moved never grows strong".

I'll stop here, although the examples do not, because I think we understand the point Seneca is making.

He then ends his letter by giving an example from his own life. Remember - Seneca's argument is not that we should only focus on a few things in our life and never diversify our ways of living, our relationships, the food we eat or the books we read, but that we should take our time with everything, understand what we do, and why, gather knowledge and appreciate each part of life, and once that is done, and properly understood, we can move to the next thing.

His example refers to the acquisition of new knowledge through picking one single thought out of the many that go through our mind, and thinking about it, deeply and profoundly, for a day. In his case, he talks of a new thought that came to him after "visiting the enemy's camp", which in this case refers to something he found in Epicurus, a habit he has developed in order to understand the point of view of those opposed to him.

He even quotes the thought: "A cheerful poverty is an honourable state". Then Seneca continues to offer his point of view which is that if it is cheerful, then it is not poverty. In his eyes, it is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the man who constantly wishes for more, blind of what he currently has.

This marks the end of his first letter to Lucilius, a very short one, and yet filled with knowledge that deserves to be thought about and maybe integrated a bit into our daily lives.

We truly are focused on the new at all times, on what book to read next before we even finish the one we're currently reading, on what to watch next before our movie even ended, or what other clothes to buy despite never wearing the ones we already got. We are obsessed with getting more, and getting something new at all times, and apparently, it was a problem back then as well, which can be either sad, because it shows that we have not learned our lesson and might never will, or good, because we can relate to the lost generations who are long gone who, despite living in a completely different era, were still humans, like we are.

So, maybe we should pay a little more attention to what we have, and try to get a better understanding of it. Then, and only then, we might begin thinking about moving onto the next thing.

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A little "post scriptum" here - while I enjoyed writing this piece, it did take a little more effort than what I usually write, and while I feel good about it, it takes a bit more time to make, time that I had to take away from my other tasks. Therefore, this type of posts might come once in a while, not as often as my usual articles. I want to put a little more thought into these type of articles, because they aren't just the result of my experiences, experiments and my opinions, but an analysis of a great work that requires thought and that has to be filtered through my own understanding of life and existence as it currently is. My opinions might also change as time passes by, so I have to take that into consideration as well. In conclusion, do not expect this type of post to be something regular on my profile, but rather something that I do when I truly feel like it.