Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. These journeys that shake the sluggishness out of me, I judge, do good both to my health and to my studies. How they help my health you can see: since love of literature makes me lazy and careless about my body, I get my exercise by someone else's efforts. How they help my studies I will show you: I have not stopped reading. Reading is necessary, I think, first so that I am not content with myself alone, and second so that once I have learned what others have discovered, I can then form judgments about their discoveries and think about what remains to be discovered. Reading nourishes the mind and refreshes it when it is tired from writing—though not without writing all the same. We ought not to do only writing or only reading: the one will sadden and drain our strength (I mean the pen), the other will loosen and dilute it. We must move back and forth between the two and temper one with the other, so that whatever has been gathered by reading, the pen reduces into a body of work. We ought, as they say, to imitate the bees, which flit about and pluck the flowers suited to making honey, then arrange whatever they have brought and distribute it through the combs, and, as our Virgil says,
pack the cells and stretch them tight with sweet nectar.
It isn't entirely settled whether bees draw a juice from flowers that is honey from the start, or whether they change what they have gathered into this flavor by some mixture and the special property of their own breath. Some hold that bees have not the skill of making honey but only of gathering it. They say that among the Indians honey is found on the leaves of reeds, produced either by the dew of that sky or by the sweet and rather thick moisture of the reed itself; and that in our own plants too the same power exists, but less obvious and less noticeable, which the creature born for this task tracks down and gathers. Others think that what the bees pluck from the tenderest parts of blooming, flowering things is turned into this quality by a kind of storage and arrangement, not without something like a ferment, by which the different elements are fused into one.
But let me not be led off into some other subject than the one at hand: we too ought to imitate these bees, and separate out whatever we have gathered from varied reading (for things are better preserved when kept distinct), then, applying the care and skill of our own mind, blend those various samplings into a single flavor, so that even if it is apparent where something was taken from, it will still be apparent that it has become something different from where it was taken. We see nature do this in our own bodies without any effort on our part—the food we take in, as long as it keeps its own quality and floats undigested in the stomach, is a burden; but once it has been changed from what it was, only then does it pass into strength and blood. Let us do the same with the things that feed our minds: let us not allow whatever we have absorbed to remain unaltered, or it will not be truly ours. Let us digest it; otherwise it will pass into memory, not into the mind itself. Let us assent to it faithfully and make it our own, so that many things become one thing, just as one number is made from single digits when a single reckoning takes in smaller, disparate sums. Let our mind do this: let it hide away everything by which it has been helped, and display only what it has produced. Even if the likeness of someone you have admired and who has made a deeper mark on you should show through in you, I want you to be like him the way a son is like his father, not the way a portrait is like its subject: a portrait is a dead thing. 'What then? Will people not recognize whose style you are imitating, whose reasoning, whose thoughts?' I think that sometimes it cannot even be recognized, if a man of great talent has stamped his own form on everything he has drawn from whatever model he chose, so that all those elements come together into one unity. Don't you see how a chorus is made up of the voices of many people? Yet a single sound comes out of them all. In it one voice is high, another low, another middle; men's voices are joined by women's, flutes are mixed in: the individual voices there are hidden, and what appears is the sound of them all together. I am speaking of the chorus known to the old philosophers: at our public performances there are more singers than there were spectators in the old theaters. When the ranks of singers have filled every aisle and the seating is ringed with trumpeters, and every kind of pipe and instrument sounds out from the stage, a single harmony arises from discordant parts. That is what I want our mind to be like: let it contain many arts, many precepts, examples from many ages, but all conspiring together into one.
'How,' you ask, 'can this be achieved?' By constant attention: if we do nothing except what reason recommends, and avoid nothing except what reason recommends. If you are willing to listen to reason, it will tell you: leave behind, once and for all, those things people run about chasing; leave riches—either a danger to those who possess them or a burden; leave the pleasures of body and mind—they soften and weaken; leave ambition, a swollen thing, empty, blown about by wind, with no limit, so anxious not to see anyone ahead of it that it is equally anxious not to see anyone level with it, tormented by envy, and a double envy at that. You see how wretched a person is who is both envied and envious. Look at those houses of the powerful, those tumultuous, quarreling thresholds crowded with callers: there is much humiliation in getting in, and more once you are in. Pass by those steps of the rich and those entrance halls suspended on great mounds of earth: there you will stand not merely on the edge of a precipice, but on slippery ground. Direct yourself instead toward wisdom, and seek out her calmest concerns, which are also her greatest. Whatever seems to stand out among human affairs, however small it may be, even though it rises above the very lowest things by comparison, is nonetheless reached only by difficult and steep paths. The road to the height of high position is rugged; but if you wish to climb this peak, to which fortune has submitted herself, you will indeed see beneath you everything that is held to be most exalted, yet you will arrive at the summit by a level road. Farewell.