Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Twelve steps to haven
- 2 Dropping in (it) at SENECA'S
- 3 You can get used to anything
- 4 The long and winding mode
- 5 Booking us in
- 6 Now and then; here and there: at SCIPIO'S
- 7 Bound for VATIA'S
- 8 Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, VATIA'S
- 9 The world of the bath-house: SCIPIO'S
- 10 The appliance of science: SCIPIO'S
- 11 Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration
- 12 Still olive, still SCIPIO'S
- Appendix 1 Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales
- Appendix 2 From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba
- Bibliography
- Indexes
5 - Booking us in
Letters 84–88
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Twelve steps to haven
- 2 Dropping in (it) at SENECA'S
- 3 You can get used to anything
- 4 The long and winding mode
- 5 Booking us in
- 6 Now and then; here and there: at SCIPIO'S
- 7 Bound for VATIA'S
- 8 Knocking the self: genuflexion, villafication, VATIA'S
- 9 The world of the bath-house: SCIPIO'S
- 10 The appliance of science: SCIPIO'S
- 11 Shafts of light: transplantation and transfiguration
- 12 Still olive, still SCIPIO'S
- Appendix 1 Here to stay Places and persons named in the Epistulae Morales
- Appendix 2 From: Letter 86 To: A Dying Light in Corduba
- Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
LETTER 84: THE BEESNESS
Book 11 opens with a shock that is meant to stay with readers reading:
Itinera ista, quae segnitiam mihi excutiunt, et ualetudini meae prodesse iudico et studiis.
The ‘journeys’ you mention, ‘shaking the sloth out’ of me, are in my judgement beneficial at once to my well-being and my studies.
We will for once recuperate travel by bracketing it with adventures across the page. Routes routinize. Bouts of physical-plus-mental ‘to-and-fro-ing’ integrate a productive self, while reading and writing phases reinvigorate by rotation (commeandum). ‘“We must”, as they say, “make like the bees”’ (84.3): go all round the garden for suitable flowers, then back home to sort out the combs, and ‘stuff their cells/rooms with sweet nectar’.
Here Seneca journeys out to read-and-raid Virgil's Aeneid (quoting 1.432–3), only to collect a reprocessed Georgics passage, and message (after 4.163–4). As he says, reading is collecting readings, and when writing turns them into a corpus, we don't know whether the human ‘honey’ is essentially found, and ready-made, or if it is the product of a conversion process (neglegentem corporis … lectionibus, … lectio … legere … lectione collectum …, redigat in corpus, … collegerunt ∼ collegerunt … colligendi ∼ lectione congessimus … in corpore nostro, 1–5).
Our brief open-air sortie turns out to be already over.
For we honey-bees have a different production-line. Our business is to internalize and process what we ingest until it is converted for incorporation (transeunt).
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- Morals and Villas in Seneca's LettersPlaces to Dwell, pp. 46 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004