In this video, I look at Seneca's second letter to Lucilius: On Reading Better. In this letter, Seneca explains the importance of having a reading program to make the most of your reading. How do we know what books to read? And how do we remember what we read?
🔸 Why we should try to settle our minds
🔸 Why we should be more focussed with our reading
🔸 Why we should stop buying books
🔸 Why we should make notes
🔸 Why we should incoporate wisdom from our reading
Seneca is urging us to slow down and read properly. If you don't know what to read next, this episode is for you.
✉️ Letter 2 - On Reading Better
“From your letter and from what I hear, I am becoming quite hopeful about you: you are not disquieting yourself by running about from place to place. Thrashing around in that way indicates a mind in poor health. In my view, the first sign of a settled mind is that it can stay in one place and spend time with itself. Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. Food does not benefit or become part of the body when it is eaten and immediately expelled. Nothing impedes healing as much as frequent change of medications. A wound does not close up when one is always trying out different dressings on it; a seedling that is transplanted repeatedly will never grow strong. Nothing, in fact, is of such utility that it benefits us merely in passing. A large number of books puts a strain on a person. So, since you cannot read everything you have, it is sufficient to have only the amount you can read.
“But I want to read different books at different times,” you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well, seizing on some item from among several things I have read. Today it is this, which I found in Epicurus—for it is my custom to cross even into the other camp,” not as a deserter but as a spy: Cheerful poverty is an honorable thing. Indeed, it is not poverty if it is cheerful: the pauper is not the person who has too little but the one who desires more. What does it matter how much is stashed away in his strongbox or his warehouses, how much he has in livestock or in interest income, if he hangs on another’s possessions, computing not what has been gained but what there is yet to gain? Do you ask what is the limit of wealth? Having what one needs, first of all; then, having enough.''
I hope you enjoy the second episode of my Seneca series. :)
#Stoicism #Seneca #Letters #RitualizeWisdom #Time #Virtue #Philosophy #InnerPeace #Values
🔗 Resources & Links:
👉 My Linktree: https://linktr.ee/RitualizeWisdom
👉 Watch the video version on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtwSM6kLJur8gT2aE-PVj3Q
👉 Read Seneca's Complete Letters: https://archive.org/details/letters-o...
👉 Listen to the podcast: https://tr.ee/iHw4RCpkth
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