Hamlet's BlackBerry (11 page)

Rome represented a new kind of connectedness, one that offered tremendous benefits, especially to the privileged classes, while simultaneously exacting costs, some of them quite high. In making the world smaller, the empire increased the everyday busyness and burdens of the individual. Life in the city of Rome itself was fast-paced, crowded, noisy. A weary soul could certainly escape, as the wealthy often did by retreating to the lavish estates they built in the countryside beyond the city. But even out there, they hadn't really left Rome, not truly. No matter where you went in the empire, there were frequent reminders—the roads, aqueducts, and fortifications, the legionnaires and postal carriers—that you were still
inside
a political, social, and cultural system that, in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways, demanded a great deal of you in terms of time, energy, and personal autonomy.

Adding further to the busyness was written communication, a technology that had taken off in the four hundred years since Plato. Writing had transformed life in the Mediterranean world and was a crucial factor in the success of Rome. The legal and administrative machinery that held the empire together depended on written laws, edicts, records, and communiqués. The age of paperwork had arrived (though at this point it was papyrus-work). Writing also figured hugely in the everyday lives of literate Romans such as Seneca. Postal deliveries were important events, as urgently monitored as e-mail is today. Seneca writes at one point of his neighbors hurrying “from all directions” to meet the latest mail boat from Egypt. Books were now central to education, and literacy in both Greek and Latin was essential for any Roman seeking to rise to a high position in society. In a world increasingly driven and defined by written language, there was just a great deal more information to process and absorb.

In sum, the busy Roman was constantly navigating
crowds—not just the physical ones that filled the streets and amphitheaters but the virtual crowd of the larger empire and the torrents of information it produced. Seneca spent most of his life at the throbbing center of it all. Though he flourished in the crowd, he also struggled with its demands and was acutely conscious that if he were not careful, it could take over his life. The best record of his thoughts on this subject is a series of 124 letters he wrote to an old friend named Lucilius, a career civil servant who was deeply interested in philosophy and apparently viewed Seneca as a teacher and role model.

In his youth, Seneca had embraced Stoicism, a Greek school of thought that emphasized self-reliance and simple living. Today the word “stoic” has a dour, joyless ring, but the philosophy itself is positive and life-embracing, particularly in the hands of the unfailingly upbeat Seneca. His correspondence with Lucilius, known as the
Epistulae Morales
or “moral letters,” covers an incredibly broad range of topics, from the mundane (a virus he's just caught) to the transcendent (why death shouldn't scare us), sometimes in the same sentence. One of his most frequent themes is the danger of allowing others—not just friends and colleagues but the masses—to exert too much influence on one's thinking. The more connected a society gets, the easier it is to become a creature of that connectedness. One's inner life grows increasingly contingent, defined by what others say and do. “You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid,” begins one letter. “My answer is this: a mass crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself yet without risk…. I never come back home with quite the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace.”

To fend off the crowd, Stoics believed, it was essential to cultivate inner self-sufficiency, and Seneca returns to this
notion over and over. Learn to be content within yourself, to trust your own instincts and ideas. Those who achieve this autonomy, he argues, are best able to enjoy and make the most of their outward lives. They thrive in the crowd because they're not dependent on it.

This was hard to do in a society that placed as many demands on the individual as Rome did. The movers and shakers in Seneca's circle were terribly busy, constantly rushing about with what he called “the restless energy of a hunted mind.” He paid particular attention to two aspects of this restlessness. One was the ceaseless need to travel, as if happiness always lay off in some distant city or resort. Those who lived this way were really just running away from themselves and their worries, Seneca said. And they were bound to fail because the stressed-out mind had a way of carrying its burdens everywhere. “All this hurrying from place to place won't bring you any relief, for you're traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.”

He noticed that those who lead distracted, unsettled lives will go to great lengths to
remain
that way, even on vacation. “The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.” In other words, by the first century
A.D
. the busy, crowd-induced state of mind had gone mobile, and even then it was hard to shake. Today we ask, “Does this hotel have Wi-Fi?”

The second variety of mindless bustling was the way people consumed
information
. Due to the explosion of writing, the empire was awash in texts. The book collection of the famous Alexandria library now numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but you didn't have to go to Egypt to read. A Roman bookseller with a large staff of scribes trained in dictation could churn out copies of popular books very quickly.
Plus there was the mail traffic, the paperwork that propelled both government and commerce, and other kinds of written communication. Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that's available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way. So there was a tendency to graze, skim the surface, look for shortcuts.

Seneca observed that people had begun to read in the same way they traveled, racing harum-scarum from book to book. Some never took the time to develop an intimate familiarity with the ideas of a single great writer, a practice he'd found useful in his efforts to develop his own mind and beliefs. There was more to be gained from knowing one excellent thinker deeply, he believed, than from knowing dozens superficially. Instead, he wrote, readers “skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.” Reading in this fashion is like anything else done in haste: “Food that is vomited up as soon as it is eaten is not assimilated into the body and does not do one any good…a plant which is frequently moved never grows strong. Nothing is so useful that it can be of any service in the mere passing. A multitude of books only gets in one's way.”

He might as well having been writing in this century, when it's hard to think of anything that
isn't
done in “mere passing,” and much of life is beginning to resemble a plant that never puts down roots.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this problem. One is to surrender to the madness, allow the crowd to lead you around by the nose and your experience to become ever more shallow. Seneca tells the story of a rich man named Sabinus who didn't read much but was desperate to
appear
as if he did. At great cost, he purchased about a dozen slaves and made them memorize the works of famous writers. One had to learn
Homer by heart, another was assigned Hesiod, and so on. At dinner parties, he would keep the slaves “at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets,” which he would then recite for his guests as if he'd produced them himself. Today, this kind of faux wisdom is a lot easier to obtain. With our screens Googling away, all the brilliance in the world is at our fingertips. And as long as it remains there, rather than in the mind, how different are we from Sabinus?

The other option is to step back, recognize you're too busy, and pare down. “Measure your life: it just does not have room for so much,” Seneca advises Lucilius. Though much of what keeps us hopping is unavoidable—the demands of work and other inflexible obligations—a fair amount is pure, self-created bustle.
Why
check the inbox ten times an hour on a Saturday, when once will do? By eliminating the worthless time-wasting stuff and focusing on what serves your highest purposes, Seneca argued, you can shape and enrich your own experience. Even in his time, this was not a new revelation. It's the commonsense view behind Socrates' notion that each of us is holding the reins of our own inner chariot, deciding at every moment where and how to deploy our energies. As Winifred Gallagher writes in her recent book
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
, “It's about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.”

“After running over a lot of different thoughts,” Seneca tells Lucilius, “pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day. This is what I do myself; out of the many bits I have been reading I lay hold of one.”

The question is how to apply this idea to a world as crowded with information and stimuli as ours. It's one thing to select an idea or experience you want to focus on, another to tune out
all the
other
stuff around it. What do you do when even Dinah Washington can't hold your attention?

In one of the letters, Seneca elaborates further on his technique. “I cannot for the life of me see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be,” he begins, noting that he's writing from a room directly above a public bathhouse or spa. There were facilities like this in every Roman city, and they figured prominently in day-to-day life. Romans went to the baths not just to bathe but for exercise, massages, and other body treatments, as well as socializing and simple relaxation. They were the progenitors of today's spas and, like the latter, not always the tranquil oases we like to imagine. “Picture me with a babel of noise going on all about me,” writes Seneca, describing in great detail the sounds rising up from below, the grunting and gasping of the weight lifters, the smack of hands on the shoulders of someone getting a massage, the raucous shouts of people leaping into the pool “with a tremendous splash.” As if this weren't enough, street sounds are drifting in, too, from vendors hawking drinks, sausages, and other edibles, from “the carriages hurrying by in the street, the carpenter who works in the same block, a man in the neighborhood who saws, and this fellow tuning horns and flutes at the Trickling Fountain and emitting blasts instead of music.”

A crazy scene, yet he tells Lucilius it's not bothering him a bit. “I swear I no more notice all this roar of noise than I do the sound of waves or falling water.” How can that be? He explains that he's trained himself to be oblivious. “I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam without so long as there is no commotion within.”

He makes it sound easy and completely self-driven, as if there's a switch he can turn on and off in his mind. The mind,
he writes in another letter, should be “able at will to provide its own seclusion even in crowded moments.” Perhaps, but in achieving what he calls “inward detachment,” he's also had a crucial assist from a tool: the letter he's writing to Lucilius. He doesn't give it credit, but there's no question that the act of writing has helped him focus his thoughts. The letter is the
object
of the journey inward, and it works beautifully, taking him to his desired destination. This letter is one of his liveliest and most interesting, which surely wouldn't have been the case if he'd been distracted by the ambient racket. In fact, toward the end of the letter he reveals that he wrote it as an experiment, in a conscious effort to see if he could filter out the din.

What's remarkable is that he's using a technology that played a large role in making the Roman mind busier—written language—to reduce that busyness. For a man who lived by a philosophy of simplicity and inner autonomy, letter writing was a perfect remedy for the problem he faced in that noisy room. First, it simplified the crowd by reducing it to one person. Of all the people in the gargantuan throng that was Rome, he chose one as the exclusive focus of his thoughts. Lucilius is the human equivalent of the one thought he would choose each day for special attention. Second, by muffling the distractions of the outward world, letter writing allowed him go back inward and reclaim his autonomy.

Thus, it turns out that written language had the capacity to do exactly what Socrates said it never could: set the mind free, so it could do its best work. It did this by affording a private, reflective experience. What Seneca describes resembles the state of “flow” that the modern psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has identified as the best kind of human experience. In essence, flow is what happens when one is so absorbed in an activity that the world seems to fall away. The activity can be as simple as working on a jigsaw puzzle or as complicated as flying
a plane, as long as it produces what he calls “a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.” In flow, there is no sense of time or distraction, just complete immersion in the moment. According to Csikszentmihalyi, one achieves this happy state by learning to “control inner experience” and find “order in consciousness.” The pursuits that induce it tend to have a sense of boundedness or limits; most are goal-directed tasks that have a reasonable chance of being completed. There's no satisfaction in doing a puzzle that doesn't fit together or shooting baskets against a backboard with no hoop.