Letters From a Stoic (10 page)

So give up this hope of being able to get an idea of the genius of the greatest figures by so cursory an approach.
You have to examine and consider it as a whole.
There is a sequence about the creative process, and a work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster.
I have no objection to your inspecting the components individually provided you do so without detaching them from the personality they actually belong to; a woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.

Still, if you press me I won’t treat you so meanly – openhanded generosity it shall be.
There is a mass of such things, an enormous mass of them, lying all over the place, needing only to be picked up as distinct from gathered up.
They come,
not in dribs and drabs, but in a closely interconnected and continuous stream.
I have no doubt, too, they may be very helpful to the uninitiated and those who are still novices, for individual aphorisms in a small compass, rounded off in units rather like lines of verse, become fixed more readily in the mind.
It is for this reason that we give children proverbs and what the Greeks call
chriae
*
to learn by heart, a child’s mind being able to take these in at a stage when anything more would be beyond its capacity.
But in the case of a grown man who has made incontestable progress it is disgraceful to go hunting after gems of wisdom, and prop himself up with a minute number of the best-known sayings, and be dependent on his memory as well; it is time he was standing on his own feet.
He should be delivering himself of such sayings, not memorizing them.
It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook.
‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said?
‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said?
How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders?
Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity.
Produce something from your own resources.

This is why I look on people like this as a spiritless lot – the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else’s shadow.
They never venture to do for themselves the things they have spent such a long time learning.
They exercise their memories on things that are not their own.
It is one thing, however, to remember, another to know.
To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own, and not to be dependent on some original and be constantly looking to see what the master said.
‘Zeno said this, Cleanthes that.’ Let’s have
some difference between you and the books!
How much longer are you going to be a pupil?
From now on do some teaching as well.
Why, after all, should I listen to what I can read for myself?
‘The living voice,’ it may be answered, ‘counts for a great deal.’ Not when it is just acting in a kind of secretarial capacity, making itself an instrument for what others have to say.

A further point, too, is that these people who never attain independence follow the views of their predecessors, first, in matters in which everyone else without exception has abandoned the older authority concerned, and secondly, in matters in which investigations are still not complete.
But no new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the past.
Besides, a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking.
‘But surely you are going to walk in your predecessors’ footsteps?’ Yes indeed, I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up.
The men who poineered the old routes are leaders, not our masters.
Truth lies open to everyone.
There has yet to be a monopoly of truth.
And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.

You say in your letter that you went and heard the philosopher Serapio when his ship put in where you are.
‘His words,’ you say, ‘tend to be tumbled out at a tremendous
pace, pounded and driven along rather than poured out, for they come in a volume no one voice could cope with.’ I do not approve of this in a philosopher, whose delivery – like his life – should be well-ordered; nothing can be well-regulated if it is done in a breakneck hurry.
That is why in Homer the impetuous type of eloquence which he compares to snow that keeps on coming down without a break, is given to the orator, while from the old man there comes a gentle eloquence that ‘flowed sweeter than honey’.
*
You should take the view, then, that this copious and impetuous energy in a speaker is better suited to a hawker than to someone who deals with a subject of serious importance and is also a teacher.

Yet I am just as much against his words coming in a trickle as in a stream.
He should not keep people’s ears on the stretch any more than he should swamp them.
For the other extreme of thinness and poverty means less attentiveness on the part of the listener as he becomes tired of this slowness with all its interruptions.
Nonetheless what is waited for does sink in more readily than what goes flying past; one speaks in any event of instruction as being handed on to those being taught, and something that escapes them is hardly being handed on.

Language, moreover, which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned.
This popular style has nothing to do with truth.
Its object is to sway a mass audience, to carry away unpractised ears by the force of its onslaught.
It never submits itself to detailed discussion, is just wafted away.
Besides, how can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?
And apart from all this surely language which is directed to the healing of men’s minds needs to penetrate into one?
Medicines do no good unless they stop some length of time in one.
There is, moreover, a great deal of futility and emptiness about this style of speaking,
which has more noise about it than effectiveness.
There are my terrors to be quieted, incitements to be quelled, illusions to be dispelled, extravagance to be checked, greed to be reprimanded: which of these things can be done in a hurry?
What doctor can heal patients merely in passing?
One might add, too, that there is not even any pleasure to be found in such a noisy promiscuous torrent of words.
Just as with a lot of things that one would never believe possible one finds it quite enough to have seen them once proved possible, so with these performers with words, to have heard them once is more than enough.
What is there in them, after all, that anyone could want to learn or imitate?
What view is one likely to take of the state of a person’s mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no restraint?

This rapidity of utterance recalls a person running down a slope and unable to stop where he meant to, being carried on instead a lot farther than he intended, at the mercy of his body’s momentum; it is out of control, and unbecoming to philosophy, which should be placing her words, not throwing them around, and moving forward step by step.
‘But surely she can move on to a higher plane now and then as well?’ Certainly, but it must be without prejudice to her dignity of character, and this vehement, excessive energy strips her of that.
Power she should have, great power, but it should be controlled: she should be a never-failing stream, not a spate.
Even in an advocate I should be loth to allow such uncontrollable speed in delivery, all in an unruly rush; how could a judge (who is not uncommonly, too, inexperienced and unqualified) be expected to keep up with it?
Even on the occasions when an advocate is carried away by an ungovernable passion or a desire to display his powers, he should not increase his pace and pile on the words beyond the capacity of the ear.

You will be doing the right thing, therefore, if you do not
go to listen to people who are more concerned about the quantity than the quality of what they say, and choose yourself – if you have to – to speak in the manner of Publius Vinicius.
When Asellius was asked how Vinicius spoke, he described it as being.
‘at a slow pace’.
Geminus Varius in fact remarked, ‘How you can call the man eloquent I simply don’t know – he can’t string three words together.’ Is there any reason why of the two you should not choose Vinicius’ style?
You can expect to be interrupted by persons with as little taste as the one who, when Vinicius was jerking the words out one by one, as if he were dictating rather than speaking, exclaimed, ‘I call on the speaker to speak.’ The pace of Quintus Haterius, a celebrated speaker of his day, is something I should have a sensible man keep well clear of: with him there was never a hesitation or a pause, only one start and only one stop.

But I also think that certain styles are suitable in a greater or lesser degree to different nationalities.
In a Greek one will tolerate this lack of discipline, while we have acquired the habit of punctuating what we say, in writing as well as speech.
Our own Cicero, too, from whom Roman oratory really sprang, was a steady goer.
Roman discourse is more given to self-examination, appraising itself and inviting appraisal.
Fabianus, who added outstanding oratory to those more important distinctions of his, his way of life and his learning, would discuss a subject with dispatch rather than with haste.
You might describe his oratory as being not rapid but fluent.
This I am ready to see in a philosopher, but I do not insist on it; his delivery is not to be halting, but I should rather have the words issued forth than flowing forth.
And a further reason I have for warning you against that disease is the fact that you can only acquire it successfully if you cease to feel any sense of shame.
You really need to give the skin of your face a good rub and then not listen to yourself!
For that unguarded pace will give rise to a lot of expressions of which you would otherwise be critical.
You cannot, I repeat, successfully acquire it and preserve your modesty at the same time.
One needs, moreover, constant daily practice for it.
It requires a switch of attention, too, from subject-matter to words.
And even if it does transpire that the words come readily to the tongue and are capable of reeling off it without any effort on your part, they will still need to be regulated.
A way of speaking which is restrained, not bold, suits a wise man in the same way as an unassuming sort of walk does.
The upshot, then, of what I have to say is this: I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.