A Tomb of One’s Own
Thoughts on reading Seneca & Virginia Woolf.
The faces of wisdom have their own demeanor, and the ancient ones, in the West at least, are always dignified, posed in our mind’s eye like a series of statues in a museum, their character expressed not in animation but in a certain static if elegant hardness.
That ancient sages should be classically remote in aspect should come as no surprise. The Greeks especially set the cartographic rules for mapping consciousness to reality, inventing official intellect as we’ve come to know it, costumed in formal dress and embracing the etiquette of logic.
The Greek philosophers thought they were stripping existence down to its fundamental elements (and conceptually speaking, perhaps they were, but the poets and the tragedians knew that thought in the abstract allows logic to be applied to life in ways more intellectually rigorous than living itself may always find useful).
The Roman thinkers had a more practical sense of how the structures of society — and their attendant markers: fame, glory, power — housed one’s behavior, and their definitions of how to live are more concerned with conduct than with thought, one’s repute in the real world being as important as one’s stance vis-à-vis an ideal one.
Since one’s position in that real world was defined, ultimately, by death, the question of how to live was translated into the problem of how to die, and eminence and legacy in the long run outlasted care and compassion in the passing moments that, in the present tense, by their presence or absence, define our lives.
Living, philosophically speaking, was left to its own devices (or the exclamations of poetic sensibilities: carpe diem and thank you, Horace), while coming to terms with death colored keystones of thinking from Epictetus to Seneca to Marcus Aurelius and beyond, erecting a noble mausoleum for thought in which the life of feeling, the unparsable ongoingness of daily consciousness, had scant memorial.
All the busts in the classical catacomb of classical philosophy are male. What body of knowledge was interred elsewhere, unceremoniously buried with — begging the pardon of Virginia Woolf — no tomb of its own? It’s not that dead white men have no useful lessons to teach, quite the contrary; it’s that the lessons themselves had, still have, something to learn.
“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me,” thinks Jinny in Woolf’s The Waves. “I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
The dead are always stoic, the living less so.
