MF 18: Reading, writing, & meditation

Read few books; read few authors; read few works; within these works, read a few passages; chose passages considered to be important and sufficient.

Reading basically involves providing an opportunity for meditation.

Meletan-meditation: it is exercise, to train oneself, a sort of mental exercise, a way of confronting an adversary, in order to find out if you can resist him or be the stronger. For Greeks or Latins, the meletan is to perform an exercise of appropriation of a thought. It involves ensuring that this truth is engraved in the mind in such a way that it is recalled immediately the need arises, and in such a way that we have, consequently making it a principle of action.

For example, the meditation of death. In a sense, meditating death does not mean thing that you are going to die, or convincing you that you are really going to die. Meditating death is placing yourself, in thought, in the situation of someone who is in the process of dying, or who is about to die, or who is living his last days.Through thought, the person who is dying or whose death is imminent.

Seneca, Letter 84: we should alternate between writing and reading. We should neither always write or always read; the former of the two activities will end up exhausting our energy if we keep at it constantly. The second lessens and dilutes our energy. We should meditate, write, and train.

Epictetus: "May death take me while I am thinking, writing, and reading these phrases."

Writing is a part of exercise with the advantage of two possible and simultaneous uses. The use for oneself. For simply by writing we absorb the thing itself we are thinking about. We help it to be established in the soul and we help it to be established in the body, to become a kind of habit for the body, or at any rate a physical virtuality. It was a recommended custom to write after having read something, and after having written it, to read it again and read it again out loud. The exercise of reading was not something easy: it was not a matter of just reading at sight. You had to stress the words properly, you had to utter them in a low voice. So the exercise of reading, writing, and rereading what you had written and the notes you had taken was an almost physical exercise of the assimilation of the truth and the logos you were holding on to. Epictetus says: "Keep these thoughts ready at hand night and day; put them into writing and read them." They are aids to memory, allowing the one who gives advice to rememorize the truths he passes on to the others but which he also needs for his own life.