The PHurrowed Brow

This is the third post in a series, one daily from the 3rd to the 24th.
If you are coming to these posts late, I’d urge you (for continuity’s
sake!) to go back & read them in their sequence of publication.

Centuries before Thomas à Kempis, Horace and Seneca, noble Romans both, published letters warning about travel. In truth, from as early as Homer’s epics, many ancient works, Greek and Roman alike, spotlighted the dangers of travel, especially travel by sea.

Other ancients, especially the poet Catullus, show a pleasure in travel and an excitement for exploration that seems almost similar enough to what I feel when I twist the throttle for a multi-day motorcycle odyssey.

The letters of Horace and Seneca, though, feature a rather different peril. In them, the authors argue that humans who travel bear with them the seeds of troubles that they’ll experience on their journeys. And so they each advise the recipients of their respective letters that travel will not solve their problems. In the Roman version of the “Wherever you go, there you are” trope, the addressee is presented as mistaking travel for transformation. Each addressee arrives at a failed transformation, and each author argues for a different methd that will enable the change that his addressee needs.

Horace, whose poetry swirls with an admixture of Epicurean, Stoic, and other ancient philosophical currents, was generally not a fan of long journeys. In his poem, cast as a letter to a friend, he advises against travel undertaken as a form of entertainment, a means of experiencing novelty, and a method of seeking status. Horace starts by diminishing the cachet that comes with being able to boast that he has seen so many famed and exotic locations in Greece and Asia Minor. He further adds that the grandeur of those destinations is not commensurate with inconveniences and dangers involved in seeking them. Indeed, Horace says, his friend will tire of those hardships long before it’s time to begin the return trip, predicting that the friend will suffer mid-journey regret for letting his restlessness and lack of contentment drive him from home. He tells the friend to glorify famous and exotic places all he wants, but to do so safely at his home in Ulubrae, just down the road from Rome. He concludes:

Horace, Epistles I.xi.23-30, translation by the author

Clearly, Horace would not follow you on Instagram, nor would he ‘Like’ any of my boast-post travel photos on Facebook (q.v. infrā). To him, traveling in pursuit of some connection to distant beauty and glory functions as a substitute for building satisfaction in one’s self and in one’s own homelife. It is, he contends, an utterly inadequate substitute, one bound to breed discontentedness rather than the contentment that flows from a life well lived.

Yep, Horace’s message seems to be “Romans, stay home!” Of course, Romans inevitably roam, and there has to be someone besides Horace to correct that error. Thankfully, we’ve got Brian Cohen…

Horace’s poem ends before he offers an answer to this question: what must one do to live one’s life well, whether at home or on the road? For such an answer we turn to Seneca.

Writing approximately 75 years after Horace, Seneca the Younger was a teacher, Stoic philosopher, playwright, essayist, and imperial adviser. His writing offers what are to many some of the best-reasoned arguments for how to live life well, even in adverse circumstances. To me, his most effective pointers are given in a collection of letters which he wrote and sent to a former pupil named Lucilius. The bond of affection between Seneca and Lucilius make the letters come across like the wise and encouraging advice you’d seek from a skilled and trusted mentor. I.e., they are not sermons.

In the letter we’ll consider, Seneca seems to have received word from Lucilius: Lucilius, unhappy, has taken to traveling with the hope of finding happiness along the way. But he’s had no success and is now even more unhappy than when he set out. That’s no surprise to Seneca. Spoiler alert– you’ll hear several echoes of Horace’s language, as well as repetition of the “… there you are” motif. But you will also find that Seneca offers guidance as to how to live your life well, no matter where you are, no matter where your next stop may be:

Seneca, Moral Epistles to Lucilius XXVIII, translation by the author

Will this work? Speaking for myself, I do not have the capacity of Thomas à Kempis to adopt self-mortification and bear a metaphorical cross of suffering as a way to live well and merit a good afterlife. Nor, as Horace suggests, am I willing or able to simply stay home and somehow live life well by taking on a right state of mind. Rather, it strikes me as much more possible (though not easy) to scrutinize, assess, and seek to begin remedying my shortcomings. And. paradoxically, that essential first step of the remedy, i.e., simply grasping that I have failed to do right by others (or even to do right for myself), well, sometimes that awareness comes more readily when I am engaged in an what I’d call an adventure. I’m not talking about being mindful of and remedying my mediocre skills as a motorcyclist. Or vastly improving my geriatric pace when hiking. Or using desensitization theory to overcome acrophobia-induced vertigo.

To be as succinct as possible, being out and about adventuring provides two essential catalysts for awareness: 1) distance/decompressed space which allows me to look more objectively back at the troubles I carried with me to the present; 2) awe and gratitude for the beauty of nature and human culture, which allow me to recalibrate my state of mind. Therafter, if I successfully prepare for and persevere through challenges (both those that can be anticipated and those that are adventitions), I gain a model forgetting myself out of troubles I brought upon myself, and this model can serve as a modus deponendi, a method of laying down the burdens of fear, avoidance, and my other vices.

Don’t get me wrong, travel is also a great way to enjoy ‘the good life’: the nurturing novelty of finding new music, food, art or architecture, beautiful scenery, etc., as well enjoying all of the above when friends and/or family are part of your journey. Those are all worthy pleasures in and of themselves. But for me, adventure is more than travel and helps me to live life well, both when life is good and when it isn’t. Besides, a double-scoop ice cream cone does indeed taste sweeter when enjoyed after exerting oneself for hours on a steep climb or riding a tough trail. And who besides Horace doesn’t like a good boast-post on InstaSnapFaceX?

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