LETTER 84: THE BEESNESS

Book 11 opens with a shock that is meant to stay with readers reading:

We will for once recuperate travel by bracketing it with adventures across the page. Routes routinize. Bouts of physical-plus-mental ‘to-and-fro-ing’ integrate a productive self, while reading and writing phases reinvigorate by rotation (commeandum). ‘“We must”, as they say, “make like the bees”’ (84.3): go all round the garden for suitable flowers, then back home to sort out the combs, and ‘stuff their cells/rooms with sweet nectar’.

Here Seneca journeys out to read-and-raid Virgil's Aeneid (quoting 1.432–3), only to collect a reprocessed Georgics passage, and message (after 4.163–4). As he says, reading is collecting readings, and when writing turns them into a corpus, we don't know whether the human ‘honey’ is essentially found, and ready-made, or if it is the product of a conversion process (neglegentem corporis … lectionibus, … lectio … legere … lectione collectum …, redigat in corpus, … collegerunt ∼ collegerunt … colligendi ∼ lectione congessimus … in corpore nostro, 1–5).

Our brief open-air sortie turns out to be already over.

For we honey-bees have a different production-line. Our business is to internalize and process what we ingest until it is converted for incorporation (transeunt).