February 3
How long will you only carry out what others have thought? Speak for once from your own store. For it is one thing to remember — another to know.
Letters to Lucilius, Letter 33 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
How long will you only carry out what others have thought? Speak for once from your own store. For it is one thing to remember — another to know.
Sometimes it takes a follow-up question for you to notice how a thought is lodged in you. You're explaining something to someone that has made sense to you for a long time, and they ask: "And what if it's otherwise?" Suddenly the next sentence isn't there. You had the thought whole, but only in the order in which you once received it.
That is no disgrace. Almost everything you think, someone has thought before you, and a thought doesn't become more valuable by coming from you first. It becomes your own rather when you can carry it further at the point where your source stops: in a case it didn't know, or at the place where it no longer holds.
The difficulty is that from the inside the two feel the same. What has been repeated sounds just as convinced in your head as what has been thought through, sometimes even more convinced, because it is smoother. In thinking alone, the difference seldom shows.
You begin an answer you don't yet know. It comes out more halting than anything you said before.
