Reading And Learning From The Stoics | Austin Central Library

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1:44Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics. something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:38Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Today, I went into the bowels of my most mortal enemy as a bookstore owner, talking about libraries, which of course are lovely and amazing. And I wouldn't be here without them because of all the books I checked out of libraries as a kid, because of the research that I do. I gave a talk to the Staff Development Appreciation Day at the Austin Central Library a while back. And it was an awesome conversation. I got to talk books with people who live and breathe books just like I do. and I'll bring you a little excerpt from that now.

3:43Thank you. It's good to be with all of you. Well, actually, I do feel like as a bookstore owner, I'm coming into the vows of my mortal enemy. You guys give away books for free. I think you guys are the socialism that my parents' friends on Facebook are warning me about. I actually love libraries. I wrote most of my first book at the library on the Tulane campus. Actually, as I was prepping for this talk, I found this pencil, which I still have, that I stole from said library. I wrote most of my next book at the UCR library, UC Riverside, where I went to college. I dropped out the beginning of my, or the end of my sophomore year.

4:27Actually, I think the first time I entered said library was to write that book after I had left. I wrote a good chunk of the next book at the 42nd Street Library in New York City. and then my book Ego is the Enemy, which is the first one I wrote after moving to Austin, I wrote a good chunk of at the UT library. So I've always worked in libraries. They're wonderful places, which is something I want to talk about today. But I fell in love with books at an early age. I read anything I could get my hands on, which did set up one somewhat traumatic memory at a library. I fell in love with Westerns.

5:03I loved books about Doc Holliday. I loved all the Louis L 'Amour books. If you haven't read Louis Lemore's Education of a Wandering Man, one of the most beautiful celebrations of reading that I've ever read. I've read all of his books. And then I was at the library in Sacramento, California, where I grew up as a kid, and I read pretty much every Louis Lemore book that was ever written. And then I came across this section with a whole bunch of westerns that I'd never read before. And I got them and I took them home. And there was a reason I hadn't read any of them and probably shouldn't have been allowed to check them out.

5:34This is the Law and Arm series, which is a very different kind of Western, meant for a very different audience. But I survived that scarring, jarring experience. And I was in college, my life would get changed by a book recommendation. I was at a conference, sort of like basic cover paper or my publishing paper. And I went up to the speaker afterwards and I said, hey, what books are you reading? What books would you recommend to someone my age? And he recommended Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. This is my Amazon receipt long before Amazon Prime existed, so I had to buy these other two books to get free shipping.

6:11It came to my college apartment, and it blew my mind. This is the book of the private thoughts of the emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius. And it's a book, I think, unlike any book ever published. It's not meant for publication. You'd probably be mortified that anyone was reading it, let alone 2 ,000 years later. It was what the economist Tyler Cowen calls a quake book. It sort of shook everything that I thought I knew about the world, which at 20 years old was not much, but it was this transformative experience. And I've put quite a few miles on that copy over the years. So this is 15, 16 years old.

6:50It's starting to show somewhere. As you can see, I'm going to come back to the idea of sort of putting miles on a book. But there is one passage at the beginning of Meditations. Marcus begins Meditations with a section that's titled Debts and Lessons, where he talks about the things that he learned from the most influential people in his life. And one of those people is his philosophy teacher, Rusticus. And he says, thanking Rusticus, a number of great things that he learned. But he says, through him, too, I came to know Epictetus' discourses, of which he gave me a copy from his own library. I think it's this beautiful idea that the course of Western civilization is changed by the thing that you do day in and day out, which is recommend books to people.

7:35This book recommendation to a young man, Marcus, who's probably 20, 25 years old, changes the course of his life. It's exactly what he needs. It's also a sort of a beautiful study of contrast, right? Epictetus is a slave in Nero's court. He is as powerless as one could be in Rome. And yet his writing, his thinking through philosophy, through the conversations that books enable, is able to influence the most powerful man in the world. And I think it's interesting that these two figures whose lives could not be more different, whose lived experiences could not be more different, are still struggling with the same fundamental questions about what it means to be a human being.

8:16They're both, for instance, thinking about what it means to be free, right? Epictetus in the literal sense, but also the figurative sense, free of the tyranny that's over him, free of the despair that quite naturally would wash over him. And then Marcus really is in this position of great power and wealth and privilege, which he does not ask for, is also thinking about freedom. freedom from stress, freedom from disturbance, freedom from envy, freedom from greed, freedom from a more figurative kind of enslavement. But nevertheless, some powerful people are as enslaved, Epictetus would say, or perhaps more enslaved than even literal slaves in Rome's time.

9:02So what I wanted to talk about today is I love books. I was thinking about books. I write about Stoic philosophy, I wanted to talk about some of the lessons that the Stoics give us as readers and thinkers and lovers of books. And the first is this idea that we must not just read, but read very, very deeply. I have Musonius Rufus, who is Epictetus's philosophy teacher in real life, riffing on a line that Epictetus says in his discourses, this is in my kid's book, the girl who would be free. He says that it's not what you read, he says it's not that we read, it's what we read and how we read, right?

9:43At one point in real life, Epictetus is talking to some of his students who are bragging about having read all of the works of Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics, who was very brilliant, but very difficult to read, and tended to be, write very long books. And Epictetus looks at them and he says, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you would have less to brag about. And his point is that, you know, it's not reading what everyone else thinks you should read. It's not reading the books that everyone says are important, but it's reading deeply into the important texts of our time. And actually, in that same passage where Marcus is thanking Rusticus, one of the things he specifically thanks him for, Aristarchus is Marcus's philosophy teacher.

10:29He says that from Aristarchus, I learned to read attentively, not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things, right? Not I think I understand, but no, I actually did put in the time and the work to truly understand what's happening here. This is my copy of Tom Ricks, a great Austin author. I think he spends about half the time, half the year here. This is his new book. It's a military history of the civil rights movement. It's called To Wage a Good War. This is a copy that I'm reading. I'm about halfway through. But you can see here when I read books, this is one of the reasons I don't check out books from the library, is that I insist on folding the pages and writing in the margins, which, of course, you're not allowed to do.

11:11But the point is, when I read, I'm not just casually consuming information. This is why I'm not a huge fan of audiobooks, although I don't fault anyone for reading them. I want to engage very deeply with the text. And so I not only read very deeply, But then after I read, I go through and I type up all the passages that I like. I want to feel them coming through my fingers. Some of them I write by hand. I do these on physical note cards. And this work not only goes into forming and building my actual recall and understanding more than just getting the gist of the book, because I've gone through it several times, but these note cards also become the building blocks for the books that I go on to write.

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13:14Now, the Stoics would also say it's not just enough to read deeply, we have to read widely. in my book, The Boy Who Would Be King, which is about the boyhood of Marcus Aurelius. Rusticus places in Marcus's hand a book and then another and another and another. And Marcus says, what does reading books have to do with being a king? And Rusticus says, everything. The idea that we have to read, that reading is the best way to understand what it is that we do is important. There's a great dictum from Bismarck. He says, any fool can learn by experience. I prefer to learn by the experiences of others.

13:50And that's essentially what books are, an opportunity to learn quite deeply from the experiences of others. And we have to avail ourselves of as many of these experiences as possible. General James Maddys, who actually traveled on all of his deployments with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, he and I have gone back and forth over what's the best translation. But he would say that if you have not read hundreds of books about what you do. He says you are functionally illiterate. And I love this idea, right? It's functionally illiterate means that you have not ingested a wide enough breadth of experiences or insights about your profession.

14:32You're just winging it. He says in his line of work, this is tantamount to murder because you're going to be learning lessons by experience at the cost of other people's lives or limbs. Tolstoy says, I cannot understand people who do not want to communicate with the wisest people who have ever lived. This is the Twain quote. Whether he said it or not, I'm not quite sure. But he says, those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read. And so I like this idea of functional illiteracy as a really important concept. It's not that we read occasionally or we read about some of the people who do what we do or some of the things we're interested we have to we have to swarm topics we have to go very very very in depth in them reading as widely and as deeply as we possibly can on this topic and the other stoic concept that i take uh as far as reading that i think about a lot and i've tried to although i try to read as widely as possible over the last couple years i've really concentrated my reading not just in a few areas but also on going back to reading books that were influential early in my life or that I struggled to read the first time.

15:41So this idea of rereading is a really important concept for the Stoics. There's a beautiful metaphor that the Stoics use. So Marcus writes a good chunk of meditations. The only true location we have for it is listed in book two of the meditations among the quadii. He's at the front of the Roman lines, and then he writes the rest of it, or a good chunk of the rest of it, at Aquincum, which is a camp outside Budapest, also on the Damien River. So this theme of a river comes up multiple times in meditations. And Marcus likes to quote Heraclitus, the great mystic poet, who says that we never step in the same river twice.

16:23The idea when we return to a book is the book is exactly the same, and yet we are different. The context in which we are reading is different. What we are looking for is different. They say that we never step in the same river twice, but it's not the same river, and it is not the same man. Yes, in many cases, the book is exactly the same, but we are different. We have changed. And so every time I go back and read a book, I find something in it that I never would have seen before. I reread Fahrenheit 451 a few years ago. I've read it a couple times since, but it's a book I read in high school, and I remember taking from this the idea that the government tries to censor what people can read.

17:02And it was only later in the context of the times that we live in now that I realized that's actually not what Bradbury is trying to tell us at all. Bradbury was concerned about a world that was too stupid to be concerned about government censorship. And he was actually most concerned about people who wanted the government to censor them because they didn't want to be offended. They didn't understand what the fuss about books was all about. They didn't understand why something so explosive or controversial or divisive should be allowed to exist. And at 15 years old, I was, you know, incapable of understanding what this was about.

17:39And it also seemed a bit, you know, naive or science fiction-y. And now we live in a world where, tragically, that's not the case. So every time you return to a book, you get something new out of it. You discover something new. And Seneca says, similar to Marcus's line from Rusticus about not being satisfied with getting the gist of it, he says, we must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works. He said, everywhere means nowhere. Reading lots of books, trying to set a record for how many you read, or being in a contest with people, or even as a little kid, I remember the contest at the library where you get little stickers for how many I read, which is wonderful, but as we get older, we have to understand that we have to pick a lane to a certain degree, and we have to go as deeply in that lane as possible.

18:27So my copy of Meditations, which I was showing you, so I got this at 19 years old. You can't quite tell from this photo, but that cover is taped on with scotch tape because it is ripped off after spending so much time in my bags over the years. But what I love about every time I pick up the book is not just that I get something new out of it, But I also have this strange relationship where I get to see what struck me when I was 19, what struck me when I was 20, what struck me at all the different ages that I read this book because I had a different pen in my hand at each time. Or I had a different highlighter.

19:02Or I folded a different page. And I can see what these different notes to myself were about. And sometimes I shake my head at what was striking to me. And sometimes I am reminded why that struck me. I'll give you an example. One of my favorite passages in meditation. from Marcus is in book five, and he talks about struggling to get out of bed in the morning when it's early. He says, what will you put on this earth to do, to huddle under the covers and stay warm? Now, as a college sophomore with early morning classes that I didn't want to go to, this struck me as really important advice. It was quite helpful.

19:40Now, as a writer whose routine is rooted around getting up early, I love the mornings. Now, I don't need any help with it at all. I actually sometimes need the opposite reminder that, hey, this is the weekend. You can sleep in if you wanted. You've got two young kids who are probably going to wake you up in the middle of the night tomorrow night. You need to catch up on your sleep. So we take different things out of the book, and that's why we have to go back to them over and over again. We can't be satisfied with just getting the gist. We can't be satisfied with just understanding what our experiences up until that point allowed us to understand.

20:15And so by coming back and then we get something new. One of my favorite things about reading Marcus is this is not the only translation of Marcus that I have. And I particularly like this translation from Gregory Hayes from the Modern Library. I think it's the most beautiful and lyrical of all the translations. But I've read the really antiquated ones. I read the new translations when they come out. Robin Waterfield just did a new translation, an annotated edition, that I really enjoyed. every time I go and that you realize, oh, not even, it's not even that you can miss something in a book that you read for the first time, but that the translator has so much leeway, so much discretion over what they emphasize or what they take out of it.

20:55And that many of the books that we read that are particularly of translations are reflections of not only the time in which they were translated, right? When you read an edition from Marcus from the 1700s and he says, thou dost not, or thou shall not, he was not saying that. He was writing in Greek to himself. He would have been totally unfamiliar with these figures of speech or this style of English. That's the translator's insertion. And so when you go back and you reread these books, you read different translations, you get something new, because each time you're seeing it from a slightly different angle.

21:31I would say the Stokes also remind us that we have to read, and this is more important than ever, We have to read people that we disagree with. Seneca talks about reading like a spy and the enemy's camp, right? And my favorite line from Seneca, he says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. And he does this. He's not just saying this. In Seneca's letters, the philosopher that he quotes the most is not another Stoic. It's not a philosopher you would think that he would agree with at all. the philosopher that Seneca quotes the most is Epicurus, ostensibly his mortal rival, the school that he would disagree the most with.

22:15And that's his point, is that he's reading like a spy in the enemy's camp. And he's quoting Epicurus not just where he disagrees with him, and is using, you know, iron sharpens iron, and is explaining why he disagrees and why the Epicureans were wrong. For instance, the Stoics believed, he says that, he says the Epicureans believe that we should not be involved in politics if we don't have to be. And Seneca says the Stoics are involved in politics, contribute to public life, unless something prevents us. So they have these diametrical differences, and Seneca is not afraid to debate these or discuss them, but they're also much more aligned than you might think.

22:58And he has no problem citing a bad author if the line is good, right? So he's reading deeply. He is intimately familiar with all sorts of schools of philosophy that you might not think he would be, or that you might think he might want to push away. So he is adamant about reading people that we disagree with. To go back to Rusticus's advice to Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius, I think, following the same path, although he never quotes Seneca in any of his writings. It's sort of a peculiar omission. But Marcus says that one of the things, and this is what I think we are struggling with as a society when we engage with the points that we disagree with, Marcus says that Rusticus teaches him not to fall for every smooth thinker, right, or smooth talker.

23:48And his point was you should be reading the things, you should be engaging with the things. It doesn't say that you should be sucked down a rabbit hole, that you should lose your grasp on reality. You have to still go to the core of what they're saying. You have to put what they're saying to the test and they can understand it.

24:20As folks believe that this sort of learning process, as Mattis was talking about, is something that goes on forever, that we must always stay astute. they believe that ego was the enemy as epictetus says it's impossible for a person to learn that which they think they already know right and so if we approach what we read if we approach knowledge if we approach our craft our profession from a place of humility from intellectual humility then we can get better if we approach it from a place of intellectual and professional arrogance then we are frozen in place and we can't get better. You think about the Socratic method, right?

25:01The Socratic method is rooted in asking questions. You think about Socrates as a person. What Socrates does is go around Athens. He's very wise. He's very smart. He almost always knows the answer, but that's not what he does. He does not go around telling people that they're good or telling people that they're wrong. He goes around asking them questions. He tries to understand why they think what they think, tries to engage with them in a debate, in a conversation, so that by the end of it, both of them understand the truth better. The physicist John Wheeler says that as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance.

25:41I think one of the most rewarding parts about reading and about learning and about this sort of self-education journey is that you never feel like you've arrived. Certainly you feel like you know more, but you also have this creeping sense that you know so very little because you've been exposed more and more to things that you didn't even know that you didn't know about, right? Domains or whole industries or areas or lines of thinking, authors that you didn't even know you were unaware of until you heard them mentioned obliquely or alluded to or you looked something up. And this process then of understanding that you'll never get there, it's like the horizon, it always moves a little bit further out from your grasp, to me is actually really challenging and compelling and exciting.

26:31It's the whole point. There's a story about Marcus Aurelius. He's widely loved as this philosopher king. He's known as being brilliant and smart and educated. in contrast to so many of his predecessors. And he's seen leaving the palace one day late in life. And his friend stops him on the street and he says, Marcus, where are you going? And Marcus says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. Sextus the philosopher, Marcus also thinks at the beginning of Meditations, and was the grandson or the grandnephew of Plutarch, the great biographer. for him. But Marcus says, I am off to see sexist a philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know.

27:15And this suns the man, and he has this great line that I think is worth recording forever. He says, oh Zeus, the king of the Romans in his old age, takes up his tablets and goes to school, right? You cannot learn that which you think you already know. Marcus is explicitly leaving the comfort of the palace where everyone tells him he's a genius, where he is in control, where he He has unlimited power, and he's seeking out teachers and philosophers and ideas. It's a lifelong process. He is explicitly seeking out things that he doesn't know. He remains a student even until the end of his life. The Stoics, though, when they read, when they think, when they explore, when they pursued philosophy, they were looking for things that they could use.

28:03Right. The Stoics would have, I think, looked down on so much of academic philosophy today, just as so much of academic philosophy looks down on Stoicism. They think it's simple. They think it's too close to self-help. I suspect that what it really is, is it's it's hard to get a Ph.D. and specialize in something that just comes out and says what it means. For the Stoics, philosophy was something you applied in your life. works, really, in meditation, says it stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now. He wanted to be a philosopher. He is thrust into power, and he realizes that actually that is the opportunity to be the philosopher, right?

28:48It's not something you do in the classroom. It's something you do in life. Seneca talking about how children are taught. Back then, students were taught the Odyssey in the Iliad in school. And he says, what does it matter where this stuff happened, right? What does it matter how to pronounce the names or who wrote it or any number of these things, right? What I remember primarily about studying Homer in elementary school and middle school and high school was, like, debates about whether he was real or not, right? Debates about how he wrote it. I remember there were questions about, you know, like, all the minutiae of it, right?

29:29This is what you get tested on in school because minutia or trivia is how we have taken it in the classroom as a way of verifying knowledge. But Seneca says, what does all of this matter? What matters is what Odysseus is struggling with, the themes. What matters, for instance, in the Odyssey is the theme of hubris. And Seneca is saying, and we are struggling with hubris in our own lives right in this moment. Mark Stoelius, what's beautiful in meditations is how often he is quoting poets and playwrights, the popular culture of his day. He even specifically talks about how tragedies can be a way of learning about life.

30:12He says, if it doesn't upset you when it happens on the stage, why should it upset you when it happens in life? So Stoelius tried to read and consume and study, but always with an eye on practicality, How will I use this information? How will it make me a better person, right? And Marcus talks about how often we want to be seen as smarter. He says, you want to be a better wrestler, a better writer, but you don't want to be a better person, a better forgiver of faults, a better friend in tight places, he says. The point of studying these ideas is to get better as a person. and he says that what he learns from Rusticus, who again is trying to teach him in real philosophy, not penitent philosophy, he says, not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric, not to write treatises on abstract questions or deliver moralizing little sermons or compose imaginary descriptions.

31:15And that's what's so wonderful about Meditations and why it is so unique among all the works ever published in philosophy is that it's straightforward. He says, why are you losing your temper? He says, why are you afraid of death? He says, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? It's four questions about what it means to be a good person in the world. One of the areas that Stoicism and Buddhism overlap is in this idea of stillness, peace, tranquility. And in fact, almost all the philosophical and religious traditions converge around this idea. They all have their own word for it. But it's to me the idea of being still while the world spins around you, not being riven by external or internal forces, getting to a place of inner peace no matter what's happening in the world.

32:02And to me there's nothing better than that than books. At the outbreak of the Second World War before Churchill was reinstalled in power, he writes to a friend. He's working on what he thought would be his magnum opus, A History of the English-speaking Peoples. And he's way back, he's still early on in the book. And they say, how are you handling all this? How are you dealing with it? And he says, you know, sometimes when the world is falling apart, it helps to put a thousand years between you and the present moment. And losing himself in history, being able to step back and see the big picture, is critical in giving him the perspective, the wisdom that he needs to ultimately step up and lead in this crisis.

32:45General Mattis again says, if you were to sum up the single biggest problem of leadership in the information age, it's a lack of reflection. It's a lack of solitude. Everyone's just emotionally, immediately, instinctively reacting to everything. We're not stepping back. We're not thinking. I think there's something special about libraries, not just because they're full of books. They're also full of silence, right? That silence is so important in a time of noise, in a time of endless noise. The ability to step into somewhere quiet. The Stoics talk about washing off the dust of earthly life. I think they also mean the noise of everyday life and having this place of stillness where we can reflect and we can think and we can see big picture.

33:33Marcus talks of taking Plato's view, meaning the view from above. He also talks of being like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around. and then again when I think of this I don't just think of the rock but I think of sitting there reading falling into the world that the author is setting up going entering another time or place historically this gives us the perspective that we need obviously mornings as I was talking about are a wonderful place to have this before the world is awake before it's noisy before you have gone straight to your phone or your inbox or your social media feeds I try to every morning not just to wake up early, not just to go outside and go for a walk, but I try to spend time with journals.

34:21I try to put my thinking down on the page. Anne Frank wrote in her diary that paper is more patient than people, and I think that's a beautiful idea.

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