Be a bee (3/12/22)

The Bee Simile

Last term, one of my professors told me to look out for references to bees in Early Modern literature. I think I finally found the passage she had in mind. Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher read widely in the Renaissance, uses a bee simile to teach about productive reading habits. In one of his letters, he begins by quoting a nice snippet of the epic poet Vergil. Vergil's bees "pack close the flowing honey / And swell their cells with nectar sweet."

Through some alchemical process—Seneca considers several theories in a digression—the bees transform the raw pollen from many flowers into precious honey. Seneca urges us to do the same with our reading:

"We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us,—in other words, our natural gifts,—we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound... We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power."

Collecting vs. Producing

I could talk about about the historical context of this quote, which meant slightly different things to the author's Roman peers and to the later writers who quoted it for their own projects. It could also be repurposed to provide a convieniant anti-plagarism lesson. Over the past week, however, I've been thinking along more self-centered lines. In terms of my writing, what's the correct balance of input to output?

This is a backwards reading of Seneca's letter, which is more concerned with the problem of mindless imitation without "digestion." At this point in my life, I feel like I have a different problem. I love to do research reading, I love to think (and occasionally, even talk to another human) about what I've read, but... I lot of my reading never makes it into a final product. This is fine when reading for personal enjoyment, but I've also hoping to use my graduate program to write more. I've got more pollen than I know what to do with: now I need to bend over the honeycomb and start coughing up that honey. I'm hoping to use my Gemini capsule to write about things that interest me, and also to practice writing in a way that is (hopefully) intersting to others as well.

Seneca, Epistle 84

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