Quote sandwich: Moral Letters to Lucillus 2.2; What is America?

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.

I like this quote by Seneca, both as it resembles my own thoughts about the "work" of the humanities and the peril of travel.

Most of the day-by-day work of an academic in the humanities depends on "grokking" other thinkers, and sometimes across great rhetorical divides. A classicist has to be conversant with feminist theory, or psychoanalysis, or ecological thought, all while reaching for a profound connection with the classics. Specialists may traffic in interdisciplinarity, but ultimately to serve as ambassadors to their primary sources.

Disciplinary thought--both "disciplinary" in the sense of academic disciplines, and "disciplinary" in the sense of self-commitment towards a set of procedures--requires the humanist to "linger among a limited number of master thinkers." And Seneca juxtaposes this process with travel, the un-lingering. GK Chesterton, likewise, finds that travel flattens the world so that the mind can roll over it without real interruption.

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger—the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

But I think there's a fundamental difference between Seneca and Chesterton, and that's the difference between the aristocratic Stoic and the democratic Christian. Whereas Seneca wants to bend the individual away from the world and towards excellence, Chesterton wants to collide the individual against the mob in some semblance of the sinner's collision with transcendent goodness. Moreover, Chesterton sees all individuals as fundamentally equivalent in sin. Seneca writes, "Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach." In other words, Seneca sees evil outside, and goodness in the sages. Chesterton, however, sees evil within, and goodness in a transcendent, other-ed Christ, prefigured by the other: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."