How to Be
Life Lessons from the Early Greeks
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other?
Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life.
These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus in Ephesus was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves ‘How can I be true to myself?’ In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.
Prize-winning and bestselling writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought.
Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal — all became the Greeks’ legacy to the world.
Born out of a rough, dynamic—and often cruel— moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of understanding.
About the author
Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including The Sea is Not Made of Water, The Making of Poetry, Sea Room, God’s Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird’s Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Nicolson (The Life Between the Tides) illuminates in this meditative account the vital influence geography had on the evolution of Greek philosophy from the 11th to the 5th centuries BCE, arguing that places gave rise to frames of mind that served as wellsprings of new ideas. Drawing on archaeology, literary accounts, and his own travels, Nicolson contends that Greek philosophers' focus on fluidity, exchange, and connectedness derived from the growth of Iron Age port cities across the Aegean. In support of this idea, he recounts a well-worn parable of the philosopher Thales, who lived in the port city of Miletus in the 6th century BCE; Thales tripped into a well while examining the stars and was laughed at by an enslaved girl who chided him for not being able to see what was directly in front of him. According to Nicolson, this story illustrates how the tensions of the slave trade, the basis of Miletus's coastal prosperity, led to the origins of philosophy's self-conscious divide between the study of an ideal cosmos and an unideal reality. Elsewhere, Nicolson posits that the poet Sappho was inspired by the long absences of a maritime world to develop the idea of a distinct, isolated self that longs for connection. ("And her light/ stretches equally/ over salt sea...// But she goes back and forth remembering.") Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read.