Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called “On Tranquility of Mind,” he wrote that idleness and isolation could… - Sarah Bakewell

The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.

Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”

The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else.