How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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Phormion the fisherman recovered his sight and a marvellous temple was erected to enshrine their prize. A great book to understand these people and these times bringing in the context of today and I am sure as I keep reading I will find more of what the title talks of. This was, as Oppenheim wrote, a ‘curiously inhibiting and ultimately falsifying [set of] constraints’. A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. How To Be tells the immersive and accessible story of Western thought, its origins and its evolution from early Greece; it is an exploration of the sea-and-city world in which, in the Western tradition, the great and everlasting questions of existence were first explored.

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His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. While the setting is very cinematic in certain parts and does indeed set up an amazing narrative structure to understanding what transpired in the Mediterranean world after the fall of the original empires, the book takes a lot of tangents towards understanding the geography polity and trade structures of the cities where pre-socratic philosophers first started preaching, and loses the track of describing the core tenets of that philosophers ideas. To the philosophical mix, Nicolson has added another ingredient: the poetry of the “ Odyssey” and of Sappho of Lesbos.

Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. The tortoise has a head start, but surely Achilles — the fastest runner the Greeks have ever known — will soon catch up? For Nicolson, this personal, emotional examination represents an intellectual development on a par with — or, rather, of a part with — the philosophical investigations being undertaken by Sappho’s contemporaries on the Ionian coast. So these passages, even from the ancient philosophers, seem too much like a chore; are pretty boring and honestly who cares?The philosophical ideas are not scholarly exercises in disputing the meaning of life but are clearly explained in an easy-to-understand way, with numerous rather brilliant examples. This is time-travel and mind-travel and wow-travel and perhaps above all soul-travel of the sort that stretches, nurtures and exhilarates.