The last couple of pages of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable are dedicated to Seneca.[1] And how. He reports that he carries Seneca’s books on all his travels, and that he is now reading the Stoic philosopher in the original Latin, which he has relearned with this purpose in mind.[2] Seneca extended the credo of Stoic self-sufficiency, which holds that nothing that can be taken from you can be considered your own, to his very life.[3] When he was asked by the emperor Nero, his former disciple, to commit suicide on trumped-up charges of conspiracy, he did it in an exemplary way. Enthralled by Taleb’s zeal, today I bought Seneca’s Dialogues and Essays and his Selected Letters, both published in the Oxford World’s Classics series by the Oxford University Press.[4] As I have always subscribed to the Stoic credo with all my heart, Taleb’s last couple of pages feel like my very own.

Addendum (January 13, 2017)

Indeed, nothing that can be taken from you can be considered your own. This credo goes as far as your life, not to mention your possessions. But it goes even farther than Seneca imagined. Two millennia ago, this world of ours was still in its youth, if not its infancy. Not even your mind can be considered your own, for it is but a repository of a tangle of thoughts by many of your precursors, including Seneca. The longer you live, the greater the tangle. The only way around this conundrum is to abandon your thought at will and for as long as you wish. Behold, the Stoic credo taken to its absolute limit.

Footnotes

1. London: Penguin, 2010 (first published in 2007).

2. Op. cit., p. 378.

3. Op. cit., p. 379.

4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 and 2009.