How to Be

Starred review from July 3, 2023
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.