There was a wonderful, revelatory moment in Adam Nicolson’s last book, Life Between the Tides, where he suddenly telescoped out from the Scottish rock pool he was describing in order to meditate on the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, demonstrating how much we can still learn about our present-day world by turning to the great minds of the past. This dazzling passage of writing argued that engagement with the environment is always a philosophical act, and that the close looking of the naturalist is more similar than we might think to the work of the philosopher. As with his 2019 book about a year in the lives of the Romantic poets, The Making of Poetry, this chapter about Heraclitus showed Nicolson at his illuminating, energetic best – scholarly without being schoolbookish, aware of the role that brilliant minds, well harnessed, can play in enlarging and enriching our appreciation of life.
It feels like that chapter was the launchpad for Nicolson’s latest book, How to Be, which is an elevated sort of self-help book about the origins of western philosophical thought. It is Nicolson’s 25th book in a career spanning 40 years and an array of genres – early in his 60s, he even turned his hand to fiction and was longlisted for the Sunday Times audible short story award. What links all his writing, though, is a tireless and tiggerish sense of wonder and curiosity; a bounding willingness to immerse himself and his reader deeply in his subject: life.
In How to Be, Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers – some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (“You can’t step into the same river twice”) and Zeno. Others have been more or less forgotten: Anaximenes, Xenophanes and Archilochus. All of these thinkers, Nicolson argues, are linked not only by their common place in space and time – between around 800 and 450BC in Megale Hellas (Greater Greece) – but also by the fact that they shared what he calls a “harbour mind”.
The idea of the harbour mind is a brilliant one and convincingly joins together disparate thinkers with vastly differing approaches to the great questions of life. The basic premise is this: that day-to-day existence in the bustling port cities of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity… interchange and connectedness”, gave birth to philosophy. Trade and the coming and going of peoples and ideas required new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another. The pre-Socratic philosophers gave voice to these new ways of thinking. Nicolson journeys to the present-days sites of these harbours – Izmir (Smyrna), Miletus, Ephesus, Ischia, Elea – in order to explore the idea that “places give access to minds” and that “philosophy has a geography”.
How to Be is structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance. Not only is each chapter structured around a specific question – How to Be Me? Does Love Rule the Universe? Can I Live Multiple Realities? – the book even ends with a staple of the self-help genre: a list of takeaways that can be deployed in modern life for the time-pressed executive wanting key learnings. In other hands this formulaic populism might be tawdry, but Nicolson writes this stuff with a twinkle in his eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun.
There’s one other great pleasure in How to Be. It is illustrated with dozens of photographs of Greek artefacts in museums and brings a whole new layer of depth and understanding to our engagement with these ancient objects. I happened to be reading the book in Senate House library and so popped round the corner to the British Museum to see one of the relics that Nicolson describes – a golden sheet with instructions for the afterlife inscribed upon it by the Orphic cultists who followed the teachings of Pythagoras. It was beautiful, moving, rich with meaning. How to Be enacts the reader’s journey in Between the Tides, but in reverse. There, we started with the specificity of a single rock pool and zoomed out to a contemplation of meaning against the backdrop of a vast and complex universe; here, we start with the seemingly abstract thinking of a host of wise and ancient minds, then we zoom in to the coins, sherds and amphorae that were the everyday objects of his harbour philosophers. We see these remnants, the ruins, the museum pieces, in a new light, made both more present and more meaningful by their proximity to thinkers whose ideas speak loudly to our fractured, anxious world. How to Be delivers wholeheartedly on the promise of its vaunting title: it is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived.
Alex Preston’s most recent book is Winchelsea (Canongate)
How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicolson is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
