On Talking with the Dead

The Art of Interacting with Time's Greatest Teachers

[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Today’s essay will be short! My latest book—This Way to the Stars: The Tao Beyond Time—is officially out and available on Amazon. (You can buy it here.) Here’s the book trailer:

As I look back on the first three books of my writing career and prepare for tomorrow’s book launch, there’s one particular practice that has been particularly meaningful. . . that of tabling with the dead. Most (if not all) of the ideas in my books come from men and women who have long since passed. In many ways, figures like Socrates, Plato, Boethius, C.S. Lewis, etc., have become some of my best friends over the last few years.

This practice of talking with dead heroes is not new or unique to me. The origins of Stoicism start famously when the Oracle of Delphi tells Zeno of Citium to take on not the color of shellfish (purple) but of dead men. It is this (confusing) pronouncement that eventually led Zeno to study the life of Socrates, seek out the counsel of Crates, and, eventually, form the school of Philosophy we know today as Stoicism.

When Dante writes himself into his Inferno, he writes in an encounter with the great poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and then includes himself in that “high company.”

As a practice, holding counsel with the people of the past whose work you feel closest to and most inspired by is an incredible motivator. It would not be a stretch to say that their imagined judgment of me and my body of work—and a personal desire to become a worthy guest at their dinner table—is one of chief animating forces pushing me to chase excellence.

So it is to this most powerful practice—that of talking with the dead and being motivated by the presence and example—that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

Figure: Illustration of Canto 4: Homer, the poets, and heroes in Limbo by Gustave Dore

If we want to live as well as we are able, we ought to have conversations often with the minds of those who move us, both living and dead. This first requires that we read and consume their works—their writings, their paintings, their letters, their music. In consuming the material they passed on, we not only get a look inside their mind, but our being begins absorbing their artistic essence and our minds add their store of knowledge to our own. . . we “annex every age to [our] own; all the years that have gone before are added to [our] own.”¹

That’s the beauty and the power of books and museums—they can bring the past to life. They make it so we can sit at a table next to Lincoln or in a room with Shakespeare. We can put ourselves in a corner booth with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis or join Boethius or Socrates in their cells. We can plant our consciousness in the middle of Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum.

The more we do this in our mind and familiarize ourselves with the work of our dead mentors, the more we can imagine ourselves in their presence and be motivated by their examples.

In his song “Timeless,” (my favorite) musical artist Jon Bellion imagines a world where he is drinking wine with a few of his inspirations. . . Frank Sinatra, James Dean, Sammy Davis. “When will it be my time?” Jon asks his mentors in his mind. “Don’t look at the clock,” they respond, “you’re gonna be timeless.” Here are the relevant lyrics:

Fell asleep, I had a kick-a** dream
Me, Frank Sinatra, James Dean
Sammy Davis at the bar, drinking Moonshine
Nice women, white wine, chillin' poolside
So I asked, “When will it be my time?”

They said “Boy don't even look at the clock”
’Cause you’re gonna be timeless (because you're gonna be timeless).²

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this vision of entering into a basement bar with a corner booth full of my favorite characters: Marcus Aurelius, Solomon, Abraham Lincoln, C.S. Lewis. In my mind, I walk up to them and they make space for me to take a seat. That’s always where the vision ends. What do they ask me? What do I show them? Do they let me stay? What do they think of me? For years, the story of how I want this encounter to end has motivated me to make the best art I can with my time on this planet.

In his Letters to Lucilius, Seneca advises his friend to do something like this. . . to pick someone that he admires and hold his memory as a witness over his life. And it is with Seneca’s advice that I leave you:

Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them. Such, my dear Lucilius, is the counsel of Epicurus; he has quite properly given us a guardian and an attendant. We can get rid of most sins, if we have a witness who stands near us when we are likely to go wrong. The soul should have someone whom it can respect – one by whose authority it may make even its inner shrine more hallowed. Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts! And happy also is he who can so revere a man as to calm and regulate himself by calling him to mind! One who can so revere another, will soon be himself worthy of reverence.

Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit. Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.³

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P.S. Speaking of conversing with the dead, I decided to have a little fun in honor of today’s book release. To that end, what follows are a few fictional endorsements of the book from the (deceased) minds that most inspired it: C.S. Lewis, Boethius, and Plato. Enjoy!

C.S. Lewis

My friend Tolkien once remarked that the deeper you go into any wood, the more you find that all paths lead backward to ancient places. I was reminded of this truth recently when reading Mr. Huisman's “This Way to the Stars: The Tao Beyond Time.”

In an age where we pride ourselves on having outgrown the “superstitions” of our ancestors, here comes a book that dares to suggest we might have lost something vital in our haste toward progress. It is a peculiar modern conceit to imagine that by moving forward in time we necessarily move upward in wisdom.

What Huisman has done - and done quite decently, I might add - is to excavate certain eternal truths that seem to have gone missing in our technological age. He has taken what I attempted to call the Tao in my own small book “The Abolition of Man” and traced its golden thread through to his own age.

The essential argument is one I've long maintained: there are certain objective values that transcend time and culture. These aren't mere social constructions to be discarded at whim, but rather the very principles by which human beings flourish. To ignore them is to cut ourselves off from the source of life itself.

But what sets this work apart is not merely its defense of eternal truths (though that alone would be worthwhile), but its practical guidance for living them out. It is one thing to speak of virtue in the abstract; it is quite another to show how it might be cultivated in the soil of everyday life.

In short, this is precisely the sort of book his age requires - not because it offers something new, but because it remembers something old. Something once known but often forgotten.

The ancient paths still remain, if we have eyes to see them. This book serves as something of a map back to those paths. Whether we take them is, as always, up to us.

Boethius

From my prison cell, where Lady Philosophy once visited to console me, I learned that true wisdom never perishes - it merely waits to be rediscovered by each generation anew. Such is my thought upon encountering Huisman's “This Way to the Stars: The Tao Beyond Time.”

In my own time, as Rome was falling and wisdom seemed to be receding like the tide, I sought to preserve what fragments of ancient truth I could. Now, in an age where technology ascends and the eternal verities decline, here comes a work that seeks to do something similar - to gather the scattered pieces of wisdom before they are lost entirely in the ruins.

The book recalls what I learned in my darkest hours: that there exists a way of living that leads upward, what my great masters called the Summum Bonum. Just as Lady Philosophy taught me that true happiness comes not from Fortune’s wheel but from aligning ourselves with what is eternal, this work points modern readers toward the unchanging principles that govern a flourishing life.

In his work, Mr. Huisman manages to weave together what I attempted to do in my Consolation - to bridge the practical and theoretical, to connect the lowest things with the highest. For what good is wisdom if it cannot teach us how to live? What use is philosophy if it cannot show us the way through our own dark nights?

Like the ladder in Jacob's dream that connected heaven and earth, this book attempts to link lofty ideals with practical methods. It recognizes what I learned through suffering: that there is no easy way from earth to the stars (non est ad astra mollis e terris via), but there is a way.

To those who feel lost in these uncertain times, who sense that something vital has gone missing from our modern world, I commend this work to you. Not because it offers something novel - indeed, its chief virtue is that it offers something ancient - but because it might help you recover what our age has forgotten: that there is a Way that leads to life, and it has been there all along.

Plato

In my dialogues, I often had Socrates speak of the realm of Forms - that unchanging place where Truth, Beauty, and Goodness reside in their pure state. Everything in our world of shadows and change, I argued, was but an imperfect copy of these eternal ideals.

I find myself thinking of this while reflecting on Mr. Huisman’s “This Way to the Stars: The Tao Beyond Time.” Here is a work that recognizes what many in your modern age have forgotten: that there exists something beyond the material world that your instruments can measure and weigh.

Just as I wrote of the prisoners in the cave who mistake reflections for reality, this book speaks to a generation that has grown too satisfied with shadows, increasingly disinterested in the Sun that casts them. What is modern man if not a prisoner, chained by technology and distraction, mistaking the fleeting for the eternal? And what is needed but a turning around of the soul toward what is most real and true?

To those who have sensed, as my teacher Socrates did, that there must be something more than what the materialists claim - that there must be Forms beyond the flux - I commend this work to you. For just as I argued that the Good itself illuminates all other Forms, this book suggests that there is a Way - a Tao beyond time - that illuminates all other paths. It is an ancient truth, yes, but one that each generation must discover anew.

1. Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.

2. Jon Bellion, Timeless.

3. Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 11: On the Blush of Modesty.