On Democritus and the Practice of Intellectual Renewal
Time seems to pass with increasing alacrity as age advances, perhaps because the days are rarely idle. This month alone has been filled with reading—books, articles, essays, plays, and poems—alongside listening to unfamiliar musical compositions, writing both essays and poems, exploring sculpture, art, and artists to whom I had not earlier been exposed, and even watching a film or two new to me. In parallel, several projects occupy my attention, some practicable, others less so.
Among the works read recently, as part of a larger and deliberately sustained program of reading, was The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus (Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary) by C. C. W. Taylor. The terrain was at once familiar and difficult—as all serious thought invariably is. Yet one fragment, attributed to Democritus, stood out precisely because of its simplicity. Fragment D3, rendered in Greek as νέα ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ φρονῶντες and translated as “Thinking new things every day,” resonated with unexpected force.
The maxim requires little exegesis. It does not strain toward profundity, nor does it announce itself with philosophical grandeur. And yet it gestures toward a way of living that is both demanding and humane. To think new things each day is not merely to accumulate novelty, but to cultivate receptivity: to ensure that the mind does not calcify, that attention remains alert, that experience continues to provoke reflection.
One might imagine how much more open, thoughtful, and richly inhabited our lives would be if we deliberately set aside even a small portion of each day—ten minutes, perhaps, or an hour, as circumstances allow—to encounter something new. Whether through reading, art, music, film, playfulness, or creative expression of one’s own, the discipline of daily intellectual renewal is no small thing. It is, in the Democritean sense, a commitment not merely to activity, but to the practice of vitality of mind itself.
Northcoast Antiquarian 