Property of Breath
We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, "pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet." It is not certain whether the juice which they obtain from the flowers forms at once into honey, or whether they change that which they have gathered into this delicious object by blending something therewith and by a certain property of their breath. For some authorities believe that bees do not possess the art of making honey, but only of gathering it. We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us—in other words, our natural gifts—we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 (65)
Two thousand years before anyone worried about what machines might generate, Seneca was puzzling over a question we still can’t quite answer: Do bees make honey, or do they merely gather it? The uncertainty matters. If transformation happens—if something in the bee’s own breath changes nectar into something new—then the honey belongs to the bee in a way that gathered nectar never could.
The metaphor extends generously to human making. Seneca doesn’t demand that we create from nothing; he assumes we’ll gather from what exists. But he also won’t let us stop at accumulation. The work is in the blending, the sifting, the application of what he calls our “natural gifts.” The result should betray its origins yet become “clearly a different thing from that whence it came.” Not pure originality, not mere copying—something stranger and more honest than either.
What stays with me is that phrase: a certain property of their breath. Seneca can’t name it precisely. He only knows it matters. When we encounter systems that can gather and arrange at speeds and scales beyond any human capacity, this unnamed property becomes the question. Is it time spent with the material? The accumulation of small choices? Something about mortality, or embodiment, or care? Perhaps the transformation happens so gradually we can’t locate the moment when gathered becomes made. Perhaps even we don’t know whether we’re gathering or creating until we taste what emerges—and recognize, or fail to recognize, something of ourselves in it.