Seneca on Creativity: Lessons from the Bees

How to ferment our natural gifts into nectar for the world.

A founding credo of The Marginalian is what I long ago termed combinatorial creativity — the idea that everything of beauty and substance we contribute to the world is composed of myriad influences and inspirations acquired in the course of being alive and awake to ideas, unconsciously composited into something new. Rilke understood this when he considered what it takes to create, and Einstein understood it when he placed “combinatory ...