I am always intrigued when lessons from the classics, sentiments from millennia past, reach into our modern lives with clarity as if they were penned last week. I was in a meeting yesterday, expecting an email on my iPhone, wondering if it was appropriate to check. I was then expecting another email while at dinner later in the evening, with someone who I know to not carry a BlackBerry for this precise reason, and I wondered again if it was appropriate to check the phone. Suddenly I recalled a passage from
Plutarch, and looked it up this morning in his essay
On Curiosity, or an Over Busy Inquisitiveness into things Impertinent. He wrote:
"When, at a public dissertation I sometime made at Rome, Rusticus was one of my auditors, a messenger comes suddenly in with an express [message] from Caesar; upon which, when I offered to be silent till he had perused the paper, he desired me to proceed, nor would so much as look into it till the discourse was ended and the audience dismissed; all that were present much admiring the gravity of the man."
When it comes to checking the phone too often, I am terribly guilty as charged. At that moment, though, I resisted. The most modern of technologies and tendencies were, for a moment, restrained by a two-thousand year old echo.
