Seneca is traveling when he writes Letter 84, and he mentions in passing that he reads on the road — but then stops himself to make a distinction that matters. Reading and writing must alternate, he says, like breathing in and breathing out. One without the other produces either a mind crammed with material it can't use, or one spinning its own thread without enough silk. But the real heart of the letter is a metaphor: the bee.
Bees, Seneca says, do something remarkable. They visit countless flowers, gather what they need from each, and then transform the whole haul into something none of the flowers contained on their own. The honey doesn't taste like any single blossom — you can't identify the linden or the clover in it. What you taste is the bee's work. A reader, he argues, should do the same:
"We should follow the example of the bees, who wander and select the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and sort into their cells all they have brought in."
The goal isn't to preserve your sources intact. It's to make something out of them that the sources themselves couldn't contain.
This connects to anxieties Seneca returns to elsewhere. In Letter 2, he warns Lucilius against skipping between too many books — not because reading widely is wrong, but because there's a way of doing it that's really just distraction wearing the costume of learning. In Letter 33, he pushes back against the habit of collecting memorable quotations from the great thinkers rather than doing the harder work of internalizing their arguments. He had real impatience for the intellectual equivalent of highlight-reel culture. What he wanted was synthesis — the kind that leaves its sources behind and produces something new in their place.
David Bowie came at this from a different direction but arrived at the same practice. He was famously voracious: his reading lists ran from Nietzsche to Balzac to Viz comics, and he approached music the same way, pulling from Jacques Brel, Little Richard, Japanese Kabuki theater, and William Burroughs's cut-up technique in the same creative breath. The result — Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin albums, "Heroes" — doesn't sound like any of those sources. You can trace the genealogy if you know where to look, but what you actually hear is the transformation. Bowie discussed this synthesis openly throughout his career, and David Buckley's biography Strange Fascination tracks it in detail if you want to follow the thread.
The worry about influence — that your sources will show, that you'll seem derivative — tends to dissolve when you've actually done the bee's work. There may be no such thing as an original thought, only original digestion.