Once Plotinos had written something, he could neither retouch, nor even
re-read what he had done, because his weak eyesight made any reading
very painful. His penmanship was poor. He did not separate words, and
his spelling was defective; he was chiefly occupied with ideas. Until
his death he continuously persisted in this habit, which was for us
all a subject of surprise. When he had finished composing something in
his head, and when he then wrote what he had meditated on, it seemed
as if he copied a book. Neither in conversation nor in discussion did
he allow himself to be distracted from the purpose of his thoughts,
so that he was able at the same time to attend to the needs of
conversation, while pursuing the meditation of the subject which busied
him. When the person who had been talking with him went away, he did
not re-read what he had written before the interruption, which, as has
been mentioned above, was to save his eyesight; he could, later on,
take up the thread of his composition as if the conversation had been
no obstacle to his attention. He therefore was able simultaneously to
live with others and with himself. He never seemed to need recuperation
from this interior attention, which hardly ceased during his slumbers,
which, however, were troubled both by the insufficiency of food,
for sometimes he did not even eat bread, and by this continuous
concentration of his mind.