#NPM2020 Day 18: Three Excerpts from Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Today we are deviating just a little from the strict line I’ve drawn prior to now between prose and poetry. Meditations is a collection of journals kept over the life of Marcus Aurelius, a two-thousand-years-ago Roman Emperor AKA someone that I hadn’t expected to have much in common with. The universe is funny that way, though, and reading Meditations for the first time last year absolutely rocked my world and felt like a bright light was shining into my soul.
I think my favorite thing about Meditations is the vastly comforting feeling (probably common to all much-later-published journals that were initially kept with no intention of being made public) that Marcus Aurelius, for all that he headed the Roman Empire for sixty years, is just out here coaching himself through something he is figuring out as he goes. Before reading it, I was put off by the second-person instructional tone until I understood that the you in question was… Marcus, himself, muddling his way through and doing his best. Aren’t we all.
When a number of lines burrow into your soul and pop into your mind unbidden many times per week and before long seem to underlie the very foundation of who you are (or who you want to be; sometimes what I want to be a mirror functions instead to measure the distance between today and an aspirational tomorrow) — what else can that be called, other than poetry?? And so I am bending the rules and I am presenting a series of small excerpts from Meditations to you during National Poetry Month.
Three Excerpts from Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
translated by Gregory Hays
42. All of us are working on the same project. Some consciously, with understanding; some without knowing it. (I think this is what Heraclitus meant when he said that “those who sleep are also hard at work” — that they too collaborate in what happens.) Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things — they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well.
So make up your mind who you’ll choose to work with. The force that directs all things will make good use of you regardless — will put you on its payroll and set you to work. But make sure it’s not the job Chrysippus speaks of: the bad line in the play, put there for laughs.
43. Does the sun try to do the rain’s work? Or Asclepius Demeter’s? And what about each of the stars — different, yet working in common?
55. Don’t pay attention to other people’s minds. Look straight ahead, where nature is leading you — nature in general, through the things that happen to you; and your own nature, through your own actions.
Everything has to do what it was mde for. And other things were made for those with logos. In this respect as in others: lower things exist for the sake of higher ones, and higher things for one another.
Now, the main thing we were made for is to work with others.
Secondly, to resist our body’s urges. Because things driven by logos — by thought — have the capacity for detachment — to resist impulses and sensations, both of which are merely corporeal. Thought seeks to be their master, not their subject. And so it should: they were created for its use.
And the third thing is to avoid rashness and credulity.
The mind that grasps this and steers straight ahead should be able to hold its own.
56. Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
3. […] What’s there to complain about? People’s misbehavior? But take into consideration:
— that rational beings exist for one another;
— that doing what’s right sometimes requires patience;
— that no one does the wrong thing deliberately;
— and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried.
…and keep your mouth shut.
Or are you complaining about the things the world assigns you? But consider the two options: Providence or atoms. And all the arguments for seeing the world as a city.
Or is it your body? Keep in mind that when the mind detaches itself and realizes its own nature, it no longer has anything to do with ordinary life — the rough and the smooth, either one. And remember all you’ve been taught — and accepted — about pain and pleasure.
Or is it your reputation that’s bothering you? But look at how soon we’re all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us — how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place. The whole earth a point in space and most of it uninhabited. How many people there will be to admire you, and who they are.
So keep this refuge in mind: the back roads of your self. Above all, no strain and no stress. Be straightforward. Look at things like a man, like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. And among the things you turn to, these two:
i. That things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within — from our own perceptions.
ii. That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you’ve already seen. “The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”
4. If thought is something we share, then so is reason — what makes us reasoning beings.
If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared.
And if so, we share a common law.
And thus, are fellow citizens.
And fellow citizens of something.
And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it — from this state that we share — come thought and reason and law.
Where else could they come from? The earth that composes me derives from earth, the water from some other element, the air from its own source, the heat and fire from theirs — since nothing comes from nothing, or returns to it.
So thought must derive from somewhere else as well.
From Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius and translated by Gregory Hays, published by the Modern Library. © 2002.
