Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [38]
So there are two reasons to embrace what happens. One is that it’s happening to you. It was prescribed for you, and it pertains to you. The thread was spun long ago, by the oldest cause of all.
The other reason is that what happens to an individual is a cause of well-being in what directs the world—of its well-being, its fulfillment, of its very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything—anything at all—from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts, but its purposes. And that’s what you’re doing when you complain: hacking and destroying.
9. Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.
And not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment, a warm lotion. Not showing off your obedience to the logos, but resting in it. Remember: philosophy requires only what your nature already demands. What you’ve been after is something else again—something unnatural.
—But what could be preferable?
That’s exactly how pleasure traps us, isn’t it? Wouldn’t magnanimity be preferable? Or freedom? Honesty? Prudence? Piety? And is there anything preferable to thought itself—to logic, to understanding? Think of their surefootedness. Their fluent stillness.
10. Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble. Any assessment we make is subject to alteration—just as we are ourselves.
Look closely at them—how impermanent they are, how meaningless. Things that a pervert can own, a whore, a thief.
Then look at the way the people around you behave. Even the best of them are hard to put up with—not to mention putting up with yourself. In such deep darkness, such a sewer—in the flux of material, of time, of motion and things moved—I don’t know what there is to value or to work for.
Quite the contrary. We need to comfort ourselves and wait for dissolution. And not get impatient in the meantime, but take refuge in these two things:
i. Nothing can happen to me that isn’t natural.
ii. I can keep from doing anything that God and my own spirit don’t approve. No one can force me to.
11. What am I doing with my soul?
Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul, an adolescent’s, a woman’s? A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?
12. Another way to grasp what ordinary people mean by “goods”:
Suppose you took certain things as touchstones of goodness: prudence, self-control, justice, and courage, say. If you understood “goods” as meaning those, you wouldn’t be able to follow that line about “so many goods. . . .” It wouldn’t make any sense to you. Whereas if you’d internalized the conventional meaning, you’d be able to follow it perfectly. You’d have no trouble seeing the author’s meaning and why it was funny.
Which shows that most people do acknowledge a distinction. Otherwise we wouldn’t recognize the first sense as jarring and reject it automatically, whereas we accept the second—the one referring to wealth and the benefits of celebrity and high living—as amusing and apropos.
Now go a step further. Ask yourself whether we should accept as goods—and should value—the things we have to think of to have the line make sense—the ones whose abundance leaves their owner with “. . . no place to shit.”
13. I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of the world, and that