Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [52]
Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.
27. Three relationships:
i. with the body you inhabit;
ii. with the divine, the cause of everything in all things;
iii. with the people around you.
28. Either pain affects the body (which is the body’s problem) or it affects the soul. But the soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquillity. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them.
29. To erase false perceptions, tell yourself: I have it in me to keep my soul from evil, lust and all confusion. To see things as they are and treat them as they deserve. Don’t overlook this innate ability.
30. To speak to the Senate—or anyone—in the right tone, without being overbearing. To choose the right words.
31. Augustus’s court: his wife, his daughter, his grandsons, his stepsons, his sister, Agrippa, the relatives, servants, friends, Areius, Maecenas, the doctors, the sacrificial priests . . . the whole court, dead.
And consider the others . . . not just the deaths of individuals (like the family of the Pompeys).
That line they write on tombs—“last surviving descendant.” Consider their ancestors’ anxiety—that there be a successor. But someone has to be the last. There, too, the death of a whole house.
32. You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.
—But there are external obstacles. . . .
Not to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense.
—Well, but perhaps to some more concrete action.
But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.
33. To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.
34. Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to . . . ? That’s what we do to ourselves—or try to—when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.
You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself off from it.
But you have one advantage here: you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole—to be separated, cut away, and reunited. But look how he’s singled us out. He’s allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he’s allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.
35. We have various abilities, present in all rational creatures as in the nature of rationality itself. And this is one of them. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
36. Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.
Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim that it can’t hold out against that . . . well, then, heap shame upon it.
37. Are Pantheia or Pergamos still keeping watch at the tomb of Verus? Chabrias or Diotimus at the tomb of Hadrian? Of course they aren’t. Would the emperors know it if they were?
And even if they knew, would it please them?
And even if it did, would the mourners live forever? Were they, too, not fated to grow old and then die? And when that happened, what would the emperors do?
38. The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag.
Look at it clearly.