Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [56]
That’s all you need.
7. Blot out your imagination. Turn your desire to stone. Quench your appetites. Keep your mind centered on itself.
8. Animals without the logos are assigned the same soul, and those who have the logos share one too—a rational one. Just as all earthly creatures share one earth. Just as we all see by the same light, and breathe the same air—all of us who see and breathe.
9. All things are drawn toward what is like them, if such a thing exists. All earthly things feel the earth’s tug. All wet things flow together. And airy things as well, so they have to be forcibly prevented from mixing. Fire is naturally drawn upward by that higher fire, but ready to ignite at the slightest touch of other, earthly flame. So that anything drier than usual makes good fuel, because less of what hinders combustion is mixed in with it.
And things that share an intelligent nature are just as prone to seek out what is like them. If not more so. Because their superiority in other ways is matched by their greater readiness to mix and mingle with their counterparts.
Even in irrational beings we see swarms and herds, and nesting, and love not unlike ours. Because they do have souls, and the bonding instinct is found in a developed form—not something we see in plants, or stones, or trees. And it’s still more developed in rational beings, with their states, friendships, families, groups, their treaties and truces. And in those yet more developed there is a kind of unity even between separate things, the kind that we see in the stars. An advanced level of development can produce a sympathy even in things that are quite distinct.
But look how things are now. The rational things are the only ones that have lost that sense of attraction—of convergence. Only there do we not see that intermingling. But however much they try to avoid it, there’s no escaping. Nature is stronger. As you can see if you look closely.
Concrete objects can pull free of the earth more easily than humans can escape humanity.
10. Humanity, divinity, and the world: all of them bearing fruit. Each fruitful in its season. Normally we limit the word to vines and other plants. Unnecessarily. The fruit of the logos nourishes both us and it. And other things spring from it too—of the same species as the logos itself.
11. Convince them not to.
If you can.
And if not, remember: the capacity for patience was given us for a reason. The gods are patient with them too, and even help them to concrete things: health, money, fame. . . . Such is the gods’ goodness.
And yours, too, if you wanted. What’s stopping you?
12. Work:
Not to rouse pity, not to win sympathy or admiration. Only this:
Activity.
Stillness.
As the logos of the state requires.
13. Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.
14. Known by long experience, limited in life span, debased in substance—all of it.
Now as then, in the time of those we buried.
15. Things wait outside us, hover at the door. They keep to themselves. Ask them who they are and they don’t know, they can give no account of themselves.
What accounts for them?
The mind does.
16. Not being done to, but doing—the source of good and bad for rational and political beings. Where their own goodness and badness is found—not in being done to, but in doing.
17. A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.
18. Enter their minds, and you’ll find the judges you’re so afraid of—and how judiciously they judge themselves.
19. Everything in flux. And you too will alter in the whirl and perish, and the world as well.
20. Leave other people’s mistakes where they lie.
21. When we cease from activity, or follow a thought to its conclusion, it’s a kind of death. And it doesn’t harm us. Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation a kind of dying. Was that so terrible?
Think about life with your grandfather, your mother, your adopted father.