Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [61]
When will you let yourself enjoy straightforwardness? Seriousness? Or understanding individual things—their nature and substance, their place in the world, their life span, their composition, who can possess them, whose they are to give and to receive?
10. Spiders are proud of catching flies, men of catching hares, fish in a net, boars, bears, Sarmatians . . .
Criminal psychology.
11. How they all change into one another—acquire the ability to see that. Apply it constantly; use it to train yourself. Nothing is as conducive to spiritual growth.
11a. He has stripped away his body and—realizing that at some point soon he will have to abandon mankind and leave all this behind—has dedicated himself to serving justice in all he does, and nature in all that happens. What people say or think about him, or how they treat him, isn’t something he worries about. Only these two questions: Is what he’s doing now the right thing to be doing? Does he accept and welcome what he’s been assigned? He has stripped away all other occupations, all other tasks. He wants only to travel a straight path—to God, by way of law.
12. Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right. (The best goal to achieve, and the one we fall short of when we fail.)
12a. To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once.
13. When you wake up, ask yourself:
Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right?
It makes no difference.
Have you forgotten what the people who are so vociferous in praise or blame of others are like as they sleep and eat? Forgotten their behavior, their fears, their desires, their thefts and depredations—not physical ones, but those committed by what should be highest in them? What creates, when it chooses, loyalty, humility, truth, order, well-being.
14. Nature gives and nature takes away. Anyone with sense and humility will tell her, “Give and take as you please,” not out of defiance, but out of obedience and goodwill.
15. Only a short time left. Live as if you were alone—out in the wilderness. No difference between here and there: the city that you live in is the world.
Let people see someone living naturally, and understand what that means. Let them kill him if they can’t stand it. (Better than living like this.)
16. To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.
17. Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the things around us. A grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.
18. Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot.
Or that everything was born to die.
19. How they act when they eat and sleep and mate and defecate and all the rest. Then when they order and exult, or rage and thunder from on high. And yet, just consider the things they submitted to a moment ago, and the reasons for it—and the things they’ll submit to again before very long.
20. Each of us needs what nature gives us, when nature gives it.
21. “The earth knows longing for the rain, the sky/knows longing . . .” And the world longs to create what will come to be. I tell it “I share your longing.”
(And isn’t that what we mean by “inclined to happen”?)
22. Possibilities:
i. To keep on living (you should be used to it by now)
ii. To end it (it was your choice, after all)
iii. To die (having met your obligations)
Those are the only options. Reason for optimism.
23. Keep always before you that “this is no different from an empty field,” and the things in it are the same as on a mountaintop, on the seashore, wherever. Plato gets to the heart of it: “fencing a sheepfold in the mountains, and milking goats or sheep.”
24. My mind. What is it? What