Book Two
Imperial Marcus Aurelius GreekSay to yourself at daybreak: today I shall meet with the meddler, the ingrate, the bully, the schemer, the envious, the unsociable. All this has befallen them through ignorance of good and evil. But I, who have seen that the nature of the good is what is noble, and the nature of evil what is base, and that the nature of the wrongdoer himself is akin to mine — not of the same blood or seed, but sharing in the same mind and the same portion of the divine — I can be harmed by none of them, for none can fasten on me anything base; nor can I be angry with my kinsman, or hate him. We were born to work together, like the feet, the hands, the eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another, then, is against nature; and to be vexed with a man and turn away from him is to work against him.
Whatever this thing is that I am, it is a little flesh, a little breath, and the ruling faculty. Put away your books; be distracted no longer; that is not granted you. Rather, as one already dying, despise the flesh: it is gore and bones and a flimsy web, a network woven of nerves, little veins, and arteries. Consider too what the breath is: wind, and never the same, but disgorged and gulped in again at every hour. The third thing, then, is the ruling faculty. Reflect thus: you are an old man; do not let this any longer be a slave, no longer be jerked like a puppet by impulses that serve no fellowship, no longer chafe at your present lot or shrink from what is to come.
The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of fortune are not apart from nature, nor from the spinning and weaving together of the things ordained by providence. From there all things flow; and joined to it are necessity and the good of the whole universe, of which you are a part. And to every part of nature that is good which the Nature of the Whole brings, and which preserves that nature. Now the universe is preserved by the changes of the elements, and likewise by the changes of the bodies compounded of them. Let these things suffice you; hold them as your settled principles. But cast away your thirst for books, that you may not die murmuring, but truly serene, and from the heart thankful to the gods.
Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often, after receiving from the gods your appointed days, you have not used them. Now at last you must perceive of what universe you are a part, and from what governor of the universe you came forth as an emanation; and that a limit of your time is set, which, if you do not use it to clear your skies, will be gone, and you will be gone, and it will never return.
At every hour give your whole attention, as a Roman and a man, to doing what is in hand with strict and unfeigned dignity, with affection, freedom, and justice, and to making yourself free from all other impressions. And you will make yourself free if you perform each act as though it were the last of your life, rid of all aimlessness and of any passionate turning away from the rule of reason, of all pretence, self-love, and discontent with what is allotted to you. You see how few are the things a man must master to live a life that flows easily and reverently; for the gods will ask nothing more of him who keeps to these.
Do violence to yourself, do violence to yourself, my soul; the time to honour yourself you will not have again. For each of us has but one life, and yours is nearly spent, and yet you have no respect for yourself, but make your own welfare depend on the souls of others.
Do things from outside break in upon you and distract you? Then make yourself the leisure to learn something further that is good, and stop being carried this way and that. But there is another straying to be guarded against as well: for those are foolish too who have worn themselves out with activity in life and yet have no goal toward which to direct every impulse and, in a word, every impression.
A man is rarely seen to be unhappy for failing to attend to what passes in another's soul; but those who do not closely follow the movements of their own soul must of necessity be unhappy.
These things you must always bear in mind: what the Nature of the Whole is, and what my own nature is, and how this stands toward that, and what kind of part it is of what kind of whole; and that no one can prevent you from always acting and speaking in accordance with the nature of which you are a part.
Theophrastus speaks like a philosopher when, in comparing offences — as one might compare such things on the common view — he says that the faults committed through desire are graver than those committed through anger. For the angry man seems to turn from reason with a certain pain and a hidden contraction of the soul; but he who sins through desire, being overcome by pleasure, shows himself somehow more unrestrained and more unmanly in his wrongdoing. Rightly, then, and in a manner worthy of philosophy, he said that the fault committed with pleasure deserves a heavier charge than the one committed with pain. And, on the whole, the one is more like a man first wronged and driven by pain to anger, while the other has of his own accord set out toward wrongdoing, carried by desire to do the deed.
Act, speak, and think in everything as one who could depart from life this very moment. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is nothing to dread; for they would not involve you in evil. And if there are no gods, or if they take no care for human affairs, why should I wish to live in a universe empty of gods, empty of providence? But there are gods, and they do care for human affairs; and they have put it wholly in man's own power not to fall into things that are truly evil. And as for the rest, had any of it been evil, they would have provided against that too, so that it should lie within every man's power not to fall into it. But how could that which does not make a man worse make his life worse? The Nature of the Whole would not have overlooked these things, neither through ignorance, nor knowing them yet unable to guard against or correct them; nor would it have erred so greatly, whether through want of power or want of skill, as to let good and evil befall good and bad men alike, at random. Now death and life, fame and obscurity, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty — all these befall good and bad men alike, being neither noble nor base. They are therefore neither good nor evil.
How swiftly all things vanish — in the universe the bodies themselves, and in time the memory of them. Such are all the objects of sense, and most of all those that lure us with pleasure, or frighten us with pain, or are trumpeted abroad through vanity: how cheap, how contemptible, how sordid, how perishable and dead they are — these the intellectual faculty must mark. And what are these men whose opinions and voices bestow good repute? What is it to die; and that, if a man looks at it alone, and by dividing it in thought strips away the fancies that gather about it, he will think it nothing else than a work of nature — and whoever fears a work of nature is a child. Yet this is not only a work of nature, but also profitable to her. And how man touches God, and by what part of himself, and how that part of man must be disposed.
Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round over everything, and "searches into the things beneath the earth," as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture into the souls of those about him, while failing to perceive that it is enough to keep close to the guardian spirit within him and to serve it sincerely. And to serve it is to keep it pure of passion, of aimlessness, and of discontent with whatever comes from gods and from men. For what comes from the gods is to be revered for its excellence; and what comes from men is dear to us through kinship, and at times in a manner pitiable through their ignorance of good and evil — a maiming no less grave than that which robs the eyes of the power to tell white from black.
Though you were to live three thousand years, or ten times as many, still remember that no man loses any other life than the one he is living, nor lives any other than the one he loses. The longest life, then, and the shortest come to the same. For the present moment is equal for all, and so what is being lost is equal, and what is taken from a man is shown to be the merest instant. For no one can lose either the past or the future; how can anyone be robbed of what he does not possess? Two things, then, must be remembered: first, that all things from everlasting are of one kind and run in cycles, and it makes no difference whether one shall see the same things for a hundred years, or two hundred, or through endless time; second, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die lose the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, since this is all he has; and what a man does not have, he cannot lose.
That all is opinion. Plain enough are the sayings addressed to Monimus the Cynic; and plain too is their usefulness, if one takes the pith of the saying so far as it is true.
The soul of man does violence to itself, first and chiefly when it becomes, so far as it can, an abscess and, as it were, a tumour upon the universe; for to chafe at anything that happens is to set oneself apart from Nature, in whose embrace the several natures of all other things are contained. Next, when it turns away from any man, or is borne against him to do him harm, as are the souls of the angry. Third, it does violence to itself when it is overcome by pleasure or by pain. Fourth, when it plays a part, and does or says anything feigned and untruthful. Fifth, when it lets some action of its own and some impulse go without an aim, but acts at random and unreflectingly, when even the smallest acts ought to be done with reference to the end. And the end of rational beings is to follow the reason and ordinance of that most venerable city and commonwealth.
Of human life, the time is a point, the substance flowing, the perception dim, the composition of the whole body quick to rot, the soul a whirligig, fortune hard to foretell, and fame a thing past all judging. In a word, all that belongs to the body is a river, and all that belongs to the soul is dream and vapour; life is a war and a sojourn in a strange land, and the fame that comes after is forgetting. What, then, can see us through? One thing and one alone: philosophy. And this lies in keeping the guardian spirit within free from outrage and unhurt, master of pleasures and pains, doing nothing at random, nothing falsely or with pretence, having no need of another's doing or not doing anything; and, further, in welcoming what befalls and is allotted as coming from that source from which it came itself; and, above all, in awaiting death with a serene mind, as nothing but a dissolution of the elements of which every living creature is composed. But if it is no terror to the elements themselves that each is continually changing into another, why should one look with suspicion on the change and dissolution of all things? For it is in accordance with nature; and nothing that is in accordance with nature is evil.
Written at Carnuntum.