A book not meant for us
The strangest thing about the Meditations is that it was never written for a reader. It is a notebook, kept by a man who had the whole machinery of an empire at his disposal and who nonetheless spent his evenings reminding himself, in short and often repetitive entries, how to behave decently the next morning. There is no argument building toward a conclusion, no attempt to persuade. The same few ideas return again and again, as if the writer knew that a truth understood once is not the same as a truth that has become habit.
That repetition is exactly what makes the book useful to come back to. I do not read it from beginning to end any more. I open it somewhere in the middle, read a page or two, and close it again. It works less like a treatise and more like a conversation with a patient friend who does not mind saying the same thing for the tenth time, because he suspects you still have not quite heard it.
Beginning the day
Several of the entries are about mornings, and they are the ones I return to most. One of the best known opens the second book:
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II.1, trans. George Long (1862)
On a first reading this sounds almost sour, a list of grievances drawn up before anyone has had the chance to commit them. But the point is the opposite of bitterness. To expect difficulty is to be spared the small shock of it. When the rude email arrives or the meeting goes badly, there is nothing to be outraged about; it is simply the day behaving as days do. What remains in our hands is how we answer, and the passage goes on to say that the people who trouble us are still our kin, made for cooperation rather than quarrel.
The other morning entry is gentler and, to my mind, funnier. It opens the fifth book with a man arguing with himself in bed:
In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present,—I am rising to the work of a human being.
Meditations V.1, trans. George Long
It is a comfort that even an emperor found the blankets persuasive. The remedy he offers is not discipline for its own sake but a change of description. Getting up is not a sacrifice; it is the ordinary business of being a person, the same business that the bees and the ants and the small birds go about without complaint. Framed that way, the reluctance does not vanish, but it loses its authority.
The inner retreat
Most of us dream of escape at some point in the week. A cabin, a coastline, a long walk somewhere with no signal. The fourth book takes up the same wish and turns it around:
Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.
Meditations IV.3, trans. George Long
I do not take this as an argument against holidays. A week by the sea is a fine thing. The claim is narrower and more practical: the quiet we are looking for is not stored in the landscape. If we bring a crowded mind to the mountains, the mountains will not empty it for us. And if we can learn to step back from our own thoughts for a few minutes in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, then the retreat is available everywhere, including on a train, in a queue, or at a desk.
In practice this means something very modest. A pause before replying. A short walk around the block. The habit of asking, when something irritates me, whether it is the event itself that troubles me or only my opinion about it. None of this is dramatic, and that is rather the point. The Stoics distrusted dramatic gestures; they preferred the small adjustment, repeated until it becomes character.
Standing firm
There is an image in the same book that I have copied onto the inside cover of more than one notebook:
Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
Meditations IV.49, trans. George Long
What I like about the promontory is that it does not fight the sea. It does not need the waves to stop. It simply remains what it is, and the water, having broken against it, grows calmer in its shelter. That is a better model of steadiness than the one we usually carry around, which imagines resilience as a kind of clenched resistance. The rock is not straining. It is just there, rooted, and the turbulence passes.
It would be easy to turn this into a slogan about toughness, and I think that would miss it. The steadiness Marcus has in mind is not indifference to other people; the whole book is full of concern for them. It is rather a refusal to let every passing disturbance decide what kind of person we are going to be today.
The shortness of things
Underneath all of this runs a steady awareness of time. Marcus returns again and again to the brevity of life, to the long line of names that were once famous and are now forgotten, to the way that everything we hold is borrowed for a while. One entry puts it with almost no ornament at all:
Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
Meditations IV.17, trans. George Long
This could be read as gloomy, but I find it clarifying. It is not an instruction to hurry or to cram as much as possible into the days that remain. It is an instruction about priorities. Since the time is limited, spend it on what actually matters: being honest, being kind, doing one's work well. The rest, the reputation and the applause and the small victories in arguments, will be forgotten soon enough in any case.
Why keep reading
None of these ideas are difficult to understand. A child could summarise them. The difficulty lies entirely in remembering them at the moment they are needed, when we are tired or annoyed or afraid. That is why a book like this rewards rereading more than reading. Each time, the same sentences meet a slightly different person with slightly different troubles, and something new catches.
I keep a copy on the shelf nearest the door. Some weeks I do not open it at all. Other weeks I read a page each evening, the way its author presumably wrote them: briefly, without ceremony, as a way of setting things in order before sleep. It has not made me wise. But it has, now and then, made me a little calmer than I would otherwise have been, and that seems like a fair return on a few minutes of reading.