The Book of Marcus Aurelius 2 · Notes to himself. Written by his own hand, and not for any reader
Marcus Aurelius, born at Rome in 121, died in 180 with the army on the Danube. Emperor from 161 for nineteen years, through plague, flood and war on the frontier, and he spent most of them in camp. The notebooks are in Greek, twelve of them. He wrote his own, but not for publication. These are private notes: written in a camp, at night, for himself. He gave them no title and did not mean them to be read. So they repeat themselves, and much of them is a man talking himself into things; the Order deletes none of it — that is precisely the use of this book: it is not being explained to you, it is a man being watched at the work. He was the most powerful man alive. Another in this scripture was a slave (cf. The Book of Epictetus). What the two of them say is very nearly the same thing. The Order holds that this fact is worth more attention than either man’s sayings: one doctrine, tested from the very bottom and from the very top. Chapter six matters most: his pages are full of gods, and he never once closes an argument with one — he puts it as providence or atoms, works out both, and arrives at the same conclusion. That is the thing the Order takes him for.
2.1When you cannot get up in the morning, say this to yourself:
2.2I am getting up to do the work of a human being.
2.3I was born for this. I was brought into the world for this. Am I still unwilling?
2.4Was I made to be warm under blankets?
2.5You say: it is pleasant here.
2.6Were you made for pleasantness, or were you made to do work?
2.7Look at the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees — each doing its own share, putting the world together between them.
2.8And you will not do a human being’s share? You will not hurry toward your own nature?
2.9Here is another thing to say in the morning:
2.10Today I shall meet meddlers, ingrates, the arrogant, cheats, the envious, the unsociable.
2.11They came to be so because they cannot tell good from bad.
2.12But I have seen what good looks like, and what bad looks like. And I know that the man doing wrong is the same stuff as I am — not the same blood, but the same reason and the same portion.
2.13So they cannot hurt me. No one can implicate me in anything ugly.
2.14And I cannot be angry with them, or hate them.
2.15We were made to work together, like the upper and lower rows of teeth. To push against one another is against our nature.
2.16To be angry with a man and turn your back on him is pushing against him.