The Book of Marcus Aurelius 3 · 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 He wrote his own, but not for publication.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.
3.1Let me teach you a method. It is not a pleasant one, but it is extremely useful.
3.2When something takes hold of you, take it apart and see what it is actually made of.
3.3That fine dish on the table: this is the corpse of a fish, that of a bird, that of a pig.
3.4That purple robe: it is sheep’s wool, dyed with the blood of a small shellfish.
3.5That thing that puts a man out of his senses: it is a rubbing together, a spasm, and the expulsion of a little mucus.
3.6I do not say this to make anyone loathe these things.
3.7I say it so a man can see that the words grow enormous in us while the thing itself is not that large.
3.8What is large is the name, not the object.
3.9How much of a life’s strength goes on names rather than on things.
3.10The method is to be used this way: see the thing first, then decide whether you want it.
3.11If you still want it after seeing it, take it — for then you want the thing itself and not its name.
3.12I do this so as not to be led about by words.
3.13I sit in this seat, and everyone uses the finest words on me. If I ever believe those words, I am finished.
3.14So I take things apart once a day.
3.15What is left standing after that is the real thing.