The Book of Marcus Aurelius 4 · 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 He wrote his own, but not for publication.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.
4.1When your mind is in disorder, try this: lift yourself to a height and look down.
4.2You will see crowds of people: at markets, at war, farming, marrying, burying, going to law.
4.3You will see them doing all of it at once: weeping in one place and laughing in another.
4.4Look further out: people did these same things before, in exactly the same way.
4.5Look further still: not one of those who did them is here now.
4.6Alexander and the man who drove his mules came to the same place in the end, and became the same thing.
4.7Consider how many have never heard your name at all.
4.8And consider how many are saying your name at this moment, who will themselves shortly not be here.
4.9I am not trying to make you despair.
4.10I am trying to get the thing that keeps you awake put back to its actual size.
4.11Once it is back, you will find it is still there, only it is no longer pressing on you.
4.12Fame is this sort of thing: those who praise you must first be alive, and then they must judge accurately.
4.13Neither can be counted on. And for this men will spend a whole life.
4.14Soon you will have forgotten everything; soon everything will have forgotten you.
4.15Knowing that, a man is loosened rather than crushed.
4.16For since you can carry nothing away, only one question is left: in this stretch of time, are you doing the work of a human being?