“[Typically we wail] ‘How unlucky I am, that this should have happened to me!’ By no means; say rather, ‘How lucky I am, that it has left me with no bitterness; unshaken by the present, and undismayed by the future.’”

— 49

This section has two main themes as I see it.  The first, being on the shortness of life, that no matter the trial or efforts spent in extending it, it is always blazingly short.  The second, on which I would like to focus today, is on that the suffering of life occurs as judgments, and not as facts of themselves.  The quote I pulled for today leans us that way.

This has been one of those tenets of Stoicism that has been gathering rust on my tool bench.  It’s a strange one, because from the outside it seems impossible.  But, once you take up the lens, and begin to examine in the world, it sees self-evident.  “Why is this physical affliction happening to me?  Woe is me!” is so entirely different from “this body falls apart, but nothing eternal has been lost.”  It could be, that in looking at my Stoic tools, since I’m sliding into something akin to a well worn pair of shoes, they fit.  I don’t remember finding this as simple a chance in the past as it seems today.

Every being on this planet, and likely in the cosmos, suffers.  Or so it seems to me.  All life requires death, and so far as we know, only humanity has the meta-awareness to observe this.  And so the suffering *means* something to us.  You can see pain in a dog, and you can see learned behaviors of avoidance, anxiety, etc.  This is often heartbreaking to many of us.  Yet, that same dog sets those signals of emotion aside when his favorite human enters the room.  He’s not plagued by the thing once it has left, or been replaced by something else.

That seems to be a human characteristic.

Yet, we too can set those aside, especially when they have been incorrectly assented to.  Is this pain of the leg an evil?  No, it’s a pain of the leg.  The fact that I cannot walk well today means I’ll be a bit slower.  I no longer hear well, so I ask for some help, I use tools to aid me, I learn a new language, and make new friends as well.

That’s been something I haven’t discussed on the blog much at all, but I’ve been having some changes in my hearing as a result of childhood and genetic issues.  As such, I’ve been wearing amplifiers, learning American Sign Language, and making new friends in the Deaf community.  Such is life, it sometimes takes us down unexpected paths.

I mourned the loss of my hearing for some time, quite a while actually.  I quit going out to see friends, I got angry and bitter.  Now I have some projects to work on, increasing my proficiency with ASL, meeting new people, and learning to navigate what is becoming to me, a new normal.

Hopefully I can be the rock Marcus wishes for himself, while the waves crash around it only to fall still once more.  And all of us making progress can pick back up a tool we’ve laid aside.

This post is part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’Meditations.

“Very soon you will be dead; but even yet you are not single-minded, nor above disquiet; not yet unapprehensive of harm from without; not yet charitable to all men, not persuaded that to do justly is the only wisdom.”

— 37.

Frequently, in this section I think sarcastically, “Jeeze, Marcus, just @ me already…”  I’ve been in a weird spot lately, and for some reason I haven’t been using the tools I developed through my Stoic practice to handle them.  I have start over.  I’m fairly aware that progress is a thing that slips if we’re not careful, and I more fully understand Hadot’s description of it as tension.  I let loose of it, and it’s slipped away.

It’s possible that such a phase was needed, required for what comes next.  I will take it as such.

In these sections, Marcus admonishes himself and then offers the solution.  The turmoil and lack of progress that we often see in our lives is accepted, and then he moves on with a Stoic therapy.  I see hints of Heraclitus’ river, and Marcus’ own View from Above.  He describes the machinations and activities of generations, each arising, and then falling away, to leave only fossils in the minds of men.

Yet he takes solace in the connection that he has with the cosmos, with God, if you will.  His part to play, his duties, his chance for virtue; these bring some comfort in the face of an eternity which quickly wipes clean the slate of our lives.

It’s probably because Marcus was an emperor, and I am not, but I do not take the same comfort in the yoking of duties as Marcus does.  Oftentimes, those seem to me to be just another, more complicated form of distraction or preoccupation.  Maybe if I had the fate of the west on my shoulders, I’d feel differently.

But I don’t.

We know a lot about Diogenes, who made himself a paragon example, that some fraction of it might take root in the minds of his fellows.  But we (or at least I) know less of the Cynics which came after, those who are often described as fashionable non-conformists, watered down, and haranguing the citizens.  Do they know they were watered down?  Was it a ploy?  A way out?  Or did they think they were doing their best, or even to improve?

Ah, yes.  Well, those questions are not answerable, but their parallel can be seen in our School, too.  Are we watered down?  If we veer, have we improved or faltered?  Are we brave enough to ask?  Hard to tell until we get there.  I might veer a bit, we’ll see.

“To be in the process of change is not an evil, any more than to be in the product of change is a good.”

— 42.

This post is part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’Meditations.

There is a lot going on in these three passages, but there are two themes, or practices rather, I would like to touch on today.  It’s sort of funny, as the title “Meditations” is a sort of fiction in English language versions of Marcus’ notes.  They are typically titled “To himself” or “Notes to himself.”  Marcus gave them no titles, as it was a philosophical diary of sorts, never intended for other readership let alone global, multi-language publication.

In today’s sections, I can identify two distinct meditation types in Marcus’ notes.

• The meditation on death, passing, and time.
• Objective description of impressions.

In the first part, Marcus describes that we can imagine the great flow of time, and how objects and people arise, exist, and fall away.  We can imagine a scene like a time lapse photo, speeding years into seconds until even mountains wither at the touch of wind and water.  He also discusses specific meditation on death, our own and others.  There is a striking similarity here to meditation on impermanence.

The second is to describe impressions objectively, to name them, especially regarding pleasurable sense impressions.  This bears a strong similarity to insight meditation as practiced in the Ajaan Tong tradition.

There’s a lot of internet chatter about the apparent similarity between Buddhism and Stoicism, most of which is a bit superficial to my mind.  However, we do see here two clear references to what look to me to be similar practices.

It’s worth nothing that we don’t have textual examples of any classical Stoics doing sitting or breathing meditations.  We do have this sort of “odd man out” with Socrates that I discussed earlier.  Either way, meditation has not typically been part of my Stoic practice, but I think I’ll give this a more serious try with Marcus’ recommendation.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.

Today’s selection hits three points:

• Marcus’ daily premeditation on adversity for dealing with others.
• An objective description of the body, and what the far more noble part of man is.
• A reminder on the Providential ordering of the cosmos, and what his work is and is not.

This selection in itself could be used as an example that these notes are a philosophical exercise, and not the workings of a depressive or addicted mind as some have claimed.  All three of this have a common thread woven in them.  These exercise are used to help Marcus, and by extension us, prepare himself for the realities of dealing with others as we find them.  We also see a nod back to the Socratic position that all who do evil do so against their will, because they misunderstand the nature of the Good.

Marcus prepares himself to deal with the less-than-best in others, and it immediately follows with the why.  There are two reasons for this:

• 1) These others who may fall short of their own best are still brothers in the Logos.
• 2) The wrongdoing of others doesn’t affect our own virtue.

Many of Marcus’ reminders are focused on his roles, which with his affection for the Discourses of Epictetus and his own personal situation is not surprising.  He constantly reminds himself to put away distractions and focus on his obligations.  A very interesting part of the Meditations is that we get to see how Marcus himself thought about his struggles, where his own impediments lay, and how he sought to work through them.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.

Marcus closes his Book I, fittingly, by thanking the Gods.  Stoic theology is a strange critter for the modern westerner, steeped in fifteen hundred years of Abrahamic context.  For many new Stoics, shaking their relationship is the hardest part of reading the Stoics.  Immediately they begin spinning up ideas of omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient personality.

Marcus’ gratitude shows not to be the case.  He simply looks at his life, and is thankful that a Providential cosmos has placed him there, and then, and in the manner which was most conducive to his development.  He maintains a proper understanding of the scale of self compared with that cosmos, and as is fitting, is thankful.  This perspective is piety.

It’s just and proper, then, that Marcus ends this section with a straight forward thanking of the Gods; a useful reminder for all of us.  If this topic interests you, I’d readily point you to Chris, at TraditionalStoicism.com for more.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.

In Chapter 16 Marcus enters into the longest discussion of Book I yet, and shows us his father.  I’ve recently been reading about Epictetus’ sense of Roles which differ significantly from Cicero’s account, the more prevalent one.  In reading Marcus’ thoughts on his father, it seems to of two types of observations.  The first, being how the man executed his various roles: carefully, controlled, effectively, and with fairness.  The second being the manner in which the man carried on his daily life: a seeming paragon of Roman decorum.

When Stoicism ceased to be a Greek-speaking realm’s pheromone, and migrate to Rome, it underwent some changes.  Hellenistic philosophy sometimes had hard edges, that cut deeply into the lives of those that handled it.  In Rome, some of those edges were knocked down.  The Cynic’s παρρησία, while still tolerated even in the watered down Roman manner, was pushed aside for the decorum.  Marcus’ discussion of his father shows this, in the focus on his roles and bearing while executing his duties as a Roman.

It is a great loss for those of us studying the Stoics not much of the early Hellenistic Stoics remains.  I still hold out my hopes for a “Stoic Herculaneum” of sorts.

The last note, about Maximus and his sickbed, make me wonder what Marcus might remember of his own father.  Back in Chapter 2, you may remember that he mentions “of what I remember” and stories he’s heard.  A quick internet search tells me that Marcus would have been about three years of age when his father died.  Not everyone has memories of that time of their life.  I have a couple, and one even older, but that’s pretty uncommon.  I wonder if Marcus’ only memory of his father is of the man’s death?  That would be something.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.

Book I continues in Marcus’ exercise in gratitude, specifically of teachers and mentors.  The thing which stuck out at me for this section is that these teachers are in the past, but they appear to be quite a ways in the past, rather than just a year or even five ago at the time of the writing.

It’s been my experience that I didn’t fully recognize the teachers who made a lasting impression until much later.  The same is true for family members.  The formative effect of my grandfather wasn’t apparent to me until I saw his words, thoughts, and actions as things of myself as well.

The seeds of the people we become are planted deep and early, and it seems only when the bows have grown heartily that the core nature of it visible.

I mentioned to my wife recently that it seemed a great loss that she never got to meet my grandfather.  My mother overheard this and said, “Kevin makes sense if you knew my Dad.” This caught me by surprise, for as this relationship has become apparent to me, I was unaware that it was apparent to others.  Which is rather silly, in retrospect.

I wonder if Marcus had similar experiences, looking back on a life lived, and seeing the landmarks only afterwards, the people and beliefs which guided him to where he now stood?  I think that this must be the case when I re-read Book I.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.

Today kicks off Michel Daw’s project of the reading of Marcus’ Meditations. You can find the pdf of the plan here.

Book I is an exercise in gratitude. Marcus thanks and gives credit to those who helped shaped the man he has become. I begins first with family, noting their specific contribution to his rearing and formation. He moves on to teachers and philosophers, who helped inculcate in him early that philosophy is thing to do, a way of life, and not merely analytical and rhetorical exercise.

For this reading plan, I’m reading a new-to-me translation by Maxwell Staniforth (1964). Staniforth notes that the title of the work, which was never intended to be read by others let alone published globally and in many languages, is titled “Meditations” in the English world solely by convention. In the Greek (in which it was written, not Latin) it is ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ, or “to himself” sometimes “The Emperor to Himself.”

Koine Greek was the language of philosophy in Rome, with a few key exceptions (Cicero, Seneca, et al.) Marcus was clearly proficient in the language, and the whole of the book is a compendium of philosophical exercises, or spiritual exercises if you like: ὑπομνήματα. This word, ὑπομνήματα, means something like “notes” or “reminders.”

I will begin this reading of Meditations with a Book I of my own.

To my grandfather and father I owe the appreciation of the example of hard work and the meaning of family ties. These men set an example in this arena which I have never met, but which was so great that even when I see myself fall short, I stand out among my colleagues and coworkers. Also to my grandfather, the love of music and stories.

To my mother I owe the belief that life must be meaningful, that the all-too-common settling for the average is a danger to be avoided. To her I also attribute the structure of my understanding of things divine; as well as my love of reading, writing, and great literature.

Two teachers of mine stand out in memory from my formative years: Dr. Seitz and Mr. Fields. These two provided me with the example of excellent instructors, passionate orators, and genuinely caring men. In an environment which is not overly conducive to such things, these two changed my perspective on more than just lecture material.

Two more recent teachers who have helped to shape my efforts in philosophy, carefully correcting errors and misapprehensions but also knowing when to step back and let me solve a problem or grow in my time: Erik Wiegardt and Chris Fisher.

To Yannos, Brendan, Germano and Chaz for always being willing soundboards, mutual advisers, friends, and teachers.

To several close friends: for supporting me and helping me rebuild when I myself could not see a way out of the ruins and ashes of my external endeavors.

Part of Michel Daw’s Reading Plan of Marcus’ Meditations.