Marcus Aurelius on Beginning the Day and Facing Death

This is a modern English rendering of Book 2 of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, written between roughly 161 and 180 AD as a private journal kept during his reign as Roman emperor. It was never intended for publication. The translation this rendering works from is George Long's 1862 English version, the standard public-domain text and the one available at Project Gutenberg. What follows is not a literal translation. It is a modern rendering: the language is updated for contemporary readers while preserving Marcus's structure, his arguments, and his Stoic vocabulary. He is talking to himself, reminding himself of how to live. Book 2, written in Carnuntum on the Danube during his campaign against the Marcomanni, is the most concentrated of the twelve books on time, mortality, and the discipline of beginning a day. Section numbers follow the standard Greek text.

I.

Begin each morning by saying to yourself: today I will meet the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, and the unsocial. They are this way because they do not know what is good and what is evil. But I have seen that the nature of the good is beautiful, and the nature of the bad is ugly. I have also seen that the person who does wrong shares my own nature. Not by blood or birth, but in that we both participate in the same intelligence and the same fragment of the divine. Because of this, none of them can harm me, since none can fasten anything ugly onto me. I cannot be angry with someone who is my kin, nor can I hate them. We were made to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To act against one another is contrary to nature, and to be irritated by another, or to turn away from them, is a form of acting against them.

II.

Whatever I am, I am a small piece of flesh and breath, and the ruling part within. Throw away your books. Stop distracting yourself. You no longer have the time for it. Treat your body the way someone already dying would treat it. It is blood and bones, a mesh of nerves and veins and arteries. Look at your breath, what kind of thing it is: air, never the same from one moment to the next, exhaled and drawn in again. The third part is what rules. Consider this: you are an old man. Stop letting the ruling part be a slave. Stop letting it be pulled by strings like a puppet, jerked toward unsocial movements. Stop being dissatisfied with your present circumstances or shrinking from what is to come.

III.

Everything that comes from the gods is full of providence. Whatever comes from fortune is not separate from nature, but interwoven and entangled with what providence orders. Everything flows from the same source. There is also necessity, and what serves the advantage of the whole universe, of which you are a part. What is good for any part of nature is what the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to maintain that nature. The universe is preserved by the changes of the elements, and by the changes of compounds made from those elements. Let these principles be enough for you. Let them be fixed convictions. Set aside the thirst for more books, so you do not die complaining, but instead cheerfully, sincerely, and from the heart, thankful to the gods.

IV.

Remember how long you have been putting these things off, how often the gods have given you the opportunity, and how you have not used it. You must finally see what universe you are part of, and from what administrator of the universe your existence flows. A limit of time is fixed for you. If you do not use it to clear the clouds from your mind, the time will go and you will go, and it will not return.

V.

Every moment, think steadily, like a Roman and a man, to do what is in front of you with simple, complete dignity. Do it with affection, with freedom, with justice. Free yourself from all other thoughts. You will free yourself if you do every act of your life as if it were your last, putting aside carelessness, putting aside passionate resistance to the commands of reason, putting aside hypocrisy, self-love, and dissatisfaction with what has been allotted to you. Notice how few things are required. The person who lays hold of these can live a quiet life, like the existence of the gods, since the gods will require nothing more from someone who holds to them.

VI.

You do violence to yourself, my soul. You do violence to yourself. And you will not have another chance to honor yourself. Every life is sufficient. Yours is nearly finished, and still your soul does not revere itself. It still places its happiness in the souls of others.

VII.

Do the external things that fall on you distract you? Give yourself time to learn something new and worthwhile. Stop being whirled around. But also avoid being carried away in the other direction. People who wear themselves out in life with constant activity, but who have no end toward which to direct any of it, no thought tied to any purpose, are also trifling away their time.

VIII.

Failing to observe what is in another person's mind has rarely made anyone unhappy. But failing to observe the movements of one's own mind necessarily produces unhappiness.

IX.

Always keep this in mind: what is the nature of the whole, what is my own nature, how is mine related to the whole, and what kind of part of what kind of whole am I? Remember also that no one prevents you from always doing and saying what is according to the nature of which you are a part.

X.

Theophrastus, comparing bad acts in the way most people would, said rightly, and like a true philosopher, that offenses committed through desire are more blameworthy than offenses committed through anger. The angry person turns away from reason with a kind of pain and unconscious contraction. The person who offends through desire is overcome by pleasure, and seems more intemperate, more unmanly, in his offense. The act committed in pleasure is more blameworthy than the act committed in pain. The angry person was first wronged in some way, and pain compelled him to be angry. The person of desire is moved by his own impulse, drawn toward doing what he should not.

XI.

Since it is possible that you may leave life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. To depart from human company, if there are gods, is nothing to fear. The gods will not draw you into evil. If they do not exist, or if they pay no attention to human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe without gods or without providence? But the gods do exist, and they do attend to human things, and they have placed in your hands the means not to fall into actual evil. As for everything else, if there were anything genuinely evil, the gods would have arranged that it lie within your power not to fall into it. What does not make a person worse cannot make a person's life worse. The nature of the universe has not overlooked these things, neither through ignorance nor through lack of power to correct them. Nor could the universe have made so great a mistake, through lack of power or skill, that good and evil would happen indiscriminately to good and bad people. But death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure happen equally to the good and the bad. They make no one better or worse. They are therefore neither good nor evil.

XII.

How quickly all things disappear. In the universe, the bodies themselves; in time, the memory of them. What is the nature of all sensible things, especially those that attract with the bait of pleasure, or terrify with pain, or are noised about by foggy fame? How worthless they are, how contemptible, sordid, perishable, and dead. The intellect's job is to observe this. To observe also who these people are whose opinions and voices give reputation. To observe what death is. If a person looks at death itself, and by analytical reflection breaks down all the things that present themselves in the imagination around it, he will see that death is nothing else than an operation of nature. Anyone afraid of an operation of nature is a child. Death is not only an operation of nature, but something that serves nature's purposes. Observe also how a human being approaches the divine, and by what part of himself, and when this part is properly disposed.

XIII.

Nothing is more pitiful than a person who runs around everything, prying into what is beneath the earth, as the poet says, and trying to guess what is in the minds of his neighbors, without realizing it is enough to attend to the spirit within himself and to revere it sincerely. To revere this spirit means keeping it free from passion and thoughtlessness, and from dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and from people. The things that come from the gods deserve veneration for their excellence. The things that come from people deserve to be welcomed because of our kinship. Sometimes they even move our pity, because of human ignorance of good and bad. This defect is no less serious than what deprives us of the power to distinguish white from black.

XIV.

Even if you were going to live three thousand years, or thirty thousand, remember that no person loses any other life than the one being lived now, nor lives any other life than the one being lost now. The longest life and the shortest come to the same. The present is the same for all of us, though what is lost is not the same. The thing that is lost is therefore a mere moment. A person cannot lose either the past or the future, since you cannot lose what you do not have. Hold these two things in mind. First, that all things from eternity are of the same forms and come around in a circle, and it makes no difference whether a person sees the same things for a hundred years or two hundred or an infinite time. Second, that the longest-lived and the soonest-dying lose exactly the same. The only thing a person can be deprived of is the present, since the present is the only thing he has, and a person cannot lose a thing he does not have.

XV.

Remember that everything is opinion. What the Cynic Monimus said is plain enough, and the use of what he said is plain too, if a person takes from it what is true.

XVI.

The soul of a person does violence to itself in five ways. First, when it becomes an abscess, a tumor on the universe, as far as it can. To be irritated at anything that happens is a separation of oneself from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. Second, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from another person, or when it moves toward another person with the intent to injure, as in the souls of the angry. Third, when it is overcome by pleasure or by pain. Fourth, when it plays a part, doing or saying something insincerely and untruly. Fifth, when it allows any of its acts or movements to be without aim, doing something thoughtlessly and without considering what it is, when it is right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end. The end of rational beings is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity.

XVII.

Of a human life: the time is a point. The substance is in flux. The perception is dim. The composition of the whole body tends toward decay. The soul is a whirlwind. Fortune is hard to read. Fame has no judgment in it. To put it all in a word: everything belonging to the body is a stream, what belongs to the soul is a dream and a vapor, life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and posthumous fame is oblivion.

What then can guide a person? One thing, and only one: philosophy. And this consists in keeping the spirit within free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nothing falsely or hypocritically, not depending on what others do or fail to do. It also consists in accepting all that happens, all that is allotted, as coming from the same source the person himself came from. And finally, in waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. If there is no harm to the elements themselves in continually changing one into another, why should a person fear the change and dissolution of all the elements? It is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.

Written in Carnuntum.