On Meditations

I picked this up expecting something like Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. It is nothing of the kind — and it’s significantly better. Seneca comes across as a wise man who has lived a long life but is also more than a little grumpy and severe, and his work is somewhat tarnished by the knowledge that he sold himself out to tutor Nero (though the end of his life was noble, and he met his fate with Stoic grace). Marcus Aurelius, by contrast, seems like a man simply trying to figure it out. You could hardly tell from the writing that he was a Roman emperor; he seems just like me.

There’s also a stronger case that his is the canonical text of Stoicism. Hardly a page goes by without the logos — the “word,” the flow that orders all of existence rationally; everything that happens was always destined to happen, and it’s impossible for things to be other than they are. Reflection on death is far more prominent here than in Seneca, too: memento mori, remember that you will die. All things do, eventually, and coming to recognize it is liberating — it frees us to do what we must and to live with virtue and care. The introduction to my edition was especially helpful, situating the Meditations in classical philosophy and offering guideposts. The translator argues that free will does exist in Stoic thought, but in a limited way, and offers an illuminating metaphor: life is a carriage bound to move forward, and we are dogs leashed to it. We can run alongside, or strain against it and dig in our feet — but run too far and we feel the constraint, refuse to move at all and we’re dragged painfully along the cobblestones.

If I had one argument to add, it’s that the strength of most spiritual traditions is that they demand acceptance of things as they are. In the Abrahamic faiths that means giving oneself over to God — recognizing that all is written, trusting that God will provide, submitting to His will. It’s there in Daoism too; the Dao looks an awful lot like the logos, though it lacks the latter’s rational order. Even Nietzsche offers something to submit to in eternal recurrence, which I think Marcus Aurelius would have been pleased by. The Meditations is therapeutic. It’s taken off on social media these past few years, and rightly so — it really is a guide for living: life-affirming, forgiving, and a way of bringing meaning to the world.