The end

Book Twelve is the last book. Marcus is close to death — within a year or two of dying of plague at his camp on the Danube — and the book has the plainness of a man closing his accounts. The fragments are short, almost terse. He runs through the central exercises one more time, briefly: the cosmos is one, the body is on loan, the only harm is the harm one does to oneself, fame is dust, gratitude is owed.

He also returns, more directly than anywhere else in the work, to his own ending. He tells himself that he should not be afraid of what nature requires of him. That the time he has had has been generous. That he has been allowed to do the work given to him, mostly well. That he should leave the stage when called and not cling to the part. The book is undefensive about this. Marcus has talked himself into the picture so thoroughly that the picture finally looks like the truth.

The Meditations ends with one of the most famous passages in Roman literature. "Pass through your short time as a guest, content with what you have been given, then exit graciously — like a fruit that ripens and falls." It is plain. It is brief. It is the Stoic discipline of departure, in one image. Marcus puts down his notebook on this line. He died on campaign about a year later, of the plague that had been moving through the legions for nearly a decade. The notebook somehow survived.