Meditations — themes & analysis

The single most important Stoic distinction in Marcus is between what is up to you and what is not. Your body is not up to you — it can be hurt, taken, killed. Your reputation is not up to you — others decide what to think of you. The actions of other people are not up to you. The empire is not up to you, even when you are emperor. None of it is.

What is up to you is the inner space where you respond to all of this. Your judgments. Your assents. The use you make of impressions. Whether to call something "bad" or "indifferent." Whether to be drawn into anger by another person's anger. Marcus calls this the hēgemonikon — the "ruling part" — and he calls it variously a fortress, a citadel, an inner space that no one can enter without your consent.

The exercise is to retreat there as often as you need to. When the day is going badly: notice that the day is not in your control, but the way you are walking through it is. When someone insults you: notice that the insult is just a sound, and the wound only happens if you complete it inside yourself. This is not denial; Marcus is unsparingly clear about how bad things can get. It is a redrawing of where you actually live. You live in the citadel.

It is also, in Marcus's hands, not a private comfort. The point of the citadel is not to wall yourself off from the world but to act in the world without being torn apart by it. The emperor still has to make decisions, hand down judgments, send men to their deaths. The citadel is what makes that work possible without becoming the kind of person it usually makes you.

Where to follow it: Book 4 (the famous "retreat into yourself"), Book 7, Book 8.

Almost every page of the Meditations contains a reminder of death. Marcus tells himself that he will die soon. That everyone he loves will die. That everyone he is angry with will die. That the great Caesars are gone. That Hadrian is gone. That entire generations have been forgotten and that he will be forgotten too. The repetition is striking; it is also intentional.

The point is not gloom. Marcus is not a dark writer in the sense Dostoevsky is dark. The point is attention. We waste enormous amounts of time on things that wouldn't matter to us if we kept the brevity of life in front of us — pretending an insult matters, planning a feud, agonizing about reputation, refusing to act because we are afraid to look bad. None of these survive contact with death. Marcus uses death as an instrument: it scrubs away the noise.

He is also wonderfully concrete about it. Look at how the recently dead lie, he says. Look at the bodies pulled from the sea. The river of time bears each thing forward, used a little while, then washed away. You will be one of those things, soon. So will your son. So will Hadrian, who took the throne with such ceremony — ash now. Marcus does not try to make this sound peaceful. He simply repeats it until it lands.

What lands, in him, is a working philosophy: do the work in front of you, treat the people in front of you well, do not waste the day on resentment, because there are not many days. It is the Stoic discipline expressed at its plainest.

Where to follow it: Book 2 (life is a campaign), Book 4, Book 12 (the final book).

Marcus is endlessly reminding himself to get up and do the work. "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do?" That passage is in Book Five. He needs to tell himself this in the morning, every morning. Even an emperor doesn't want to get up.

The Stoic argument behind this is that each person is given a role — by nature, by birth, by the circumstances they find themselves in — and the task is to play the role well, not to long for someone else's. A foot is for walking; an eye is for seeing; a human being is for the kind of rational, social, virtuous work that human beings can do. The world is one cosmos and you are one part of it. You don't get to opt out of being a part. You only get to choose how you contribute.

For Marcus this had a very specific meaning. He hadn't chosen to be emperor. He had been a quiet, scholarly young man, and the role was given to him by his adoptive father Antoninus. He spent the rest of his life fulfilling it — through wars he didn't enjoy, against rebellions he hadn't started, with a son (Commodus) he was beginning to suspect would unmake everything he had built. He never seems to have considered abdicating. He took the role he had been given and tried to play it well. The Meditations is, in part, the document of that effort.

He is also clear that "duty" doesn't mean "joyless service." The Stoic does the work cheerfully, because complaining is unworthy and because the cosmos is rational and because, frankly, the work is better with the complaining left out. "What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee." Get up. Do the work.

Where to follow it: Book 5 (the famous "at dawn"), Book 6, Book 8.

Behind everything else in the Meditations is a metaphysical commitment that Marcus shares with the older Stoics. The universe is one — a single ordered system, a cosmos, run by reason, in which everything that happens is part of the whole and does what the whole requires.

This is not consolation. Marcus is not telling himself everything happens for a personal reason. He is saying something larger and stranger: that the universe is the kind of thing it is, and that the kind of thing it is includes human suffering, the deaths of children, the falls of empires, and his own oncoming death. None of these are exceptions to the system. They are how the system runs.

What the metaphysics buys him is that nothing is anomalous. He does not have to feel betrayed by anything that happens, because nothing that happens is a betrayal — it is what nature does. A wave breaking on the rocks is not a violation of the wave. A man dying is not a violation of life. There is therefore no point in being scandalized by reality. Marcus repeats this to himself, again and again, when he is tempted to be scandalized.

It also tells him how to act. Since you are a part of the cosmos, your job is to act in keeping with its grain. Be reasonable, because the cosmos is rational. Be social, because human beings are made to live with each other. Don't try to opt out of the system you are in — you are not the kind of thing that can opt out. The cosmos is going to do what it does. Your only choice is how to do your small piece of it.

Where to follow it: Book 4, Book 6, Book 9.

The Stoic ideal is a soul that is not yanked about by its own emotions. Anger, lust, fear, grief, envy — the Greeks called these pathē, "passions," and the Stoic discipline was to bring them under the rule of reason. Not to extinguish them; that is a misreading. To stop being driven by them.

Marcus, like everyone else, is yanked about constantly. He gets angry; he is pulled by sexual desire; he is afraid of his son; he is frustrated by petitioners and by senators and by the people closest to him. The Meditations is the record of him noticing this and putting reason back in charge. Many of his exercises are simple reframings: "what's done to me is in my own mind." "An ungrateful man is just a man." "What's not good for the hive is not good for the bee."

The trick the Stoic uses, again and again, is to refuse the second arrow. The first arrow — pain, loss, insult — is unavoidable. The second arrow is the one you fire into yourself: the resentment, the rumination, the self-pity. Marcus catches himself mid-draw and refuses to fire. Not always; he wouldn't have to write it down so often if he succeeded. But the discipline of catching himself is itself the practice.

He is also kind to himself about it. He is not a saint and does not pretend to be. He just keeps trying. "Do not be ashamed to be helped," he tells himself in Book Seven. "It's like a soldier scaling the wall: when you can't do it alone and someone gives you a hand, you don't refuse." The Stoic is not the man who never falls. The Stoic is the man who, when he falls, gets up and continues.

Where to follow it: Book 2, Book 7, Book 11.