Today I talked with a client about mortality and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present–being "in the moment"–is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius that I find both bracing and comforting:
Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [1]
I had been thinking along these lines well before the conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.
In the "unpublished jottings" that close Christopher Hitchens' posthumous book Mortality he includes this brief note: "Larkin good on fear in 'Aubade,' with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either." [2] Hitchens, who wrote these lines while dying of cancer, is referring to Philip Larkin's haunting poem from 1977, which he had begun and set aside three years earlier, returning to it only upon the death of his mother. The short verse includes the following stanza:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round. [3]
Hitchens and Larkin take issue with stoicism and its seemingly inhuman implication that our fear of death is so foolish and irrational that it should be easily surmounted. I haven't read Hume or Lucretius, so I can't characterize their perspective, but I don't think that's an accurate description of Aurelius' view. In the introduction to the Oxford edition of the Meditations, classics scholar R. B. Rutherford emphasizes that "Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter… At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [4] Aurelius wasn't rebuking us for our irrational fear of death; he was encouraging himself to be brave.
At times like this I find the above passage from the Meditations comforting because I accept Aurelius' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years, and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment. And I find this passage equally bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can I can sit back and let it pass by, as I so often do, or I can step forward and do something meaningful with it.
Footnotes
[1] Meditations, Book II, Chapter 14 (Marcus Aurelius)
[2] Mortality, page 92 (Christopher Hitchens, 2012)
[3] "Aubade" (Philip Larkin, 1977)
[4] Meditations, pages ix-x.
Photo by Martin Fisch.
4 Responses
Since you are considering the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius today, perhaps the thoughts of King Solomon on the subject are relevant and worthy to be considered:
[Remember your Creator earnestly now] before the silver cord [of life] is snapped apart, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern [and the whole circulatory system of the blood ceases to function];
Then shall the dust [out of which God made man’s body] return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God Who gave it.
Vapor of vapors and futility of futilities, says the Preacher. All is futility (emptiness, falsity, vainglory, and transitoriness)!
And furthermore, because the Preacher was wise, he [Solomon] still taught the people knowledge; and he pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs.
The Preacher sought acceptable words, even to write down rightly words of truth or correct sentiment.
The words of the wise are like prodding goads, and firmly fixed [in the mind] like nails are the collected sayings which are given [as proceeding] from one Shepherd.
But about going further [than the words given by one Shepherd], my son, be warned. Of making many books there is no end [so do not believe everything you read], and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
All has been heard; the end of the matter is: Fear God [revere and worship Him, knowing that He is] and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man [the full, original purpose of his creation, the object of God’s providence, the root of character, the foundation of all happiness, the adjustment to all inharmonious circumstances and conditions under the sun] and the whole [duty] for every man.
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it is good or evil.
Thanks, John–I appreciate it.
On another note, I was also just pointed to the “unpublished jottings” that close Christopher Hitchens’ posthumous book Mortality, in which he writes “Larkin good on fear in ‘Aubade,’ with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.”
This led me to look up Philip Larkin’s beautiful, haunting poem, which I don’t read as a critique of stoicism but as a version of same–more tender and accepting, perhaps, but still an effort to address the dread that our mortality evokes.
Beautifully stated, Ed. The present is the easy and hard of it. Your revelation that Aurelius wrote for himself makes him sound like one of us bloggers — well, sort of. By any account his voice certainly reaches across time, and in this case seems ironically to transcend his own present. There’s an elegiac tone in his writing (and in this post, too), that reminds of what the poet, Billy Collins has said somewhere I can no longer remember: “all poetry is about death.”
Thanks, Dan–the comparison with blogging is an interesting one, because I think the best bloggers write in a personal voice on topics that are meaningful to them, and yet do so in a way that’s accessible to readers. I suppose it’s about helping readers see themselves in the writer’s own story–you’re great at that, by the way–and it’s striking that we can see ourselves in the 2,000-year-old personal stories of a Roman emperor.
And “elegiac” is just the right word for his tone. I’m drawn to that quality in him, which seems to acknowledge our mortality and the inward-looking sadness it inevitably evokes in us, while encouraging us to lift our gaze and appreciate life while we can.