The Emperor Who Wrote at Night
Short story about needing the same reminder again.
The tent was cold. The man inside was fifty-four and commanded every legion between Britain and Syria.
He was writing in Greek, badly, by lamplight, and nobody would read it for fifteen hundred years.
Not a history. A note to himself: that the staff officer who had irritated him that afternoon was acting on his own idea of the good, as everyone does, and that being surprised by this was foolish.
He had written a version of that note perhaps forty times.
That is the strange thing about the book — the repetition. The most powerful man alive kept telling himself the same few things for years. Do the work in front of you. You will be dead soon. The insult is your opinion of it.
He wasn't writing because he had understood these things.
He was writing because he kept losing them.
Needing the same reminder again is not failure. That is what a practice is.
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Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A biographical sketch drawn from the Meditations and standard accounts of Marcus Aurelius' life. No wording here is presented as a quotation; many famous “Marcus Aurelius” lines in circulation are paraphrases rather than translations.
The Meditations were private — not philosophy for an audience but maintenance: a man returning nightly to a few principles because they would not stay put.
This is the most useful fact about Stoicism and the one most often lost in its modern packaging. It is not a set of conclusions but a practice, done badly and repeatedly. Marcus grieves. He fails at what he prescribes. The book is more usable for it.
What is the one thing you have to keep relearning?
