Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.53

It is a vulgar, but still a useful help towards contempt of death, to pass in review those who have tenaciously stuck to life. What more, then, have they gained than those who have died early?

Certainly they lie in their tombs somewhere at last, Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or any one else like them, who have carried out many to be buried, and then were carried out themselves.

Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people, and in what a feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life a thing of any value.

For look to the immensity of time behind you, and to the time which is before you, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4 (tr Long)

Marcus Aurelius calls it vulgar, because I suspect that there is the implicit temptation to gloat. A good man never gloats. He shows appreciation.

At the same time, there is something that can be learned from the vanity of others. I will only become vain if I start to think I am somehow superior, if I become just like those very people who think they are somehow better than me.

Three days or three generations? There is no real difference. In the face of what is Infinite, it means absolutely nothing.

But isn’t it all about me, getting what I want? It is about me, but not all about me. I need to think of myself as a piece of everything else, not of everything else as being a piece of me.

I have struggled to make so many things timeless, or to take what was passing and try to make it forever. I remember all the pop songs, the ones that told me that one more night would somehow make it all last. I would repeat things, hoping they would bring back what was lost. Now that was my vanity.

Only Nature itself, and the Divine Mind that rules it, are timeless. I am a part within the whole, and I can change my ways, to be happy as a part within that whole. It is never about gloating, but always about appreciation.

I once saved from three months of my paltry paycheck to take a girl to a fancy dinner. In hindsight, I know it meant little to her, because her father’s credit card could have paid for it in a moment, without any problem. But it was about me trying to do my own part, not about me asking to receive. I even understood that bit back then.

I put on my only tailored suit, with a pressed white shirt and fancy silk tie, and Italian shoes I’d only worn once before. I shaved twice with a proper blade, and splashed myself with cologne well beyond my price range. My mother told me how handsome I looked, and my father reminded me that I should always be a gentleman.

I still have the fondest memories of that dinner, until the end of it, when it all went a bit wrong, even as I learned something very right.

“Thanks. That was really nice! It’ll be even nicer when we can do this all of the time. It’ll only be a few more years until we’ve got it made!”

She meant it as an encouragement, though I suddenly saw it as a discouragement.

“How will we have it made?” I asked.

“You know, good degrees, good jobs, it’ll work out forever.”

“How will that make anything forever?”

Well,” she said quite seriously, “we need to pay for forever.”

There it was, two of the biggest obstacles to my own living, laid out for me as clearly as they could ever be. The idea that I could make anything forever, and the idea that I could do it all by finding a way to pay for it.

I had always enjoyed strolling down Newbury Street in Boston, lined with all the best stores, selling all of the best things, to all of the best people. As I glanced at them now, they looked more like tombs in a neat little row. We somehow become convinced that we can buy eternity, and we are buying into the biggest scam there ever was.

Observe all the human monuments to immortality, and then how those who paid for them and built them are no longer here to appreciate them. I realized how that was such a waste of living, clinging to what is never meant to be permanent. 

Written in 2/2006

Image: Roman tombs in the Isola Sacra, Lazio.