Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.4

I go through the things which happen according to Nature until I shall fall and rest, breathing out my breath into that element out of which I daily draw it in, and falling upon that earth out of which my father collected the seed, and my mother the blood, and my nurse the milk. Out of which during so many years I have been supplied with food and drink, which bears me when I tread on it and abuse it for so many purposes.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 5 (tr Long)

When I seek to live according to Nature, I need to remember that this is not merely a romantic notion, or a noble abstraction, or an intellectual luxury, or some pleasant diversion from the business of the day. It is the very business of the day, the stuff itself out of which I am made, to which I am connected, and to which I will return. To embrace Nature, as it is understood by the Stoic, is never to turn away from everyday living, but to finally embrace the fullness of everyday living.

As much as our human endeavors often seem to mask it, everything that we are is inseparable from the order of Nature, and even our most impressive artificial posturing would be nothing separately of that harmony. The part has no meaning without the whole.

I often notice how strong and independent we think we are, and though we might be quite adept at this in our time of high technology and social engineering, this was surely true for the Rome of Marcus Aurelius as well. We eat, drink, breathe, and consume or manipulate all sorts of the things around us, quite oblivious to all the deeper relations between them. We pursue our careers and the improvement of our position in life, quite oblivious to our very human purpose, and the depth of our bond with other persons.

I think it is no accident that the same man who pays no attention to the air he breathes is quite often the same man who pays no attention to the dignity of his neighbor. He pollutes the one with his waste, and pollutes the other with his greed.

The tools of power and vanity only give the illusion of independence. We are just as bound to everything and everyone else as we have always been. It is fortunate that Nature is patient with our tantrums and abuses.

The tension of this passage by Marcus Aurelius, between being necessarily joined to the unity of all things on the one hand, and my stubborn insistence on breaking myself away from that unity on the other, or between being in Nature and yet stepping on it, brings to mind my favorite poem, which I never miss the opportunity to share:

“God’s Grandeur”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

Written in 3/2006

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Farm at Laken (c. 1618)