Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.10

Everything material soon disappears in the substance of the whole, and everything formal is very soon taken back into the Universal Reason.

And the memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

Just as we regularly view humans in opposition to one another, so too we will often see all the things in the world through their distinction and separation. This here is different from that, and so we consider them only individually, not collectively. Yet the matter these things are composed of is of one and the same sort, and the identity these things take upon themselves is from one and the same source. They proceed from a complete unity, and they return back into a complete unity. In and of themselves, they have nothing separate from their universal origin and end.

Time offers the ideal indication of this fact, for however quickly or slowly it may seem to unfold, all particular things are subject to change and transformation. Only the measure of what is Absolute can give meaning and purpose to what is relative, and it is the passage of time that helps us to understand how the contingent exists only as a dependence on the necessary.

I have often felt sadness and regret when the things I have grown attached to pass away. Friends are lost, people I love have died, places are no more, and moments that may still remain in memory are never to be repeated. You can’t take it with you, they say, and you can’t go home again. That can seem to be quite a burden, for some of us too hard to bear.

But I will only think this to myself when I dwell upon the parts at the expense of the whole, of the particulars at the expense of the universal. Yes, this or that aspect may seem to be gone, but it isn’t gone at all, because it has only been modified. Everything that ever was, and all that ever will be, still remains.

I was amazed to meet a family in rural New Hampshire who had lived on the same plot of land for many generations. They would tell stories about how it was old forest when the land was first settled, and then it was cleared as farmland. A swamp was drained, and an outcropping of rock broken down to build walls. As the years passed, and agriculture left the region, the trees began to grow back, and now it was so very slowly returning to what it had once been before.

Parts of their house, along with an old barn, had been rebuilt a few times over, but each time, their story had it, the family would reuse old stone and wood from the previous structure when constructing the new one. They had some very old photos of what it had once looked like, and I could barely recognize the place.

Yet, for them, it was one and the same place, even as it had been repeatedly transformed, and even as those people who were older made way for those who were younger. The amateur poet and philosopher in me found that deeply beautiful. It’s like that other old phrase, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Written in 9/2007