Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.2

It would be a man's happiest lot to depart from mankind without having had any taste of lying and hypocrisy and luxury and pride. However, to breathe out one's life when a man has had enough of these things is the next best voyage, as the saying is.

Have you determined to abide with vice, and has not experience yet induced you to fly from this pestilence? For the destruction of the understanding is a pestilence, much more, indeed, than any such corruption and change of this atmosphere that surrounds us.

For this corruption is a pestilence of animals so far as they are animals; but the other is a pestilence of men so far as they are men.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.2 (tr Long)

Some philosophies may see the good to the exclusion of the bad, or the bad to the exclusion of the good, yet I have always been amazed at how Stoicism will manage to balance an awareness of both.

Even as all things that exist are good by their natures, it remains within the power of our judgments to abuse what is good within us. I may know that all is made to unfold as it rightly should, though this can hardly make me look away from the depths of human depravity.

If you had told me as a child the sorts of profoundly evil things I would experience in my coming years, I would not have believed you. But sure enough, both in my own immediate life and in the wider world around me, I have seen too many things that have made me want to give up hope.

Malice runs deep. Greed is thick in the air. Lies are heaped upon lies. And at times it will all feel like enough is enough.

This should hardly surprise me, because if Providence chooses to include creatures of reason and choice within its plan, there will always be both the ups and downs of human freedom. For every wise decision there will be an ignorant decision, for every act of love there will an act of hate.

The ignorance and the hatred will not destroy the good in this life, because they will always give me the chance to transform them into what is good, but they remain a burden to be borne nonetheless.

It might have been a much more pleasant life if I never had to face the corruption of vice at all. Still, I suspect that even what little virtue I have managed to build within me would never have come to pass, if I had not first been challenged with these obstacles, both from others and within myself. Confronting malice has helped me to love. Confronting greed has helped me to give. Confronting lies has helped to be true.

It may not have been the smoothest journey, but if I have done all that I can do to live with Nature, I can be content that it has not been in vain. I will have fulfilled my part, however small, and I can move on knowing that I have made it through the storm. I will now rightly be grateful for being relieved from my watch.

The pollution in the air may clog our lungs and sicken our bodies, while the pollution in our minds will smother our virtue and stifle our souls. To face that deeper corruption is a responsibility of life, and to be freed from it is a blessing of life.

Written in 7/2008