The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Monday, June 30, 2025

Birds for My Mother 7




Stoic Snippets 266


Consider in what condition both in body and soul a man should be when he is overtaken by death; and consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter. 

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.7 

IMAGE: Anonymous (after Hans Holbein the Younger), Portrait of Sir Brian Tuke with Death (c. 1540) 



Sunday, June 29, 2025

Netherlandish Proverbs 7


"To bell the cat." 

To carry out a dangerous or impractical plan. 



Epictetus, Discourses 2.9.2


What makes a complex proposition be what it is? It must fulfil its promise: it keeps its character only if the parts it is composed of are true. 
 
What makes a disjunctive proposition? It must fulfil its purport. 
 
Is not the same true of flutes, lyre, horse, and dog? Is it surprising then that man too keeps or loses his nature on the same principle? 
 
Each man is strengthened and preserved by the exercise of the functions that correspond to his nature, the carpenter by carpentering, the grammarian by studies in grammar. If a man gets the habit of writing ungrammatically, his art is bound to be destroyed and perish. 
 
In the same way the modest man is made by modest acts and ruined by immodest acts, the man of honor keeps his character by honest acts and loses it by dishonest. 
 
So again, men of the opposite character are strengthened by the opposite actions: the shameless man by shamelessness, the dishonest by dishonesty, the slanderous by slander, the ill-tempered by ill-temper, the miser by grasping at more than he gives. 
 
That is why philosophers enjoin upon us “not to be content with learning only, but to add practice as well and then training”. 
 
For we have acquired wrong habits in course of years and have adopted for our use conceptions opposite to the true, and therefore if we do not adopt true conceptions for our use we shall be nothing else but interpreters of judgements which are not our own. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.9 
 
Aristotle offers a similar argument about isolating our human function in his Nicomachean Ethics, passages I have always gone over in detail with my students, though I fear that they usually give me a glazed expression, confused about the prospect of employing reason in the realm of morality. They are accustomed to treating right and wrong as a matter for sentiment alone, comfortably subjective and conveniently vague. 
 
We live in especially odd times, when there has never been more precision in engineering, chemistry, or accounting, and yet we remain so sloppy at crafting a conscience. While a man can describe his trade in the greatest detail, he is tongue-tied when it comes to explaining his most basic values. What a relief it is to finally learn that a refined understanding is the key to coping with raw emotions! 
 
How am I to desire the good, if I do not first know what is good? The purpose of anything is revealed by grasping its identity, such that the mechanic is acquainted with the workings of an engine, and the writer is fluent in the meaning of words, and the sage is informed on the powers of the soul. Not all of us need to fix cars, and not all of us will write poetry, but all of us are called to human excellence. 
 
We become good by exercising the virtues, which bring us into harmony with Nature. Now as much as the intellectual would like to believe that pondering a truth is sufficient, it is only practice that can make perfect. Some habits will raise us up, and other habits will also bring us down, and it is sound judgement that allows us to discern the critical difference. 
 
Whenever a change of behavior seemed too difficult for me to make, it was always because of my own entrenched tendencies, not because the undertaking itself was impossible. I can attribute any improvements in my character to a patient diligence, where each repetition, however insignificant it initially seems, is a worthy contribution to the whole. 
 
The musician commits to the tedium of playing his scales, and the soldier submits to the drudgery of following his drills. They are willing to endure the discipline of their arts for the sake of noble ends, secure in the knowledge that the ideal only becomes real through constancy. 

—Reflection written in 7/2001 

IMAGE: Edwin Austin Abbey, Baron Steuben Drilling American Troops at Valley Forge (c. 1910) 



Saturday, June 28, 2025

A Psalm of Life


"A Psalm of Life" 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)  

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
   Life is but an empty dream! 
For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
   And things are not what they seem. 

Life is real! Life is earnest! 
   And the grave is not its goal; 
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 
   Was not spoken of the soul. 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
   Is our destined end or way; 
But to act, that each to-morrow 
   Find us farther than to-day. 

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, 
   And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
   Funeral marches to the grave. 

In the world’s broad field of battle, 
   In the bivouac of Life, 
Be not like dumb, driven cattle! 
   Be a hero in the strife! 

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! 
   Let the dead Past bury its dead! 
Act,—act in the living Present! 
   Heart within, and God o’erhead! 

Lives of great men all remind us 
   We can make our lives sublime, 
And, departing, leave behind us 
   Footprints on the sands of time; 

Footprints, that perhaps another, 
   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, 
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, 
   Seeing, shall take heart again. 

Let us, then, be up and doing, 
   With a heart for any fate; 
Still achieving, still pursuing, 
   Learn to labor and to wait.

IMAGE: H. Winthrop Peirce, Footprints on the Sands of Time (1892) 

The Eagle and the Mole


"The Eagle and the Mole" 

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) 

Avoid the reeking herd, 
Shun the polluted flock, 
Live like that stoic bird, 
The eagle of the rock.

The huddled warmth of crowds 
Begets and fosters hate; 
He keeps above the clouds 
His cliff inviolate.

When flocks are folded warm, 
And herds to shelter run, 
He sails above the storm, 
He stares into the sun. 

If in the eagle's track 
Your sinews cannot leap, 
Avoid the lathered pack, 
Turn from the steaming sheep. 

If you would keep your soul 
From spotted sight or sound, 
Live like the velvet mole: 
Go burrow underground. 

And there hold intercourse 
With roots of trees and stones, 
With rivers at their source, 
And disembodied bones. 

IMAGE: Ferdinand von Wright, Golden Eagle by a Lake (1897) 



Friday, June 27, 2025

Aesop's Fables 81


The Old Woman and the Wine-Jar 

You must know that sometimes old women like a glass of wine. 

One of this sort once found a Wine-jar lying in the road, and eagerly went up to it hoping to find it full. 

But when she took it up she found that all the wine had been drunk out of it. 

Still she took a long sniff at the mouth of the Jar. "Ah," she cried,

"What memories cling round the instruments of our pleasure." 




Epictetus, Discourses 2.9.1


Chapter 9: That we adopt the profession of the philosopher when we cannot fulfill that of a man.   
 
It is no ordinary task merely to fulfil man's promise. For what is Man? A rational animal, subject to death.
 
At once we ask, from what does the rational element distinguish us? From wild beasts. And from what else? From sheep and the like. 
 
Look to it then that you do nothing like a wild beast, else you destroy the Man in you and fail to fulfil his promise. See that you do not act like a sheep, or else again the Man in you perishes. 
 
You ask how we act like sheep? 
 
When we consult the belly, or our passions, when our actions are random or dirty or inconsiderate, are we not falling away to the state of sheep? 
 
What do we destroy? The faculty of reason. When our actions are combative, mischievous, angry, and rude, do we not fall away and become wild beasts? 
 
In a word, some of us are great beasts, and others are small but base-natured beasts, which give occasion to say, “Nay, rather let me be food for a lion.” All these are actions by which the calling of man is destroyed. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.9 
 
Though I tried to resist the conclusion for some time, I finally had to admit that professional academia and the love of wisdom have very little in common. While nominally appearing to cover the same ground, the one is a job to make a living, and the other is a vocation to living well. I am saddened when folks won’t see the difference. 
 
A chapter like this one doesn’t sit well with the experts, because it reminds them why talking the talk is useless without walking the walk. Epictetus is a philosopher best suited for those who urgently wish to become good rather than to look good, who understands why the lofty theories must be put to work in gritty practice. 
 
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. 
 
Beyond any sweeping notions about humanity, there remain the hard facts of being human. To know how I should act first requires that I know my own nature, and for what end I was made. There is no need to complicate the matter with fanciful musings: I am an animal, and I also possess the power of reason. These are self-evident from the very conditions of my everyday experience.
 
Only that which can rule itself can rule another, and thus it is the role of the reflective mind to direct the instinctive passions. From the very beginning, we have a good sense of why the head is above and the gut is below, both literally and figuratively. The emotion is merely as good as the understanding.
 
Whenever impulsive folks tell you to stop thinking and just listen to your heart, remember that their advice is itself a judgment, an act of the intellect. That we should carefully attend to our feelings is not in question, but a feeling does not decide; it is one thing to embrace a passion, and quite another to be dragged along behind it. 
 
What has become of me when I fail to act with estimation? It has always brought me grief, because I am running blind. If I am consumed by fear, I am no more than a sheep, and if I am consumed by rage, I am no more than a wolf. Whatever the form of the desire, I have abdicated my role as a man, and I have reduced myself to the level of a brute. The vices proceed from the perversion of my natural powers. 
 
The appetites are in need of a guiding conscience, as the sheep are in need of a caring shepherd to protect them from the wolves. 

—Reflection written in 7/2001 

IMAGE by Ian Lawson 



Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Dhammapada 401


Him I call indeed a Brahmana who does not cling to pleasures, like water on a lotus leaf, like a mustard seed on the point of a needle. 



Stockdale on Stoicism 49


In prison, I never tapped or mentioned Stoicism once. You soon learned that if the guy next door was doing okay, that meant that he had all his philosophical ducks lined up in his own way. 

But some sharp guys read the signs in my actions. 

After one of my long isolations outside the cell-blocks of the prison, I was brought back into signaling range of the fold. My point of contact was a man named Dave Hatcher. 

As was standard operating procedure on a first contact after a long separation, we started off not with gushes of news but with, first, an agreed-upon danger signal; second, a cover story for each of us if we were caught; and third, a back-up communications system if this link was compromised—"slow movin' cagey prisoner" precautions. 

Hatcher's back-up system for me was a note-drop by an old sink near a place we called the Mint, the isolation cell-block of his wing of the prison—a place he rightly guessed I would soon enough be in. Every day we would signal for 15 minutes, over a wall between his cell-block and my "no-man's-land." 

—from James B. Stockdale, Master of My Fate: A Stoic Philosopher in a Hanoi Prison 

IMAGES: Francisco de Goya, The Prisoners (c. 1815) 

"The custody is as barbarous as the crime." 

"The custody of a criminal does not call for torture." 

"If he is guilty, let him die quickly."