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)
