diff --git a/source/content/meditations-book-2/1993-george-long.md b/source/content/meditations-book-2/1993-george-long.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5336ffe --- /dev/null +++ b/source/content/meditations-book-2/1993-george-long.md @@ -0,0 +1,86 @@ +Author: Marcus Aurelius +Title: Meditations +Translator: Geoge Long +Date: 1993 +Source: [book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0380722167) +Code: gl +  + +## 1 +  + +Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away. + +## 2 + +Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer either be dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future. + +## 3 + +All that is from the gods is full of Providence. That which is from fortune is not separated from nature or without an interweaving and involution with the things which are ordered by Providence. From thence all things flow; and there is besides necessity, and that which is for the advantage of the whole universe, of which thou art a part. But that is good for every part of nature which the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to maintain this nature. Now the universe is preserved, as by the changes of the elements so by the changes of things compounded of the elements. Let these principles be enough for thee, let them always be fixed opinions. But cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly, and from thy heart thankful to the gods. + + +## 4 + +Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. + +## 5 + +Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things. + +## 6 + +Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of honouring thyself. Every man's life is sufficient. But thine is nearly finished, though thy soul reverences not itself but places thy felicity in the souls of others. + +## 7 + +Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then thou must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts. + +## 8 + +Through not observing what is in the mind of another a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy. + +## 9 + +This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part. + +## 10 + +Theophrastus, in his comparison of bad acts - such a comparison as one would make in accordance with the common notions of mankind - says, like a true philosopher, that the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger. For he who is excited by anger seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and unconscious contraction; but he who offends through desire, being overpowered by pleasure, seems to be in a manner more intemperate and more womanish in his offences. Rightly then, and in a way worthy of philosophy, he said that the offence which is committed with pleasure is more blameable than that which is committed with pain; and on the whole the one is more like a person who has been first wronged and through pain is compelled to be angry; but the other is moved by his own impulse to do wrong, being carried towards doing something by desire. + +## 11 + +Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But in truth they do exist, and they do care for human things, and they have put all the means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils. And as to the rest, if there was anything evil, they would have provided for this also, that it should be altogether in a man's power not to fall into it. Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil. + +## 12 + +How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature. To observe too how man comes near to the deity, and by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed. + +## 13 + +  Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely. And reverence of the daemon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men. For the things from the gods merit veneration for their excellence; and the things from men should be dear to us by reason of kinship; and sometimes even, in a manner, they move our pity by reason of men's ignorance of good and bad; this defect being not less than that which deprives us of the power of distinguishing things that are white and black. + +## 14 + +Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not. + +## 15 + +Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true. + +## 16 + +The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. In the next place, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring, such as are the souls of those who are angry. In the third place, the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain. Fourthly, when it plays a part, and does or says anything insincerely and untruly. + +## 17 + +Fifthly, when it allows any act of its own and any movement to be without an aim, and does anything thoughtlessly and without considering what it is, it being right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end; and the end of rational animals is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity. Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature. This in Carnuntum. + +  + +  + +  + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source/content/meditations-book-2/2003-gregory-hays.md b/source/content/meditations-book-2/2003-gregory-hays.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ef4b65 --- /dev/null +++ b/source/content/meditations-book-2/2003-gregory-hays.md @@ -0,0 +1,131 @@ +Author: Marcus Aurelius +Title: Meditations: A New Translation. Book 2 +Translator: Gregory Hays +Date: 2003 +Source: [book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0812968255) +Code: gh + +## 1 + +When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions. + +  +## 2 + +Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air, but vomited out and gulped in again every instant. Finally, the intelligence. Think of it this way: You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future. + +  +## 3 + +What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it. And then there is necessity and the needs of the whole world, of which you are a part. Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom. Discard your thirst for books, so that you won’t die in bitterness, but in cheerfulness and truth, grateful to the gods from the bottom of your heart. + +  +## 4 + +Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return. + +  +## 5 + +Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you. + +  +## 6 + +Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others. + +  +## 7 + +Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work. + +  +## 8 + +Ignoring what goes on in other people’s souls—no one ever came to grief that way. But if you won’t keep track of what your own soul’s doing, how can you not be unhappy? + +  +## 9 + +Don’t ever forget these things: + + + +The nature of the world. + +My nature. + +How I relate to the world. + +What proportion of it I make up. + +That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always. + +  +## 10 + +In comparing sins (the way people do) Theophrastus says that the ones committed out of desire are worse than the ones committed out of anger: which is good philosophy. The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins. Theophrastus is right, and philosophically sound, to say that the sin committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than the one committed out of pain. The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger. The other man rushes into wrongdoing on his own, moved to action by desire. + +  +## 11 + +You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. If the gods exist, then to abandon human beings is not frightening; the gods would never subject you to harm. And if they don’t exist, or don’t care what happens to us, what would be the point of living in a world without gods or Providence? But they do exist, they do care what happens to us, and everything a person needs to avoid real harm they have placed within him. If there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure that the ability to avoid it was within you. If it doesn’t harm your character, how can it harm your life? Nature would not have overlooked such dangers through failing to recognize them, or because it saw them but was powerless to prevent or correct them. Nor would it ever, through inability or incompetence, make such a mistake as to let good and bad things happen indiscriminately to good and bad alike. But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad. + +  +## 12 + +The speed with which all of them vanish—the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time. And the real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things—how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are—that’s what our intellectual powers are for. And to understand what those people really amount to, whose opinions and voices constitute fame. And what dying is—and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it’s nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of. (And not only a process of nature but a necessary one.) And how man grasps God, with what part of himself he does so, and how that part is conditioned when he does. + +  +## 13 + +Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, “delving into the things that lie beneath” and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely. To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human. What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad—as terrible a blindness as the kind that can’t tell white from black. + +  +## 14 + +Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have? + +Remember two things: + + + +i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; + +ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. + +  +## 15 + +“Everything is just an impression.” —Monimus the Cynic. And the response is obvious enough. But the point is a useful one, if you take it for what it’s worth. + +  +## 16 + +The human soul degrades itself: + + + +i. Above all, when it does its best to become an abscess, a kind of detached growth on the world. To be disgruntled at anything that happens is a kind of secession from Nature, which comprises the nature of all things. + +ii. When it turns its back on another person or sets out to do it harm, as the souls of the angry do. + +iii. When it is overpowered by pleasure or pain. + +iv. When it puts on a mask and does or says something artificial or false. + +v. When it allows its action and impulse to be without a purpose, to be random and disconnected: even the smallest things ought to be directed toward a goal. But the goal of rational beings is to follow the rule and law of the most ancient of communities and states. + +  +## 17 + +Human life. + +Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion. + +Then what can guide us? + +Only philosophy. + +Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not doing it. And making sure that it accepts what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed. If it doesn’t hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It’s a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil. + diff --git a/source/content/meditations-book-2/2021-robin-waterfield.md b/source/content/meditations-book-2/2021-robin-waterfield.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35e537e --- /dev/null +++ b/source/content/meditations-book-2/2021-robin-waterfield.md @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +Author: Marcus Aurelius +Title: Meditations: The Annotated Edition. Book 2 +Translator: Robin Waterfield +Date: 2021 +Source: [book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1541673854) +Code: rw + +## 1 + +At the start of the day tell yourself: I shall meet people who are officious, ungrateful, abusive, treacherous, malicious, and selfish. In every case, they’ve got like this because of their ignorance of good and bad. But I have seen goodness and badness for what they are, and I know that what is good is what is morally right, and what is bad is what is morally wrong;and I’ve seen the true nature of the wrongdoer himself and know that he’s related to me—not in the sense that we share blood and seed, but by virtue of the fact that we both partake of the same intelligence, and so of a portion of the divine. None of them can harm me, anyway, because none of them can infect me with immorality,nor can I become angry with someone who’s related to me, or hate him, because we were born to work together, like feet or hands or eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against each other is therefore unnatural—and anger and rejection count as “working against.” + +## 2 + +This thing that I am, whatever we are to call it, is flesh, spirit, and the command center. Forget your books—and don’t let it upset you—that’s not allowed. Instead, as one on the point of death, despise the flesh: it’s just blood, bones, and a network of nerves, veins, and arteries. Then consider what spirit is: no more than air, and never constant, continually belched out and gulped back in again. So that leaves the third ingredient, the command center. Look at it this way: you’re elderly; put an end to allowing its enslavement; put an end to being tugged here and there like a puppet at the prompting of selfish impulses; put an end to both complaining about your present fate and shrinking from the future. + +## 3 + +The gods’ works are filled with providence; the works of fortune aren’t independent of nature or of the interlacing and intertwining of things under the direction of providence. It is the source of everything, including necessity and the well-being of the universe, the whole of which you are a part. What is good for every part of nature is what is supplied by the nature of the whole and what preserves the whole; and what preserves the whole is the changing of the compounds no less than the changing of the physical elements. Be content with these doctrines; make them your constant guiding principles. Get over your thirst for books, so that you don’t die grumbling, but with true serenity and with heartfelt gratitude to the gods. + +## 4 + +Remember how long you’ve been putting this off and how often the gods have given you due dates of which you’ve not taken advantage. It’s high time now for you to recognize what kind of universe you’re a part of, and what kind of universal directing power you’re an emanation of, and that a limit has been set on your time, and if you don’t use it to dispel the mists it will pass, and you will pass, and the opportunity won’t come again. + +## 5 + +You must always consider, with Roman and masculine doggedness, how to tackle any matter that arises with scrupulous and unfeigned grace, affection for others, generosity, and justice, and how to spend no time over all other incoming impressions. That will happen if you treat every act as though it were the last of your life17—which is to say, if you’re free from all stray thoughtsand from any deviation, under the influence of passion, from the principles established by reason, and if you’re free from hypocrisy, self-love, and dissatisfaction with your lot. And look! There are only a few things that a person has to master in order to gain the ability to live a contented and god-fearing life. Even the gods will require nothing more from someone who adheres to these few principles. + +## 6 + +Treat yourself with contempt, soul of mine—yes, contempt! The time has passed for you to respect yourself. For no one lives long, and this life of yours is all but spent while you dishonor yourself and make your happiness depend on the souls of others. + +## 7 + +Do you get sidetracked when external things intrude? Free yourself from them, in favor of learning something new and worthwhile, and stop your purposeless wandering. But now there’s another kind of meandering that you need to guard against: people who’ve become world-weary, and lack a goal to which they can direct every impulse and, in general, every impression, act in ways that are as meaningless as their words. + +## 8 + +One doesn’t commonly see people becoming miserable as a result of not taking note of what’s going on in someone else’s soul, but anyone who’s unaware of the activity of his own soul can’t help but be miserable. + +## 9 + +Here are things you should always bear in mind: what the nature of the whole is; what my nature is; how my nature is related to the nature of the whole; what kind of part it is of what kind of whole; and that no one is stopping you from being in accord with the nature of which you are a part, in all you ever say or do. + +## 10 + +Theophrastus spoke as a true philosopher when, in the course of his comparison of offenses (a comparative exercise that is quite commonly undertaken),he said that the sins of desire were more serious than the sins of anger. He argued that an angry man abandons reason because he’s distressed, experiencing some internal psychic contraction,while a man whose wrongdoing is caused by desire is more self-indulgent, because he’s been defeated by pleasure,and is less manly in his wrongdoing. He was right, then, and thinking like a philosopher, to say that wrongdoing that’s accompanied by pleasure is more deserving of blame than wrongdoing that’s accompanied by distress. To put it generally, the latter case seems to be one where someone has had wrong done to him first, and his pain compelled him to get angry, whereas in the former case he felt impelled of his own accord to do wrong and acted as he did because he was carried along by desire. + +## 11 + +Everything you do and say and think should be predicated on the possibility of your imminent departure from life. But, if the gods exist,leaving this world can’t be something to fear, because they wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you. On the other hand, if they don’t exist or have no care for the human race, why live in such a world, devoid of gods and divine providence?But in fact they do exist and they do care for the human race, and they’ve made it entirely up to each of us to avoid experiencing anything truly bad. And if anything else were bad, they would also have made sure that it was our choice whether or not to experience that too. (But how could a man’s life be made worse by anything that doesn’t make him a worse person?)The universe would have neglected this only if it were ignorant, or if it had knowledge but lacked the ability to guard against it or correct it; but neither of these is the case. Nor could it have committed such a great wrong, out of either impotence or incompetence, as to let good and bad things be the lot equally of good and bad people without distinction. But death and life, glory and obscurity, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty—all these things come to good and bad people alike, since they are morally neutral in themselves, and this proves that they’re neither good nor bad. + +## 12 + +How rapidly everything vanishes, physical bodies lost in the universe and the memory of them lost in eternity! Look at the nature of every object we perceive, especially those that entice us with the prospect of pleasure, frighten us with the prospect of pain, or are celebrated by humans in their vanity! How worthless, vile, sordid, and short-lived things are, just corpses!It is for the intellectual faculty to consider what kind of people they are, those whose views and voices confer fame or obscurity; what death is, and the fact that, if one sees it for what it is and, by analyzing the concept, dissolves the impressions that adhere to it, one will stop believing it to be anything other than a natural process34—and there’s nothing to fear about natural processes unless you’re a child35—though in fact not only is it a product of nature, but it also does nature good;and how a human being makes contact with God, with what part of himself, and in what condition this part of him must be to do so. + +## 13 + +There’s nothing more pathetic than a man who’s always running around and poking his nose in everywhere—investigating “the nether regions of the earth,” in the poet’s words37—and using outside signs to infer what’s going on in his neighbors’ souls, without realizing that all he needs to do is focus on his own inner guardian spiritand take proper care of it. Caring for it is keeping it unsullied by passion, purposelessness, and dissatisfaction with the activities of gods and men; for the goodness of the gods is such that their acts are to be respected, and human kinship means that men’s acts are to be welcomed. There are times, however, when human acts are also rather pitiful because of their ignorance of good and bad, which is as much of a disability as being blind to the difference between white and black. + +## 14 + +Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, remember that the only life anyone loses is this one, the one he’s living, and the only life anyone lives is the one he loses. It follows that the longest life and the shortest life come to the same thing. The present moment is equal for all, and therefore its passing is equal for all, and therefore what is lost turns out to be a mere instant. After all, no one can lose either the past or the future, because no one can lose what he doesn’t have. So there are two points for you always to bear in mind: first, that everything is the same in kind throughout all eternity, and recurs cyclically,and that it makes no difference how long you see these same things, whether it’s a hundred years or two hundred years or infinite time; second, that both the longest-lived and the shortest-lived lose an equal amount of time, because the present is the only thing one can lose, since that is all one has, and no one can lose what he does not have. + +## 15 + +“Everything is as you take it to be.”As a response to Monimus the Cynic, this is self-evident, but the value of the saying is also obvious, if one accepts what is wholesome about it, its truth and no more. + +## 16 + +The human soul dishonors itself, first and foremost, when it becomes, to the extent that it can, a growth and a tumor, as it were, on the universe. To resent anything that happens is to set oneself apart from nature, of which the various individual natures of everything else are parts. A second case is when it rejects another human being or even opposes him with malicious intent; this is what the souls of angry people are like. Third, it dishonors itself when it’s defeated by pleasure or pain. Fourth, when it dissembles and does or says anything in an affected or dishonest manner. Fifth, when it fails to direct any of its actions or impulses toward a goal, but instead acts without purpose and without attention, when even the slightest actions should be carried out with reference to the end. And the end for rational beings is to follow the reason and rule of the most venerable of all cities and communities. + +## 17 + +A person’s lifetime is a moment, his existence a flowing stream,his perception dull, the entire fabric of his body readily subject to decay, his soul an aimless wanderer, his fortune erratic, his fame uncertain. In short: the body is nothing but a river; the soul is dream and delusion; life is war and a sojourn in a strange land; and oblivion is all there is to posthumous fame. What, then, can escort us safely on our way? Only one thing: philosophy. This consists in keeping the guardian spirit within us safe from assault and harm, never swayed by pleasure or pain, purposeful when it acts, free from dishonesty or dissemblance, and never dependent on action or inaction from anyone else. It also consists in accepting what happens, the lot one has been assigned, as coming from the same source as oneself, and in always awaiting death with a serene mind, understanding that it’s no more than the disintegration of the elements of which every living creature is a compound. If there’s nothing unusual in the elements themselves changing moment by moment one into another, why should the alteration and disintegration of them all be a cause for anxiety? It’s in accord with nature, and nothing that’s in accord with nature is bad. diff --git a/source/content/meditations-book-2/config.json b/source/content/meditations-book-2/config.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6441332 --- /dev/null +++ b/source/content/meditations-book-2/config.json @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +{ + "title": "Meditations book 2 – translation comparison", + "description": "Tell yourself: I shall meet people who are officious, ungrateful, abusive, treacherous, malicious, and selfish.", + "heading": "Translator", + "display": { + "Code": [ + "gl", + "gh", + "rw" + ] + }, + "files": [ + "1993-george-long.md", + "2003-gregory-hays.md", + "2021-robin-waterfield.md" + ], + "metaKeys": [ + "Title", + "Author", + "Translator", + "Date", + "Source" + ] +}