Summary: Meditations (page 5)

To this end, the author of the Meditations develops several arguments.

First, death is part of the natural order: You have embarked, you have sailed, you have reached port — now disembark! ¹.

Another way to free oneself from the fear of death is not to flee from the thought of it, but to contemplate it and grow accustomed to it. It takes real effort to meditate on and truly come to terms with our condition as mortals.

Death is in our very nature; resisting it is futile. Everyone, even the greatest among us, shares this fate: Hippocrates, after curing countless illnesses, fell ill himself and died. Alexander, Pompey, and Gaius Caesar—after razing entire cities to the ground and cutting down myriads of horsemen and infantrymen in battle—likewise perished. ².

Marcus Aurelius returns to this theme elsewhere: Reflect constantly on how many doctors have died after frowning so many times upon the sick; how many philosophers, after endlessly debating death and immortality; how many rulers, after causing the death of so many others; how many cities have, so to speak, died altogether—Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others! ³.

Marcus Aurelius thus underscores the frailty of man — even of the greatest among us. We must grasp this fragility in order to become accustomed to it:

The span of man's life—an instant. His substance—ever-changing. His sensations—indistinct. The very structure of his body—prone to decay. His soul—a turbulent eddy. His destiny—obscure. His fame—a fleeting illusion.

To put it briefly: all that pertains to the body is flowing water; all that pertains to the soul, a dream and smoke. His life—a battle, a sojourn in a foreign land. His posthumous renown—oblivion ⁴.

One must laugh at those who seek to escape death by chasing after glory and the illusion of immortality it provides. First, we must recognise how small the space is in which fame is confined. The whole earth is but a dot — and what a tiny fraction of it is even inhabited! ⁵.

Rather than seeking to escape death through a vain pursuit of glory, we should prepare ourselves for oblivion:

Soon you will have forgotten everything; soon all will have forgotten you ⁶.

As soon as we die, we leave no lasting memory in the hearts of others. Just as certain words, once in common use, now survive only in dictionaries. So too the names of men once widely celebrated now persist merely as entries in a lexicon: Camillus, Caeson, Volesus [...] All this fades swiftly into legend, and soon total oblivion buries it. And this is true even of those who once shone with extraordinary brilliance; as for the rest, the moment they are gone, they are unknown and unremembered ⁷.

The pursuit of glory is nothing but a flight from the thought of death. On the contrary, we must confront this thought and accept that nothing — not even fame — can shield us from it.

To seek to escape death, for Marcus Aurelius, is to struggle against nature — like a part trying to break away from the Whole, like a tumour attempting to live independently of the body.

But to reflect on death is not to be saddened by it; on the contrary, genuinely confronting and meditating on death can bring us serenity!

In the face of death, nothing is truly serious anymore. The various difficulties of life — personal, professional, or otherwise — pale in comparison to death. Contemplating our mortality allows us to put into perspective the gravity of what befalls us.

At the same time, the wise man, through this process of putting things into perspective, ultimately questions the gravity of death itself. Why?

First, because death is natural, and nothing is wrong with what is done according to nature ⁸, for it partakes in the harmony of the Great Whole, understood as cosmos.

¹ III, 3
² ibid.
² IV, 48
⁴ II, 17
⁵ IV, 3
⁶ VII, 21
⁷ IV, 33
⁸ II, 17