Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Have you recently been hit with the question “How often do you think of the Roman Empire?”
My fiancée got me before we went to sleep last week. At least once up to seven times a week, mainly due to a book suggested to me - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
This read dawned on me somewhere in 2015, I was in a friends apartment in Chelsea, London. A very calm, collected, stoic man. I needed to know what information he was absorbing in his -from the outside in- easy going life.
Look no more, Roman Emperor of AD 161-180, unknown or wanted by him for his writings to be published, Meditations is put together of private notes to himself and ideas among Stoic Philosophy.
For what it is, the text is relatively simplified and straightforward, yet I’d almost coin it as the longest/shortest book I’ve ever read (information vs length of text). Not too many pages, but also not one to be missed.. perhaps singular readings are to be noted over twice before turning the page.
Example being.. in Book Six, Marcus Aurelius gives himself a command to keep an important idea in mind. “Meditate often,” he writes, “on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe.”
He is speaking of the Stoic concept of Sympatheia, the idea that, as Seneca wrote, “All that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one—we are the parts of one great body.”
Why should we think about this and what will it do?
Well, to the Stoics, understanding how we are all connected and dependent on each other will prompt us to be good and do good for each other.
“We can never not be all of us. We’re always sharing the moment that we are here living in time. And so it’s really hard to separate and really truly try to decipher what one person really is because you don’t really have one person without the other. And that to me is just like, seems to be sacred math for figuring out our problems as human beings, is just understanding that there’s always the other that we’re kind of responsible for.” - Bon Ivor
If you do pick up Meditations, please let me know! I would love a sit down to share a pot of tea and discuss said ideology, something I believe is heavily important as we grow and venture on.
SBG
