Meditations II.17

The opening of Book II.17 is among the most cited passages of the Meditations. Marcus surveys what a human life is composed of — its duration, its substance, its perceptual access, its body, its fortune, its memory after — and arrives at a characterization that does not console. The passage continues beyond what is rendered here, moving from the diagnosis to the question of what can guide a person through such a life; the architecture renders only the diagnostic portion.

Τοῦ ἀνθρωπίνου βίου ὁ μὲν χρόνος στιγμή, ἡ δὲ οὐσία ῥέουσα, ἡ δὲ αἴσθησις ἀμυδρά, ἡ δὲ ὅλου τοῦ σώματος σύγκρισις εὔσηπτος, ἡ δὲ ψυχὴ ῥόμβος, ἡ δὲ τύχη δυστέκμαρτον, ἡ δὲ φήμη ἄκριτον.

— Marcus Aurelius, Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν II.17 (opening). Public domain.

Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perception dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain.

— Translation: George Long, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862). Public domain.

Notes

The full II.17 continues from this catalogue into a constructive movement — what then can guide a person? — answering: philosophy understood as the keeping of the daimōn within a person free from violence, accepting what comes from the same source one came from, 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." The architecture renders only the diagnostic catalogue, deferring the constructive movement to the reader's engagement with the full passage in primary sources.

This is itself an editorial choice the reader should be able to perceive. Cutting at the catalogue gives the passage a particular emphasis — the bleakness without the answer that follows. Marcus would not have intended the passage to stand at that emphasis; he intended it as the ground from which the philosophical answer arises. The architecture's excerpt is faithful to the words but takes a portion that, standing alone, has a register the surrounding context modifies. The reader encountering only the excerpt should know they are encountering an excerpt.