Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation; our final Reading & the Good Life (weekly meetup) for January is tomorrow (27 Jan at Noon EST). January’s theme is Stoic Meditations for Modern Living (Register here). We are continuing the exploration of select passages from Marcus Aurelius’s personal journal (known today as Meditations), called one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written.
***The theme for February is The Art of Living a Meaningful Life. The book we’ll be exploring is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Reading & the Good Life is a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living.
Selected passages for this week:
Objective judgment, now, at this very moment.
Unselfish action, now, at this very moment.
Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.
That’s all you need.
— Meditations, 9.6
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To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don’t impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments—inscribing them on ourselves. And we don’t have to. We could leave the page blank—and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly. […]
— Meditations, 11.16
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“If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.” Unhelpful, unless you specify a goal. There is no common benchmark for all the things that people think are good—except for a few, the ones that affect us all. So the goal should be a common one—a civic one. If you direct all your energies toward that, your actions will be consistent. And so will you.
— Meditations, 11.21
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Everything you’re trying to reach—by taking the long way round—you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice.
— Meditations, 12.1
Who is Marcus Aurelius?
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121—180) was a Roman emperor and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors. In the Lives of the Stoics, Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman write,
At the core of Marcus Aurelius’s power as a philosopher and a philosopher king seems to be a pretty simple exercise that he must have read about in Seneca’s writings and then in Epictetus’s: the morning or evening review. “Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand,” Epictetus had said. “Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”
So much of what we know about Marcus Aurelius’s philosophical thinking comes from the fact that for years he did that. He was constantly jotting down reminders and aphorisms of Stoic thinking to himself. Indeed, his only known work, Meditations, is filled with quotes […]
The title of Meditations, which dates to 167 AD, means “to himself,” which perfectly captures the book's essence. Holiday and Hanselman explain Meditations is not a book for the reader. It was a book for the author. Yet this is what makes it such an impressive piece of writing, one of the great literary feats of all time. Somehow, in writing exclusively to and for himself, Marcus Aurelius produced a book that has survived through the centuries and is still teaching and helping people today.
12 Short Reminders from Marcus Aurelius
“What injures the hive injures the bee.”
“Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure.”
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
“To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.”
“Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.”
“Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.”
“Don’t be overheard complaining about life. Not even to yourself.”
“To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.”
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
“The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.”
“Give yourself a gift: the present moment.”
“You have a mind? —Yes. Well, why not use it?”
If you are available on a Friday (at Noon EST), feel free to drop into one of our Reading & the Good Life meetups (Register here). It’s an extremely casual space for connection and conversations on the art of living.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or make suggestions!