Book 2

Tell yourself first thing in the morning: today I’ll meet people who are nosy, ungrateful, arrogant, treacherous, jealous, and selfish. They’re like this because they don’t know the difference between good and bad. But I’ve seen that good is beautiful and bad is ugly. I’ve seen that the person who does wrong is related to me—not by blood or birth, but because we share the same mind and the same piece of the divine. None of them can hurt me. No one can make me ugly. I can’t be angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against each other is unnatural. Being angry and turning away from someone—that’s working against them[1].

Whatever I am is just flesh, breath, and the ruling part. (Forget your books—that’s not allowed. Act like you’re dying.) Don’t worry about the flesh—it’s just blood and bones and a network of nerves, veins, and arteries. Look at the breath too—what is it? Just air, and not even the same air, but constantly being blown out and sucked back in. So the third thing is the ruling part. Think about it this way: You’re old. Don’t let it be a slave anymore. Don’t let it be pulled around by selfish impulses like a puppet. Don’t let it complain about what fate brings now or dread what might come[2].

The gods’ work is full of providence. Chance is not separate from nature or from the weaving together of things governed by providence. Everything flows from there. Added to that is necessity and what benefits the whole universe that you’re part of. What the nature of the whole brings is good for each part, and what keeps it going. Just as changes in the elements keep the universe going, so do changes in the compounds. Let these be your principles. Throw away your thirst for books so you won’t die complaining, but truly content and grateful to the gods from your heart[3].

Remember how long you’ve been putting this off and how many deadlines the gods gave you that you missed. You need to realize now what universe you’re part of and what power governs it, and that you’re a spark of that power. There’s a limit to your time—if you don’t use it to clear the air, it’ll be gone, and you’ll be gone, and you won’t get another chance[4].

Every hour focus like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, with love, freedom, and justice. Give yourself relief from all other thoughts. You will, if you do each task as if it were the last thing you’re doing in your life, free from all aimlessness, from letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, from hypocrisy, self-love, and dissatisfaction with what you’ve been given. You see how few things you need to master to live a good and godly life. The gods won’t ask for more from someone who keeps to these things.

Go on, scold yourself, my soul. But you won’t have the chance to respect yourself much longer. Everyone gets one life—yours is almost over, and instead of respecting yourself, you’re putting your happiness in other people’s souls[5].

Do external things distract you? Give yourself time to learn something new and good, and stop wandering around. But you also have to watch out for the other kind of wandering. People who are worn out by life and have no aim for their impulses and thoughts are wasting their time in what they do too.

You don’t usually see people unhappy because they never notice what someone else is doing. But people who don’t pay attention to the movements of their own soul have to be unhappy[6].

Always remember: what is the nature of the whole, what is my nature, how does mine relate to the whole, what kind of part am I of what kind of whole? And that no one can stop you from always doing and saying what’s consistent with the nature you’re part of.

Theophrastus is right when he compares mistakes (speaking philosophically about such comparisons): mistakes made from desire are worse than ones made from anger. Someone who’s angry seems to turn away from reason with some pain and unconscious contraction. But someone who makes a mistake from desire, overcome by pleasure, seems more uncontrolled and weak in his mistakes. He was right, then, and philosophical, to say that making a mistake with pleasure deserves more blame than making one with pain. One is more like someone who’s been wronged first and forced by pain to get angry. The other starts the injustice himself, carried toward doing something by desire[7].

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. If the gods exist, leaving the human world isn’t scary—they wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you. And if they don’t exist, or if they don’t care about human affairs, why would I want to live in a world without gods or providence? But they do exist, and they do care about human affairs, and they’ve put it completely in our power not to fall into real harm. If anything else were bad, they would have made sure we could avoid that too. How could something that doesn’t make a person worse make their life worse? The nature of the whole wouldn’t have overlooked this through ignorance, or knowing but unable to prevent or correct it. It wouldn’t have made such a mistake, through weakness or lack of skill, that good and bad things happen equally to good and bad people all mixed up. But death and life, fame and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty—all these happen equally to good and bad people, and they’re neither noble nor shameful. So they’re neither good nor bad[8].

How quickly everything disappears—bodies themselves into the universe, and the memory of them into time. Look at what all sensible things are like, especially the ones that lure us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are shouted about because of pride. How cheap they are, contemptible, dirty, quickly rotting, dead—that’s for your mind to figure out. What are these people whose opinions and voices create fame? What is dying? If you look at it by itself and break down the idea of it, you’ll see it’s nothing but a process of nature. If someone’s afraid of a natural process, they’re a child. But it’s not just a natural process—it’s also beneficial to nature. How does a person reach god, through what part of themselves, and what state does that part need to be in?[9]

Nothing is more pathetic than someone who runs around in circles, “investigating the depths below,” as the poet says, and trying to figure out what’s in his neighbors’ souls, not realizing it’s enough to focus on the divine spirit inside himself and genuinely honor it. Honoring it means keeping it pure from passion, aimlessness, and frustration at what comes from gods or men. What comes from the gods deserves respect because of their excellence. What comes from humans deserves our affection because we’re related. Sometimes it even deserves our pity because they don’t know good from bad—a blindness as bad as not being able to tell black from white[10].

Even if you were going to live three thousand years or ten thousand, remember that no one loses any life other than the one he’s living, and no one lives any life other than the one he’s losing. The longest and shortest lives end up the same. The present moment is equal for everyone; what we lose is equal; and what’s lost turns out to be just a fleeting instant. No one can lose the past or the future—how can you lose what you don’t have? So remember two things: first, that everything is the same pattern repeating forever, and it doesn’t matter whether you see the same things for a hundred years or two hundred or infinite time; second, that the longest-lived and the one who dies soonest lose the same thing. It’s only the present that anyone can be deprived of, since that’s all they have, and you can’t lose what you don’t have[11].