Meditations

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

— Alexander Herzen, born in 1812


 His repeated desire to magically alter reality - "If I were a magician who could make things possible..." - becomes a moving reminder of how nothing can undo the events that overtook his life. Because just like the Morava River, and just life life, his stories must move relentlessly forward. 

~One Day in A River Will Rock You 


Joe: Sydney Opera House engineer dies at 97 - READ More in The Canberra Times 

Whispers in the Bare Ruined Choir: Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Crisis of Faith - Los Angeles Review of Books

Chesterton famously noted that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Here is a corollary: When people abandon authentic religion, they can turn anything else into one.  A favorite is politics, which is as belief-based as you can get. Give up on faith, and you get hooked on beliefs. This piece is filled with evidence in support of that thesis.

For example, Marcus refers several times to the image of time as a river.  Like other Stoics, he was influenced by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus who famously said “Everything changes and nothing remains still” and “You cannot step into the same river twice”.  Although the Heraclitean metaphor of time as a river flowing past was almost a cliche, it does acquire more resonance if we think of Marcus writing these words beside the Danube. The Romans personified the Danube in the form of a river god, a bearded middle-aged man, whose image appears on the Aurelian column at Rome and also in an exhibit at the Museum Carnuntinum.  The River Danube was of immense importance to the Romans and must have featured very prominently in Marcus’ life, commanding the troops along its banks.

It’s easy to imagine that he had the Danube in mind, therefore, when he describes Nature as “a rushing torrent”, which “carries all things in its stream” (9.29).  All bodies, he says, are swept through the substance of the whole “as through a winter torrent” (7.19).

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too. (4.43)

At one point, speaking of the river as a metaphor for change, Marcus also brings to mind the little birds who can be heard in the trees and bushes along the banks of the Danube.

At all times some things are hastening to come into being, and others to be no more; and of that which is coming to be, some part is already extinct. Flux and transformation are forever renewing the world, as the ever-flowing stream of time makes boundless eternity forever young. So in this torrent, in which one can find no place to stand, which of the things that go rushing past should one value at any great price? It is as though one began to lose one’s heart to a little sparrow flitting by, and no sooner has one done so than it has vanished from sight. (6.15)

Where Marcus Aurelius Wrote The Meditations