Meditations

Book 5 explores the importance of accepting one’s lot and loving one’s nature and its purpose. Marcus’s exhortations to himself include reminders not to be distracted by others and to display the virtues that are within his power to display—“integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity” (36). He instructs himself not to expect to receive a kindness because he has given one, publicly or privately, but to be “unconscious of the good [his kindnesses] do” (37). Extrapolating from Asclepius’s medical prescriptions, even what seems bad when viewed in isolation is part of his destiny, which combines with all causes “to make Destiny one harmonious cause” (38). To reject what is prescribed to you harms the “connection and continuity” of the Whole (38).

Marcus reminds himself that “the infallible man does not exist” (39). When he falters, he must return to philosophy as a student to a teacher or a sick person to his medicines, remembering that everything that happens to him is “in accordance with the nature of the Whole” and that he cannot be forced to act against his “god and the divinity within [him]” (39).

Other meditations are posed as questions to himself: “To what use, then, am I not putting my soul?” (39) as well as “what fraction of [the whole of existence] are you?” (42) and “[h]ow have you behaved up to now towards gods, parents, brother, wife, children, teachers” and others (44).