ENGLISH COMMENTARY
out of our power, but only for what we do.' Marcus makes a tacit reply to the refined sentimentalism (or sensuality, as his opponents thought) of Epicurus.
Ch. 17. Marcus here appears to be combating a fatalism which may be the other side of resignation. One is tempted to hazard the objection that man is no ball or stone, nor a lamp to be lit and again put out (cf. viii. 20).
Chs. 18–21. Chapters 18 and 20 belong together, and chs. 19 and 21 are clearly connected. The tenderness to opinion, which Marcus expresses in ch. 18, as in chs. 27 and 34, is perhaps pardonable if these are private reflections, intended primarily for himself. His sensitiveness, which is remarked by his biographer, tallies with the delicate regard for others which is a striking trait of the Meditations, and which is expressed in ch. 20 (cf. vii. 29; ix. 38).
Ch. 19. To fortify himself against fear of death Marcus, here and in ch. 21, employs a reflection which had found its way, naturally enough, into the literature of Consolation. We die daily, since our bodily frames, like every other part of the world of becoming, are continually being built up and decaying.
The thought is derived ultimately from Heraclitus (circa 500 b.c.), the first who framed the law of serial change; it is often found combined with another, also derived from Heraclitus, that waking and sleeping are images of life and death: 'the living and the dead, the sleeper and the watcher, the young and the old are the same.'[1] Heraclitus thus expresses enigmatically the rhythm of the life process, which underlies its continuity, a rhythm also illustrated by the psychological truth, with which ch. 21 opens, that effort and impulse die with the attainment of their object.
Popular thought added a further consideration, rarely touched upon by the philosophers, that life's rhythm is made intelligible by the persistence of the individual life through the continuous changes. This is a thought implied by Marcus in x. 7. 3. Plutarch and Seneca use this to console the mourner, that he may be comforted in the presence of death by the belief that there is an awakening to follow, as we awake from our nightly slumber.
- ↑ Heraclitus, Fr. 78 B., 83 D., adopted by Euripides, whom Aristophanes ridicules for it.
