Marcus Aurelius on the morning
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Book five of the 📕 Meditations opens with 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius in bed, not wanting to get up, arguing with himself. It is the least imperial passage in the book. He tells himself that when he rises unwillingly he should remember he is rising to the work of a human being, and asks whether he was really made to lie under the covers and keep warm.
The other voice answers that it is more pleasant there. He does not deny it. He asks whether pleasure is what he exists for, and points at the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders and the bees, each doing its part in the order of things without complaint. A person has a part too. Rest is necessary, he grants, but nature has set a limit to it, as to eating and drinking, and he goes past the limit in bed while stopping short of it in his work.
Then the sharpest turn: you do not love yourself enough, or you would love your own nature and what it asks of you. Craftsmen wear themselves out at their trade, forgetting to wash or eat. Does he value the common good less than a turner values the lathe?
✨KEY IDEAS
"In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being."
He lets the lazy voice speak and concedes that it is warmer in bed.
Rest has a proper measure, like food, and he overshoots it lying down and undershoots it in work.
People who love their craft forget meals for it.
Elsewhere he begins the day by expecting to meet meddling, ungrateful and difficult people.
🕸️CONNECTIONS
🔗LINKED FROM
📝READING NOTES
The line in quotation marks is George Long's 1862 wording, which is free to quote. I have written his dash as a colon. The rest is paraphrase.
Why this is the oldest note in the vault
Written on 2 January, a day of leave, before the vault was really in use. I have read a paragraph or two of Marcus most mornings for years and never kept a note on any of it. This passage was the obvious first one, because it is about the first decision of the day and I was about to try to change mine.
What he is and is not saying
- Not: rise early. He gives no hour.
- Not: discipline is good in itself.
- He is saying: you have a function, as everything does, and the blanket is a small daily vote against it.
- And: the reluctance is normal. An emperor felt it badly enough to write it down.
Where I argue with him
- The argument from nature is weak for a modern reader. Bees do not choose. I do, and what a human is for is exactly the question he treats as settled.
- He treats the pull of bed as a failure of self-love. Some mornings it is dark until eight and I have slept five hours. The Stoic account has no room for a body that is simply short of sleep. Bram has a better theory of rest than Marcus does.
- I tried the stern version in 2023, with five o'clock starts, and it cost a winter. So I read this as an argument about the first act, whatever the hour.
What it turned into
The first act became a walk. 🔹 Walk before screens is the habit, 2.1 km through Estuary Park before the phone, and the claim behind it is 💎 The first hour of the day decides who owns the rest. 📖 Graham on maker and manager time gave me the working-day version of the same thing a fortnight later.
After the worst week of the winter, in which the walk was the first thing to go, I started the walk-first experiment properly. The passage reads differently when you have just seen what the alternative does.
Quote note: 💬 In the morning when thou risest.
Goes with
- 🔹 Walk before screens
- 💬 In the morning when thou risest
- 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : Meditations, book 5.1, with book 2.1 beside it, Long's translation
- Marcus Aurelius argues that : getting up is the first piece of the work a person exists to do, and that reluctance should be answered and not obeyed
- by stating that : every creature carries out its own part, rest has a natural measure which comfort exceeds, and someone who valued their own nature would turn to its work as a craftsman turns to a trade