Infinite Jen's Reviews > Meditations

Why do I always posit bizarre questions at the beginning of every review? Well, have you ever, after many talks with a chemist and micro-dosing guru, finally persuaded yourself that you’d be just peachy with pin-balling some spirit molecules around in your brain casket? Only to later profane against your prior optimism by leaping up, cleaving the coffee table with the blunted knife of your shins, all while struggling to quell the erratic gestures which are presently animating your limbs? Why? Well, if every time you hold your hands out, your fingers ejaculate pyrotechnic jets of DMT, the only sensible course of action is to shield your loved ones from harm by convulsing as if gripped by an invisible straight jacket and roil your way towards the balcony with the conspicuous golden thread. Why? Because it’s obviously Ariadne’s thread, you philistine! Your soul is attached to it, and your buoyant spirit, while great at making friends, is navigationally challenged and will breach the atmosphere to explode soundlessly in the vacuum of deep space if not for the cement shoes of your corporeality. At a time like this, a powerful aphorism could save you.

The following apocryphal tale is how the last emperor of the Pax Romana riveted my stray quintessence back to my pineal gland using the pithy wisdom of The Meditations as adhesive. Giving me the incredible strength required to consume an entire box of grape popsicles, which in turn, carried me away from the jaws of psychosis on high fructose wings.

Below the balcony. Street level. A man of anachronistic manner and dress watches my futile attempt to collapse a probabilistic cloud of electrons back into the wave function of its sebaceous prison.

Me: “Think of the menstrual cramps you’ll miss!”

Soul: “....”

Stranger: “You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”

Me: “Wait, are y-“

Stranger: “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.”

Me: “You have to admit that some things are difficult to prepare for, and the shock of their oblique assault causes one to writhe as if restrained in the manner of Houdini and seek to rescue their soul from an eternity spent conversing with molecular hydrogen. Can’t you help me?! You seem so nonplussed. So.. stoic!”

Stranger: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

Me: “You’re right. What would my personal hero (Dr. Hannibal Lecter) do at a time like this? If he can bite the faces off rude corrections officers without his pulse rising above normal, surely I can manage this trivial ordeal.”

Stranger: “Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up.”

Me: *Deep centering breath*

Stranger: “Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this ‘reality’ as you view your dreams.”

Me: “Yes. Like the one with Dita von Teese and the Shibari Rope Bondage based on the quantum weirdness of spinnorial matter. If I spin her just so, she will arrive back at her original configuration only have 720-degrees of rotation!”

Stranger: “Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”

Me: “Damnit.”

Stranger: “Consider that as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events that go before are soon covered by those that come after.”

And that’s how I met Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. What a guy.

This is another very important book to me. It’s message, contrary to conflations of stoicism with pure apathy, is this: The narrow band of experience, which comprises the entire trajectory of your life, is bracketed by voids of unknown dimensions. So in every sense, what you do here, in this blip of astronomical time, matters. Possessing this knowledge, how should we behave in the face of life’s travails? Despair and give ourselves to the comforting cowardice of nihilism? Or bear, with dignity, our one and only experiential opportunity in this absurd system?

This book contains the rumination’s of an emperor, a philosopher, and, most pertinent to our collective struggles, a fellow mortal, aware of their paltry chronological endowment. Trying to live well and love fully. Seeking to define goodness and hone the pursuit of it as earnestly as possible. Espousing the virtues of self reliance, of facing hardship with equanimity, of treating others with respect and compassion. Stressing the importance of habituating your thoughts in ways that are productive, rather than adopting fatalistic narratives. It’s a panacea against carping and catastrophizing. A set of conceptual triangulations to steady you in times when you feel unmoored. Succor in menacing shadow of life’s impermanence.

It is fashionable to consider all works of philosophy to be stodgy and concerned with matters so esoteric that little practical value can be derived them. But this book chiefly concerns (by heavy dent of the Roman preoccupation with pragmatism, one imagines) the concrete ways in which a life of the mind can provide a bulwark against turmoil and tragedy. I encourage you to give it a chance, you might find yourself surprised by the power of ideas, and the fortitude of a life well lived.