Latest / The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism / Ep. 29: A Cucumber Is Bitter

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Ep. 29: A Cucumber Is Bitter · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  A bitter cucumber is a small thing.
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  Nobody writes histories about one.
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  And yet an emperor of Rome, in a cold camp on the northern frontier,
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  took the time to write one down.
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  We've just closed a season with Marcus Aurelius on the Danube,
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  talking about the portion of divine reason that he believed lives inside every
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  person.
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  That was the large idea.
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  Today we begin the ongoing mornings by testing it against something much smaller.
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  A vegetable.
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  A thorn.
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  A pile of wood shavings.
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  Here is what we know, and I'll try to keep it separate from what I'm guessing.
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  Marcus was born in Rome in A.D.
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  121.
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  George Long, whose translation we're using, tells us that during the German wars
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  Marcus lived for three years on the Danube at Carnuntum.
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  The notebook we call the Meditations was, in Long's account,
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  written for his own use.
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  Not for readers.
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  Not for the Senate.
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  For himself.
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  The traditional Greek title is usually rendered as something like,
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  to himself.
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  And the setting was not gentle.
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  The campaigns were against the Marcomanni and the Quadi, roughly the years 170 to
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  180 by the usual dating.
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  A plague had swept through the empire not long before.
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  There was court friction, there were petitions, there was the plain cold of a
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  northern winter.
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  Long's biographical sketch even records a revolt by a commander in Asia,
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  which pulled Marcus away from the frontier for a time.
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  This was a man whose days were full of real problems.
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  So now I'll ask you to imagine something, and I want to be clear that it's my
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  imagining, not the record.
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  I imagine Marcus late in the day, an oil lamp low on the table,
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  the petitions finally put aside.
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  I imagine someone has brought him food, and he bites into a slice of cucumber,
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  and it's bitter.
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  That's all.
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  Nothing in the sources tells us this happened.
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  But the line he wrote is so ordinary that I can't help picturing the table.
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  The passage is Book Eight, section fifty.
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  A short note before it, though.
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  Just ahead, in section forty nine, Marcus gives himself an instruction that sets the
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  stage.
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  In Long's wording it reads: "Say nothing more to thyself than what the first
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  appearances report."
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  Hold on to that.
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  The first report is the bitter taste.
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  Everything else is something added afterward.
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  Now the passage itself, in George Long's translation, from Project Gutenberg number
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  fifteen eight seven seven.
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  The original punctuation uses dashes between the short sentences,
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  and I'll let the pauses stand in for them.
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  He writes: "A cucumber is bitter.
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  Throw it away.
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  There are briers in the road.
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  Turn aside from them.
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  This is enough.
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  Do not add, And why were such things made in the world?"
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  Notice how fast that moves.
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  Bitter, throw it away.
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  Briers, turn aside.
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  Four tiny acts, and then three words: "This is enough."
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  I find that line almost funny.
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  Marcus is telling himself that the cure for a bitter cucumber is to stop eating the
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  cucumber.
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  And then he catches the real habit, the one he knows he has.
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  The complaint.
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  The big, wounded question aimed at the universe.
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  Because that's the move, isn't it?
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  The thorn scratches you, which is a fact.
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  And then the mind adds a second sentence, which is a verdict.
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  Why does this always happen.
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  Who allowed this.
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  What kind of world has thorns in it.
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  I'd guess an emperor, surrounded by people who needed things from him all day,
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  had plenty of occasions to feel that verdict rising.
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  And he doesn't stop at the vegetable.
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  He turns to the workshop.
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  Again in Long's words: "For thou wilt be ridiculed by a man who is acquainted with
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  nature, as thou wouldst be ridiculed by a carpenter and shoemaker if thou didst find
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  fault because thou seest in their workshop shavings and cuttings from the things
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  which they make."
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  I like this image a great deal.
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  Picture a carpenter's floor at the end of a day, curls of wood everywhere.
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  Nobody walks in and demands to know why wood was made to shed.
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  The shavings aren't a scandal.
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  They're what working looks like.
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  Marcus is saying that thorns and bitterness may be like that,
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  the leavings of a world that is actually being made.
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  But then he sees the weak point in his own comparison, and he states it himself.
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  Here's the continuation: "And yet they have places into which they can throw these
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  shavings and cuttings, and the universal nature has no external space; but the
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  wondrous part of her art is that though she has circumscribed herself,
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  everything within her which appears to decay and to grow old and to be useless she
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  changes into herself, and again makes other new things from these very same,
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  so that she requires neither substance from without nor wants a place into which she
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  may cast that which decays.
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  She is content then with her own space, and her own matter,
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  and her own art."
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  That's a long breath of a sentence, so let me slow it down.
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  The carpenter can sweep his shavings out the door.
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  Nature has no door.
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  There is no outside to throw things into.
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  So whatever decays, whatever grows old or seems useless, she must turn back into
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  herself and make into something new.
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  Marcus calls that the wondrous part of her art.
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  Now, a word of honesty.
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  That's a Stoic claim about the whole cosmos, and you're free to hold it lightly.
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  I'm not in a position to tell you it's true, and I'm not a philosopher.
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  I'm just reading what Marcus wrote.
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  What I can say is how it works inside the passage.
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  It takes the bitter thing out of the category of insult and puts it in the category
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  of material.
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  And there's something moving about where he wrote it.
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  Think of the frontier.
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  Plague behind him, war in front of him, the world visibly wearing out its people.
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  If anyone had grounds to ask why such things were made in the world,
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  it was a man on that river.
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  And his notebook answer is not a lecture on suffering.
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  It's a cucumber.
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  It's a thorn.
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  Turn aside from it.
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  I want to be careful not to make him sound serene all the time.
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  The notebook itself suggests otherwise.
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  A man doesn't need to write himself reminders like "Do not add" unless he's tempted
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  to add.
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  The advice is the evidence of the temptation.
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  I find that admirable, in an honest way.
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  He isn't posing as someone who's above irritation.
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  He's a tired man at a table, correcting himself in plain Greek.
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  And it connects back to where we left off last season.
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  The idea that something divine and reasonable lives within us was the grand claim.
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  This is its quiet daily form.
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  If the part of you that reasons is yours to keep, then the bitterness of a vegetable
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  can't reach it, unless you carry the complaint in yourself.
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  Marcus can't remove the thorn.
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  He can decline the second sentence.
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  So that's the scene I'd leave you with.
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  A lamp, a notebook, a small bitter taste.
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  An emperor who sets the cucumber aside, steps around the briers,
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  and writes, in effect, that this is enough.
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  Whatever the morning holds for you, the thorns will be what thorns are.
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  Good morning.