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Ep. 25: The Inner Retreat · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  An emperor's tent at night is not a quiet place.
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  I imagine a lamp burning low, couriers coming in from the cold with dispatches,
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  an officer waiting outside with one more report, and the wind off the Danube pushing
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  at the canvas.
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  This is Marcus Aurelius, somewhere on the northern frontier,
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  in the years of the Marcomannic Wars.
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  We left him in Carnuntum in the last episode, writing notes to himself.
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  And here is what I find so human about him.
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  He ruled an empire, and he owned the very things most of us daydream about.
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  Country houses.
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  Estates at places like Lorium and Lanuvium, which our sources connect with the
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  imperial family.
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  And there were seaside retreats, like Baiae on the Bay of Naples,
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  where Romans of means went to be warm and idle.
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  He could, in principle, have been somewhere sunny.
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  Instead there was a plague that had swept through the empire,
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  there were the burdens of administration, there was a long war,
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  and there were years spent in camps in Pannonia, at Carnuntum,
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  and on the river Granua.
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  Marcus is not shy, in his notebook, about being tired.
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  He writes like a man who feels the pull of the quiet country house,
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  and who catches himself feeling it.
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  Now I'll be careful here.
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  The Meditations are private notes, and what Marcus was feeling on any given night is
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  something I can only imagine.
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  But the passage itself is plain about the impulse.
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  It is a man looking at his own wish to flee, and speaking to it,
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  a little sternly.
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  This is George Long's translation, Meditations, book four, section three.
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  Marcus writes: "Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country,
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  sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much."
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  Notice that second half.
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  Thou too.
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  He includes himself.
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  He is not above the wish.
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  Then he turns.
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  "But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,
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  for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself."
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  I'll admit that line has a bit of sting in it.
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  An emperor with villas calling the longing for villas common.
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  But he is not scolding the villa.
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  He is pointing at what the villa cannot do.
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  He goes on: "For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble
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  does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within
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  him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect
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  tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the good
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  ordering of the mind."
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  Sit with that last clause for a moment.
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  Tranquillity, for Marcus, is not silence.
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  It's not a change of scenery.
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  It is order.
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  And that's my reading, not a quotation, but I think the logic is simple enough.
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  If your mind is in disorder, you carry the disorder with you to the sea-shore.
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  You only change the sky above it.
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  And if your mind is in order, then a camp, a crowded hall, a tent in the wind,
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  can hold a kind of quiet.
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  He doesn't leave it as a mood, though.
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  He gives himself something to do in that inner room.
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  "Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy
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  principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them,
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  will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from
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  all discontent with the things to which thou returnest."
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  Send thee back.
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  That's the part I like.
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  The retreat is not an exit.
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  It's a way back into the work.
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  And the brief principles he lists are the ones you'd expect from a man buried in
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  other people's demands.
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  Discontent with men?
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  He reminds himself: "Rational animals exist for one another,
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  and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily."
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  Think of the petitioners, the officers, the court.
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  That is a hard sentence to say about them, and he writes it down anyway.
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  Discontent with fortune?
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  "Either there is providence or atoms."
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  A strange little line, almost a shrug, but a settling one.
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  And for the things that press in from outside: "Things do not touch the soul,
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  for they are external and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the
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  opinion which is within."
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  Then he closes the section with a touchstone, five words and a bit more: "The
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  universe is transformation: life is opinion."
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  I won't pretend to unpack all of that.
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  I'm a narrator, not a philosopher.
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  But I can say what the life and the passage show together.
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  Here is a man who truly had the villas, and who truly was weary,
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  and who did not pretend otherwise.
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  He writes that the wish for a getaway is common, and he writes it as one of the
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  common.
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  What he refuses is the idea that peace lives only somewhere else.
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  The plague, the war, the cold, none of it was removed by a thought.
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  His troubles were real.
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  But the room he is describing sat inside the tent, as near as his own attention.
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  I imagine him, at the end of a long day, setting down the stylus,
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  and for a few minutes simply going in.
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  Then standing, and going back out to the lamps and the couriers and the wind.
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  Free, as he puts it, from all discontent with the things to which he returned.
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  Not escaped.
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  Returned.
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  That's the retreat he left us.
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  Good morning.