Meditations II.17
Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perception dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In a word all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. What then is it that can help us on our way? One thing and one alone—Philosophy; and this consists in keeping the divine ‘genius’ within pure28 and unwronged, lord of all pleasures and pains, doing nothing aimlessly29 or with deliberate falsehood and hypocrisy, independent of another’s action or inaction; and furthermore welcoming what happens and is allotted, as issuing from the same source, whatever it be, from which the man himself has issued; and above all waiting for death with a good grace as being but a setting free of the elements of which every thing living is made up. But if there be nothing terrible in each thing being continuously changed into another thing, why should a man look askance at the change and dissolution of all things? For it is in the way of Nature, and in the way of Nature there can be no evil. Written at Carnuntum.3031
- 28.See § 13.
- 29.See § 5, 16.
- 30.These words may very possibly be intended as a heading for Book III.
- 31.Now Haimburg in Hungary.
Carnuntum was a Roman legionary fortress on the Danube in Pannonia, east of Vienna, near the modern village of Petronell-Carnuntum. Haines’s “Haimburg” is the neighbouring town of Hainburg an der Donau, which in 1916 lay within Austria-Hungary.