Meditations II.2
This that I am, whatever it be, is mere flesh and a little breath and the ruling Reason. Away with thy books3! Be no longer drawn aside by them: it is not allowed. But as one already dying disdain the flesh: it is naught but gore and bones and a network compact of nerves and veins and arteries. Look at the breath too, what sort of thing it is; air: and not even that always the same, but every minute belched forth and again gulped down. Then, thirdly, there is the ruling Reason. Put thy thought thus: thou art an old man4; let this be a thrall no longer, no more a puppet5 pulled aside by every selfish impulse; nor let it grumble any longer at what is allotted to it in the present or dread it in the future.
- 3.Compare ii. 3.
- 4.Compare ii. 6; i. 17, § 6; Dio’s Roman History 71. 24, § 4. Marcus would be a little over 50. Contrast i. 17, § 6, and note. Cromwell when 51 writing from Dunbar says, “I grow an old man.”
Marcus was born in 121, so Haines’s “a little over 50” places this entry around 171–172. Cromwell was writing from Dunbar, where he defeated the Scottish army on 3 September 1650.
- 5.iii. 16; vi. 16, 28; vii. 3, 29; xii. 19. Compare Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata ii. 3; iv. 11.
Clement of Alexandria was a Christian theologian and teacher; the Stromata (“Miscellanies”) is his loosely organized work on the relation between Greek philosophy and Christian belief.