Legacy & Destiny
My daughter Meg recently told me that a meme doing the rounds claimed that the average bloke thinks about the Roman Empire twice a day, and she asked if I thought it were true. I just picked up my copy of Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius nearly two thousand years ago, off my bedside table and showed it to her. She sent a photo of it to her friends and they were in stitches. The proof was complete.
I don’t think that Marcus Aurelius ever dreamed that the thoughts he wrote down in Meditations would be read by others and I’m sure he would have been astounded to learn that they would be widely published and read millennia later. I think he likely just regarded his writings as a kind of journal, jotting down thoughts and everyday struggles he faced in order to define them and bring them into full consciousness. Meditations is full of practical and sometimes mundane thoughts, like a dialogue that he has with himself about whether to stay in a warm bed or to get up and attend to the duties of the day. I gave my copy to my son Sam a few days ago because I thought he might benefit from some of its insights (hint, hint). Besides, it’s kind of cool to get a glimpse inside the mind of one of the greatest Roman leaders. At least for me.
Marcus Aurelius is probably the best known of the Roman stoics. Like all stoics of the time, he regarded stoicism as a life philosophy – defining in essence, how to live, behave, and view the world and one’s role in it. Adherents to its contemporary philosophies such as scepticism and hedonism, each with their own sets of followers, had completely different beliefs and codes of behaviour. Most of the figures that I admire from the Greek and Roman eras were stoics. All concerned themselves with how best to live, and I’m sure all centred their behaviour around the four ancient virtues of fortitude, prudence, justice, and temperance.
I don’t think many people nowadays tend to think of themselves as following a particular life philosophy, even though we of course do through our thoughts and actions. I’d guess most relatively affluent people today follow a kind of involuntary moderated hedonism, living often mundane day-to-day lives between episodes of indulgence. While I believe in the good in people and I do think most of us go about our day to day activities trying to do the right thing, I wonder how many people hold themselves to account at a higher, longer-term level, especially as we get older. Sometimes I get the feeling that when it comes to matters like careers, relationships, and long term goals and endeavours, many of us behave almost by default and as though we don’t really have a choice.
The reality, of course, is that we do. Our lives and our destinies are, by large measure, of our own choosing. As I get older I’m increasingly concerned about the prospect of one day looking back and regretting the choices that I didn’t make. That if I’m not to become embittered, I need to ensure that I live boldly and that I don’t just coast from day to day without questioning the larger patterns of my life. There’s good reason of course that we often avoid challenging or changing these patterns – it’s at this level that change is most difficult. But it’s also at this level that change provides the greatest opportunities for personal growth and fulfilment.
It can be hard to find a balance between apparently conflicting ethical concerns when it comes to life choices that impact others, especially those we love. Do we stay in dead-end careers for fear of sacrificing financial security? Or remain in relationships longer than we should for fear of hurting those we love? These are some of life’s hard questions that we should not shy from, even if only to make peace with our acceptance of the compromises we make.
Of the four ancient virtues, fortitude is often cited as courage, but this opens the door to its misinterpretation as courage in the narrow sense of bravery. Fortitude is the broader strength of will to confront what we must, and deal with it in the face of adversity. To do what needs to be done. It includes courage in all its forms, but also includes the capacity to endure difficulty and see things through. But prudence, another virtue often cited as wisdom, will more often than not need to work hand in hand with fortitude lest the consequences of our actions be rash. The same applies to temperance and justice – it’s seldom that these four virtues work in isolation from one another and getting the balance right is not always easy. It’s here that I think we need to let our inner light be the guide and I feel St. Paul was right in citing Love as the greatest of all the virtues. I’ve long thought of Love as the source of all virtue and the one thing without which even the concept of virtue would lose all meaning.
I’m not sure if it’s just part of getting older, but I sometimes look back over my years so far and get the feeling that it’s almost as if it’s all been scripted by some hidden hand. So many opportunities to make mistakes were missed almost as if by accident; I could easily have been so much less fortunate. What a privilege life is and what a time to be alive. Yet, despite all the incredible progress in human endeavour in my lifetime, I find myself now yearning for simplicity and freedom. To somehow escape from the darker aspects of our time like industrialised agriculture and the shallowness of social media and the mob, and to try to ensure real connections with others, with nature, and with what I consume. To rebel against the artificialness of AI and engage instead in the true crafts of old, working with wood and stone and iron and clay. We have a small farm in the Karoo with lots of stone artefacts from a bygone era, two hundred years ago, when the people that lived there had nothing but time; the complete opposite to the world of today. Even though I never knew those people, I know something of them by what they left behind, I know they loved and pursued beauty, and I love the idea of honouring them by restoring what remains and leaving something for those that follow me. But time is running out.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is one of my favourite movies, not least for Richard Harris’ portrayal of Marcus Aurelius. Like in so many stories that resonate with us, the protagonist Maximus undertakes the typical Hero’s Journey, so deeply engrained in our mythology, with all its difficulties, agony, and ultimately triumphant, if tragic return. But Harris portrays the emperor as an old man in Gladiator, while in reality Marcus Aurelius died relatively young at 58. Today, it’s become so normal for people to live beyond 90 that we’ve almost come to see anything less as a premature ending. It hasn’t always been so, as the echo of my grandmother’s “three score years and ten” reminds me. Perhaps we need to look on the additional years conferred on us by our ancestors as a gift that they would have cherished, and as an opportunity to reflect on our own lives and how we live them. To endeavour to live, as the ancient Greeks believed, as though all of our ancestors are living again through us. Like a mighty river. After all, as Maximus reminds us, what we do in life, echoes in eternity. Do we dare?

And now, on this forgotten shore,
She’s yearning seaward, wanting more,
But hemmed by sands of countless tides
Her land-locked body cannot rise
To meet the calling of the surf;
To show once more that she’s worth
More than shards of metal, rusted deep,
Settled in an endless sleep.
From The Song of the Kakapo ~ Self
Photo Jaro Kalak
In Lisbon

And so I thought I’d walk
Down these old streets alone.
No need to share or talk,
No shadow but my own.
Still you were always here
Just as I should have known,
And so instead I write
Another broken poem.
I saw some people starving
There was murder, there was rape
Their villages were burning
They were trying to escape
I couldn’t meet their glances
I was staring at my shoes
It was acid, it was tragic
It was almost like the bluesI have to die a little
Between each murderous thought
And when I’m finished thinking
I have to die a lot
There’s torture and there’s killing
And there’s all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing
Lord, it’s almost like the bluesSo I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot
My father says I’m chosen
My mother says I’m not
I listened to their story
Of the Gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn’t boring
It was almost like the bluesThere is no God in Heaven
And there is no Hell below
So says the great professor
Of all there is to know
But I’ve had the invitation
That a sinner can’t refuse
And it’s almost like salvation
It’s almost like the blues
Leonard Cohen
R.I.P.
Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me nowLook up here, man, I’m in danger
I’ve got nothing left to lose
I’m so high it makes my brain whirl
Dropped my cell phone down belowAin’t that just like me
By the time I got to New York
I was living like a king
Then I used up all my money
I was looking for your assThis way or no way
You know, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now ain’t that just like meOh I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Oh I’ll be free
Ain’t that just like me
R.I.P.
Tolstoy
They say that time will soldier on
To bolster faith when hope is gone.
They say that patience too will hold
The bastions as the storms unfold.
What of the heart that will not heal
The ravages of love’s ordeal?
What of the ache that will not yield
While heartbreak stays within concealed?
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Some songs just strike a chord in me. This is one of them.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.