Meditations #40

 You cannot hope to be a scholar. But what you can do is to curb arrogance; what you can do is to rise above pleasures and plains; you can be superior to the lure of popularity; you can keep your temper with the foolish and ungrateful, yes, and even care for them.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight

Damn, MA, I already feel bad about my lack of scholarly production, way to pile on. 

Actually, I've always loved this passage from the Meditations. As I think about my upcoming talking for the Vermont Public Philosophy Week I suspect that this passage will find it's way into the talk. My point is that, when thinking about the books that made me a better person - or at least gave me the tools to be a better person - I would always include the Qur'an (and I first said this before I ever converted to Islam), the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I think it is a potentially rich topic because they are, on the surface, three remarkably dissimilar sources. And yet, I think there are definite liminal spaces where the three converge, one of them being a sense of your relationship to a larger world, and the role that you can and should play in it. There are things that we, no matter our station or position in life, can do, and one of the first is to, as MA reminds us, "curb arrogance." Certainly the Qur'an reminds us of that, including the consistent reminder to control our temper. I think Proust says the same thing, although in a roundabout and maybe contradictory fashion; that is, I think it shows us the folly of those actions, as compared to merely lecturing us on them.