"A poor soul burdened with a corpse," Epictetus calls you.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four
I really do need to design a Champlain course based around the Meditations. A couple years ago I put in a proposal for a first year course as part of our new curriculum, but it wasn't chosen. While I suspect this particular passage wouldn't resonate with my students (if anything resonates with them . . .) but it definitely speaks to me as I slide deeper into my 60s.
Some more pictures of the backroads of Vermont. As my life seems to inexplicably lead me to central Vermont I guess it's natural and unavoidable that more pictures of it pop up. I wish I could say that I took these with my new camera, but I simply snapped them with my phone. And, no, they're not black & white, but simply the extraordinary winter beauty (desolation) of Vermont.
My friend Frank sent me this picture this morning. It's of my friend Doug and me in our first year of graduate school. This picture was taken in March 1983. Was I ever actually this young - and in graduate school? God, no wonder our professors in graduate school at UC thought we were morons (plus, they were perceptive).
It also got me thinking about the time that Doug was a finalist for the position of Provost here at Champlain. The college, as part of an endless string of dreadful administrative hires, didn't choose him. It did give us the chance to spend several blissful hours on the deck of the Saint John's Club reflecting on life, history, love, and friendship; essentially, it turned into the closing passage of Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which I recently re-read - it simply, unlike us, gets better with age).
Injustice is a sin. Nature has constituted rational beings for their own mutual benefit, each to help his fellows according to their worth, and in no wise to do them hurt; and to contravene her will is plainly to win against this eldest of all the deities. Untruthfulness, too, is a sin, and against the same goddess. For Nature is the nature of existence itself; and existence connotes the kinship of all created beings.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Nine
As we're dragging towards the end of Year Two of COVID, and considering the implications of Year Three and Year Four, I'm drawn back to this passage from the Meditations. As usual MA is correct when he pointed out that "existence connotes the kinship of all created beings." The great trick of capitalism is to make us forget this fact, and to instead celebrate the individualistic accumulation of as much as inhumanly possible, and to decry compassion for our fellow human beings as weakness. I'd hate to think how many COVID-related statistics I've posted on Twitter or Facebook which then cried out for the same tagline: "But my freedom . . ." In the end individual freedom doesn't mean much when it endangers the collective good. Aren't we told this on every visit to our houses of worship (well, not the Evangelical mega-churches), and yet we forget it as we pass out the door.
Lately I've spent a lot of time roaming around the backroads of central Vermont, and I think I've done more exploring than when I actually lived in central Vermont. As a result I've snapped a couple decent pictures that vaguely and clumsily captured the stark beauty of VT in the winter (not Iceland in winter beautiful, but still pretty).
Press on steadily, keep to the straight road in your thinking and doing, and your days will flow on smoothly. The soul of man, like the souls of all rational creatures, has two things in common with the soul of God: it can never ben thwarted from without, and its good consists in righteousness of character and action, and in confining every wish thereto.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Five
During the year on this blog that I devoted to reflections on faith I noted, way too many times, the fact that in the Quran the essential concepts of faith and righteous deeds are linked over fifty times. For example, Surah 103: "By the declining day humanity is a state of failure, with the exception of those who believe, perform righteous deeds, and enjoin each other to truth and patience." This has always been one of my favorite surahs because, while we can't understand the divine, we can, to be the best of our abilities, focus our attentions on those four concepts. Cycling back to faith and righteous deeds, I would propose that they are naturally linked; essentially, I would argue that we most clearly practice faith when we're devoting our time to the small kindnesses that we should direct towards all living beings. I'm making this point because it is so remarkably similar to what Marcus Aurelius is saying in the Meditations. Of course, I suppose all religions and philosophies say something similar, or at least they should.
My sister Lisa, obviously bored because she's laid up recovering from knee surgery, has been sending me pictures all day. Here's one of them taken in my grandparents' (Jum and Maude, my dad's parents) house in Rising Sun. Lisa and I had actually lived in that little house on Mulberry Street before we moved up the river to Lawrenceburg.
