← The Daily Stoic
The Daily Stoic
You Must Learn to See | The Stoic Lesson of Marcus Aurelius' Crumbling Statue
00:08:11
Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You must learn to see. It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Buford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Buford stopped the young Baldwin. Look, he said as he pointed down into the gutter. What do you see? All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again, and then he saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in A Love story, a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter's black water, distorted and radiant. It's clear in Meditations that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things? From the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar's mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase, but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met. But in any case, as Baldwin said of Delany, the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see. And so it goes for us. We must cultivate this ability to see beauty and poetry everywhere, because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius is someone who helped me see that. And my reading and rereading of this book has changed my life, and it's changed the lives of millions of people over the last 20 centuries. And it's also why we have Meditations Month here in April. Daily Stoic We've been putting together what I think is the perfect companion for reading and understanding Marcus Aurelius. Meditations Daily Stoic Meditations Guide Like a book club or an annotated version of your favorite book, it's designed to be your personal roadmap through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. It's not spark notes or a summary. There's no substitute for reading Meditations. It's not a shortcut, but it's a guide that will help enhance your understanding, help you really get everything you should get out of it and hopefully guide you not just to read it once, but time after time after time. I'm really excited for you. To check it out, go to dailystoic.com meditations click it in the show notes and also I would say if you haven't read Meditations, do grab our edition. We sell it in the Daily Stoic store, the Gregory Hayes edition. It's leather, so it'll hold the, hold the test of time. Well, and I'll link to that in today's show notes as well. If you're running a business, you know the deal with most CRMs. They are packed with a bunch of features. You're never going to use clunky interfaces and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basic info and then you stop using them. Well, that's where today's sponsor, pipedrive comes in. It's a simple sales CRM tool for small and medium sized businesses. Pipedrive brings your entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of the sales process as well as customer information so you stay in control and you can close more deals faster. And it all centers around the visual sales pipeline where you can see every deal, what stage it's in and what needs to happen next. Pipedrive is powerful enough to scale with your business, but simple enough that your team can actually use it. Right now on day one, switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive right now. If you use the link, you'll get a 30 day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipedrive.com stoic to get started. That's pipedrive.com stoic and you can be up and running in minutes. We just got home from a spring break trip, 12 hours of driving. We're pulling into the driveway and we're like oh man, what are we going to have for dinner tonight? What are we going to have dinner for tomorrow? Because we don't have time to go to the grocery store. But then we remembered we had a hellofresh box delivered while we were gone. We had someone put it in the fridge. That took care of everything because hellofresh makes cooking effortlessly. So you can always look forward to a homemade meal. And with HelloFresh, no two meals will ever be the same. You can choose from 80 plus global recipes every month. Vietnamese, Moroccan, Caribbean and more. You can try unique ingredients. They're all pre proportioned for you. You don't have to be a five star chef to make dinner taste great. The recipes are easy to follow, they don't require fancy equipment. And again, all the ingredients are right there. Go to hellofresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free NutriBullet Ultra. That's their compact kitchen system. It's almost a $200 value on your third box. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only, varies by plan. Must order the third box by May 31, 2026. Okay, so there's a story about how they're restoring the famous Marcus Aurelius column in Rome. If you don't know about the column, it's a masterpiece of sculpture and carving depicting the 14 years that Marx Aelius spends at war with the Marcomanni tribes. And they put up this 94 foot column in his honor that still stands to this day. There's actually a Stoic lesson in this, because yes, 19 centuries later, a monument to his accomplishments still stands. And even though it's a little worn down and needs some restoration, you might say that this disproves Marcus's reminders and meditations that posthumous fame doesn't last and no one will remember remember him. But I actually think the fact that it's still there is precisely the point. Because if you look at the top of this column, there's not a statue of Marcus Aurelius on top. It's actually St. Paul. In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V decides to take the monument to Marcus Aurelius and reuse it for his own purposes. And in the end, that's what Marcus Aurelius's greatest accomplishment becomes a pedestal of for somebody else. And that is what Marcus is saying. That's what history does to all of us, even those of us famous enough to be remembered for one year or one century or 1000 years. History takes us and it remixes and reuses us, it perverts us and undermines our legacy, it contradicts us, it absorbs us and it uses us for our own purposes. On a long enough timeline, everyone's will and legacy is ignored. Their graves are lost and obscured, their memory is written over. And we should remember this before it's too late. And let's say it didn't happen. Let's say it was still shining and gleaming. Why would that matter? He says in Meditations. People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will die soon too, and that those after them in turn, until their memory pass from One to another, like a candle flame gutters and goes out. And then he says, suppose that that actually wasn't true. Perhaps you are remembered forever. He says, what good would that do you? And he says, I don't just mean when you're dead, but in your own lifetime. What use is praise except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable? He's trying to remind himself that reputation, fame, impressing people, that doesn't matter who you are as a person, that that's the only thing that counts, who you are as a person to the people around you. Did you do good with the resources that you had? It's like the Shelley poem about Ozymandias, right? The statue fallen over in the desert, two legs, the. The head there laying in the sand. A colossal wreck, he says, boundless and bare. Even though this person was so powerful and important in life, very little of it remains. Now, this is not the state of Marcus Aurelius monument. You can go see it. It's still standing there. I've seen it myself. And yet the same stoic lesson is actually there if you look for it. Okay, so if he's saying that being remembered is not important, that posthumous fame is worthless, what is he saying that does matter? Well, he does address this in Meditations too. He says, forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small. Small as the corner of earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown passed from mouth to mouth by short lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. He's saying that all you have is this moment. All you have is who you are in this moment, creating some enormous legacy that other people get to live in. Focusing on impressing people who you will never meet, what good will that do you? He's saying, what matters is that you do good now, that you live a good life, that you live a good life as a good person. That's what Marcus Aurelius is striving to do in Meditations. And the irony is in not caring about posthumous fame, in not caring about his accomplishments, in just trying to be a good man, to concentrate on what he has to do as he writes in Meditations, to fix his eyes on it, reminding himself that his tax is just to be a good human being. And to do it, he says without hesitation, to speak the truth as he sees it, with kindness and with humility and without hypocrisy. In that ironically he does create a real legacy and we are still talking about him today. Are you really buying a car online on autotrader right now? Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget. You can really have it delivered or pick it up. Mommy's I think kid is walking up the slide. Really? Autotrader? Buy your car online? Really?
- [10:40]
B
Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's name your price tool for years now. With the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com, find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law.