of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg
white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment.” On
this reading, the individual entries were composed not as a
record of Marcus’s thoughts or to enlighten others, but for his
own use, as a means of practicing and reinforcing his own
philosophical convictions. Such an interpretation accounts
for several aspects of the entries that would otherwise be
puzzling. It explains the predominance of the imperative in
the text; its purpose is not to describe or reflect (let alone to
“meditate”), but to urge, direct, and exhort.^7 And it explains
also the repetitiveness that strikes any reader of the work
almost immediately—the continual circling back to the same
few problems. The entries do not present new answers or
novel solutions to these problems, but only familiar answers
reframed. It was precisely this process of reframing and
reexpressing that Marcus found helpful.
The recognition that the entries are as much process as
product also accounts for the shapelessness and apparent
disorder of the work. We do not know by whom or on what
basis the individual books of the Meditations were arranged;
the order may be chronological, or partly chronological, or
wholly arbitrary. The arrangement of the individual entries
may or may not be Marcus’s own, though its very
randomness suggests that it goes back to the author (a later
editor would have been tempted to group together
thematically similar entries, and perhaps to tie up some of the
more obvious loose ends). Nor can we always be sure where