time accepting. The gods care for mortals, he reminds
himself, “and you—on the verge of death—you still refuse to
care for them.”
There is a persistent strain of pessimism in the work. “The
things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs
snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and
then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice,
truth—‘gone from the earth and only found in heaven.’ Why
are you still here?” (5.33). Images of dirt appear in several
entries. The world around us resembles the baths: “oil,
sweat, dirt, grayish water, all of it disgusting” (8.24). If
Marcus contemplates the stars, he does so only in order to
“wash off the mud of life below” (7.47). And the objective
analysis Marcus prizes often shades over into a depressing
cynicism (in the modern sense of the term). “Disgust at what
things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth. Or marble as
hardened dirt, gold and silver as residues, clothes as hair,
purple dye as shellfish blood. And all the rest” (9.36). The
human body itself is no more than “rotting meat in a bag”
(8.38). “[D]espise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of
bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries” (2.2).
Perhaps the most depressing entry in the entire work is the
one in which Marcus urges himself to cultivate an
indifference to music (11.2).
As one scholar has observed, “reading the Meditations for
long periods can be conducive of melancholy.” And even