Meditations 4.3: retiring into yourself

The section in full

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as notes to himself, and many sections of Book 4 are a sentence or two long. Section 3 is by far the longest: 556 words in George Long’s 1862 translation, more than twice the length of any other section in Book 4. Here it is complete. The square brackets are Long’s, marking words he added to explain or complete the sense.

The section moves in three steps: a claim, a test against four complaints, and two principles to keep at hand.

What it means, line by line

“Men seek retreats for themselves.” A wealthy Roman got away to the country, the coast or the mountains, and Marcus admits “thou too art wont to desire such things very much.” Today it might be the lake-house listing you scroll through after a bad day. What he calls common isn’t wanting a break. It is believing that quiet lives somewhere else, when “it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.”

“Tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.” Calm, for Marcus, isn’t silence or distance from people. It is order. He doesn’t praise an empty mind; he praises one stocked with the right thoughts, kept within reach.

“Let thy principles be brief and fundamental.” This is the working instruction. A principle you have to look up is no help when the kids are fighting in the back seat. Marcus wants a few, short enough to recall at once. He tells himself to take the retreat “constantly” and to “renew thyself,” which makes it a habit through the day, closer to stepping outside for air than to a vacation.

Four complaints, and “be quiet at last.” In the middle Marcus argues with himself, answering four complaints in turn.

The list hasn’t aged: a coworker who takes the credit, a job you didn’t choose, a sore back, a post nobody shared. In Long’s version each answer ends with the same refrain, written out once and supplied in brackets after the other three. Marcus doesn’t settle the complaint forever. He gives himself a reason, then tells himself to stop. The fork between providence and atoms recurs in other notes (is Stoicism a religion?), and seeing the earth as a point is a version of the exercise known today by a modern name, the view from above.

“This little territory of thy own.” Marcus restates the instruction and says how to behave once there: don’t strain, be free, and look at things “as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal.” None of those is a hermit. A citizen has duties to other people, and a mortal has limited time to do them. The retreat is a way back, not a way out, meant to return him “free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest.”

The two principles. The first: “things do not touch the soul,” and “our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.” The email from your manager sits in your inbox. It does nothing to you until you decide what it means, and the deciding is where the distress begins. Epictetus puts the same idea in the opening sentence of Enchiridion 5, and Marcus credits his teacher Rusticus with sharing Epictetus’s discourses with him (Meditations 1.7).

The second: “all these things, which thou seest, change immediately.” Marcus checks it against experience: “how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed.” You have outlived jobs, apartments and worries that once filled whole weeks. The first principle lets you examine an upset. The second puts it at its real size.

“The universe is transformation: life is opinion.” The last line packs both principles into one breath, in reverse order. Read with the rest of the section, it says that how a day goes turns less on its events than on what you judge them to be. That is why a retreat into your own mind can work at all: if the trouble lived in events, sitting with your principles would change nothing. The Greek word behind Long’s “opinion,” here and in “the opinion which is within,” is hupolēpsis, a supposition or judgment, often a judgment of value (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

Where it sits in the book

Much of Book 4 reads like the brief principles 4.3 asks for. In our words, 4.7 says that if you take away the opinion, the complaint of being harmed goes, and the harm with it. In 4.43 change becomes an image of time as a river, shown with a note in how to read the Meditations. Read this way, 4.3 explains why the Meditations repeats itself: Marcus keeps writing his principles out short so they will be there when he turns to them.

Six books later, the places he named come back, this time to say they are no better than where you already stand.

The words “retire into thyself” open 7.28 too, where Marcus adds a condition: the ruling part of the mind is content with itself when it acts justly. The quiet depends on conduct; it is not a place to hide from it. And near the end of the book the thought that life is opinion returns with a promise attached.

“When thou choosest” (Meditations 12.22) echoes the “whenever thou shalt choose” of 4.3: in both, calm comes by an act of your own, not by a trip.

Related sections

• 2.15 and 12.8. The first principle shrunk to a phrase: all is opinion, or everything is opinion.
• 6.11, coming back quickly. When circumstances knock you out of tune, return to yourself fast.
• 8.48, the mind as a citadel. The retreat pictured as a fortress, on Stoic principles.
• 9.30, looking down on the human world. The answer to fame at full length, on the view from above.

Section 4.3 is also the nearest real passage to a viral line, wrongly credited to Marcus, about everything we hear being an opinion; fake Stoic quotes has the verdict. To keep your own short principles in writing, as Marcus did, see Stoic journaling.