The clear picture — and the neglected reminders
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τὸ φαντασθῆναι περὶ τοῦ κατὰ φύσιν βίου ἐναργῶς καὶ πολλάκις οἷός τίς ἐστιν, ὥστε, ὅσον ἐπὶ τοῖς θεοῖς καὶ ταῖς ἐκεῖθεν διαδόσεσι καὶ συλλήψεσι καὶ ἐπιπνοίαις, μηδὲν κωλύειν ἤδη κατὰ φύσιν ζῆν με, ἀπολείπεσθαι δὲ ἔτι τούτου παρὰ τὴν ἐμὴν αἰτίαν καὶ παρὰ τὸ μὴ διατηρεῖν τὰς ἐκ τῶν θεῶν ὑπομνήσεις καὶ μονονουχὶ διδασκαλίας·
That I saw clearly, and again and again, the life lived according to nature, just what it is — so that, so far as it rests with the gods and the gifts, the help, and the promptings that come from them, nothing now prevents me from already living according to nature; yet I still fall short of it, through my own fault, and because I fail to keep in mind the reminders the gods send — reminders that are all but their outright teaching.
Continues Marcus's closing thanksgiving to the gods (1.17), the counterpart to his tribute to Antoninus Pius in 1.16 — thanking them for a vivid, repeated picture of the life according to nature, then locating the remaining shortfall entirely in his own neglect.
This fragment belongs to the closing thanksgiving of Book One, where Marcus counts the gods among his teachers. What he thanks them for here is oddly abstract: not an event or a person but a picture — a clear, recurring impression (φαντασία) of what a life according to nature actually looks like. He treats that clarity as a gift in itself, since without it the goal would remain a slogan. And once the picture is vivid enough, he adds, nothing on the gods' side blocks him from living it: whatever aid, cooperation, and prompting divine agency supplies has already been given in full.
The turn that follows is the passage's real interest. Having cleared the gods of any debt, Marcus places the shortfall entirely on himself — his own αἰτία — and specifies where: he has not kept hold of the reminders the gods send, calling them "all but their teaching." The word for reminders, ὑπομνήσεις, sits close to hypomnēmata, the very genre of notes-to-self that makes up this book; the failure he confesses is structurally the same discipline the Meditations exists to correct. It is the same move he makes elsewhere — the obstacle is never the world, only the untended will — but stated here with unusual tenderness toward the source of the reminders themselves.
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Meditations 1.17.6 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/1.17.6/