Only the Present Can Be Lost
Read the full text in our reader
Κἂν τρὶς χίλια ἔτη βιώσεσθαι μέλλῃς, κἂν τοσαυτάκις μύρια, ὅμως μέμνησο ὅτι οὐδεὶς ἄλλον ἀποβάλλει βίον ἢ τοῦτον ὃν ζῇ, οὐδὲ ἄλλον ζῇ ἢ ὃν ἀποβάλλει. εἰς ταὐτὸν οὖν καθίσταται τὸ μήκιστον τῷ βραχυτάτῳ. τὸ γὰρ παρὸν πᾶσιν ἴσον καὶ τὸ ἀπολλύμενον οὖν ἴσον καὶ τὸ ἀποβαλλόμενον οὕτως ἀκαριαῖον ἀναφαίνεται. οὔτε γὰρ τὸ παρῳχηκὸς οὔτε τὸ μέλλον ἀποβάλοι ἄν τις· ὃ γὰρ οὐκ ἔχει, πῶς ἄν τις τοῦτο αὐτοῦ ἀφέλοιτο; τούτων οὖν τῶν δύο δεῖ μεμνῆσθαι· ἑνὸς μέν, ὅτι πάντα ἐξ ἀιδίου ὁμοειδῆ καὶ ἀνακυκλούμενα καὶ οὐδὲν διαφέρει, πότερον ἐν ἑκατὸν ἔτεσιν ἢ ἐν διακοσίοις ἢ ἐν τῷ ἀπείρῳ τὰ αὐτά τις ὄψεται· ἑτέρου δέ, ὅτι καὶ ὁ πολυχρονιώτατος καὶ ὁ τάχιστα τεθνηξόμενος τὸ ἴσον ἀποβάλλει. τὸ γὰρ παρόν ἐστι μόνον, οὗ στερίσκεσθαι μέλλει, εἴπερ γε ἔχει καὶ τοῦτο μόνον καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔχει τις οὐκ ἀποβάλλει.
Even if you're going to live three thousand years, or ten thousand times that, still remember: no one loses any life but the one he is living, and he lives no other life than the one he loses. So the longest life comes down to the same as the shortest. For the present moment is equal for everyone, and so what is being lost is equal too, and what is cast off proves to be a mere instant. No one, after all, could lose the past or the future — how could anyone be robbed of what he does not have? So there are two things to keep in mind: first, that everything, from everlasting, is of one kind and cycles round, and it makes no difference whether a person watches the same things play out for a hundred years, or two hundred, or forever; second, that the longest-lived and the one who is about to die soonest lose exactly the same amount. For the present is the only thing a person can be deprived of, since it is the only thing he has — and what he doesn't have, he can't lose.
Marcus dismantles the fear of dying young: since a person only ever possesses the present instant, the longest life and the shortest forfeit exactly the same thing at death.
The argument is a small piece of logic-chopping aimed at a large fear. Marcus wants to disarm the terror of dying young, or the envy of those who live to be old, by pointing out that duration is irrelevant to what death actually removes. No one possesses a stock of "life" that a long-lived person has more of and a short-lived person less of; each person only ever has the sliver of time called now. Since the past is already gone and the future is not yet had, neither can be taken from anyone — you cannot be robbed of what you do not hold.
What death takes, then, is always exactly one thing: the present instant, and that instant is the same size for everyone, whether Croesus or a child, the sleeper who wakes at ninety or the one who does not wake at nine. This is the same move Marcus makes more compactly in 2.4 and 4.50, chipping away at the specialness people attach to length of days.\n\nThe passage then names its own procedure — "there are two things to keep in mind" — a rare moment where Marcus flags his own method, useful for seeing how Book 2's aphorisms actually argue rather than merely assert. The first point is cosmological: everything is ὁμοειδῆ and ἀνακυκλούμενα, of like kind and endlessly cycling, so a hundred years and an unbounded stretch of time show a person the same content, which is the Stoic doctrine of eternal recurrence doing quiet work here without being named as doctrine. The second point returns to the individual: however long or briefly a person burns, the equal forfeiture stands. There's a colder comfort under the tidy syllogism — the same reasoning that steadies the reader against fearing an early death also strips a long life of any special credit; both are simply exchanged, in identical coin, for a moment that was never anyone's to keep in the first place.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Meditations 2.14 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Meditations — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Meditations 2.14 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/2.14/