The Extensions You Haven't Used
Read the full text in our reader
Μέμνησο ἐκ πόσου ταῦτα ἀναβάλλῃ καὶ ὁποσάκις προθεσμίας λαβὼν παρὰ τῶν θεῶν οὐ χρᾷ αὐταῖς. δεῖ δὲ ἤδη ποτὲ αἰσθέσθαι τίνος κόσμου μέρος εἶ καὶ τίνος διοικοῦντος τὸν κόσμον ἀπόρροια ὑπέστης καὶ ὅτι ὅρος ἐστί σοι περιγεγραμμένος τοῦ χρόνου, ᾧ ἐὰν εἰς τὸ ἀπαιθριάσαι μὴ χρήσῃ, οἰχήσεται καὶ αὖθις οὐκ ἐξέσται.
Remember how long you have been putting this off, and how many extensions you have taken from the gods without ever using them. It is time, at last, to recognize what universe you are part of, and from what governing power of the universe you are an emanation — and that a boundary is drawn around your time, which, if you do not use it to win clear skies within, will be gone, and never come again.
Marcus catches himself postponing self-examination yet again, then reasons his way from that habit of delay to his place in the governed cosmos and the nonrenewable limit set on his own time.
This passage turns Marcus's chronic self-admonition about delay into a cosmological argument. The "extensions" (προθεσμίαι) he has taken from the gods and let lapse are no abstraction — procrastination is treated as a debt against a benefactor, echoing the opening resolve of 2.1 and anticipating the memento mori of 2.11 and 4.17 ("live as if on a mountain," "as if about to depart"). The imperative αἰσθέσθαι — perceive, come to realize — is doing real philosophical work: grasping one's place in the κόσμος is not incidental to ethics but its foundation, since knowing you are a μέρος of the whole and an ἀπόρροια of its governing reason (a term Stoic physics also uses of the individual soul as an effluence of the cosmic πνεῦμα or λόγος) supplies the actual reason to act now rather than later.
The closing image is arresting: a stretch of time "circumscribed" (περιγεγραμμένος) like a plot of land, and the rare verb ἀπαιθριάσαι — literally "to clear to fair weather," used of skies breaking after cloud — applied to the self. Marcus is not merely warning that time runs out; he is saying that unused time forecloses a specific kind of inner clearing, a settling of the mind into its own proper brightness, and that the chance, once missed, does not come again (αὖθις οὐκ ἐξέσται). The weather-image is unusual in the Meditations and lends urgency without melodrama: the self has its own climate, and neglect leaves it permanently overcast.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Meditations 2.4 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 2.4 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/2.4/