Meditations 4.15 · 4.15

This is one of Marcus’s most compact death-meditations, a single picture with no argument attached. Grains of incense are dropped onto the altar fire; some catch and are consumed a moment before others. The image supplies its own reading: each grain is burnt up all the same, and the little difference of sooner-or-later is nothing. So with human lives. Whether one dies young or old, first or last, the end is identical, and the interval that seems so vast from inside is, against the whole, a matter of one grain landing an instant before another.

The force of the image is that it makes the point felt rather than proved. Marcus does not say "life is short" or "all must die"; he lets the altar say it. There is even a quiet dignity in the picture — the grains are an offering, consumed on the same holy fire — which fits his conviction that dying is a natural and not a shameful thing (4.5). διαφέρει δ᾽ οὐδέν, "it makes no difference," is the whole moral: the anxiety about when death comes dissolves once you see your life as one grain among many on a single altar, sure to burn, and no worse for burning a little sooner.

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