Again, poet, classicist and translator based in New York City, whose work has appeared in
the Financial Times, the New York Review of Books, and Poetry Magazine. His new translation
of Marcus Aurelius' Meditation is out now from Live Write Publishing. Aaron, welcome to the
show. Thank you very much for having me. Okay, so Aaron, may I ask you what first drew you
to the classics? I had kind of religious experience when I was 18, I was taking a humanities class
and there was a section on the Greeks and Romans and on the very first page written out in
Latin, I didn't know Latin then, um was the opening words of Virgil's epic Theoneid about
the foundation of Rome um and I just sounded out the words, Armo e rumque cano troiae qui
primus aboris um Yeah, it goes on from there and it's beautiful. It just sounds glorious.
um And I had, yeah, the light became brighter for me, grass became greener where I was sitting
out front of the English department. And I just knew, oh, I'm gonna be a poet and I need to
learn ancient Greek and Latin. And so, yeah, ever since then I have for richer or for poorer
and usually for poorer pursued that goal. And so, yes, I ended up getting a PhD in classics.
and then an MFA in poetry in order to, yes, fulfill both ends of that experience, both
the creative half and the scholarly half. Very good. So I also noticed that your father is
a philosopher and your mother is a literature teacher. Yes. A teacher of literature. And
I've noticed also your book has your father uh dedicated. So did that influence you? in
your work? Very much. I love my father dearly. He died about eight years ago. But I respect
him because he was a systematic philosopher. He was working to put the universe back together.
um And so certainly I studied a great deal of philosophy when I was in undergraduate school
and graduate school. And I'm fascinated by it. And I have a great respect for it. But also
in the translation, there is a little bit of rebellion against my father in that, yes,
I am a literary person and not a philosopher. um He had a cool writing style, but he wrote
like it was math and it was inaccessible to a lot of people. And so yes, that literary
influence from my mother, I reach out to the audience and I'm willing to do anything I can
to welcome them in and keep them excited. Um, yes, I'm, it's interesting that you noticed
that. Yes, I am in every way, a combination of my mother and my father. Wonderful. I should
mention personally that the meditations is one of my favorite books. Marcus Aurelius is someone
I generally look up to. I think he's an example of leadership. For listeners who are coming
to Marcus Aurelius for the first time, can you tell us who he was and how you first encountered
Marcus? Yes. I first encountered Marcus Aurelius when I was in graduate school. I read the meditations
from beginning to end. And I was excited about it for a couple of different reasons, but
primarily because he was a great Roman emperor. He lived in the second century AD and he was
the last of what were known as the five good emperors. Famously, Marcus Aurelius' son Commodus,
who became emperor after him, was a disaster and was killed by the Praetorian Guard. So
Marcus was the last of the, in a way, the last of the really good emperors of Rome. And he
was scrupulously dutiful. But what you can see in the meditations and in certain letters
to mentors of Marcus that had been preserved, he was a reluctant emperor. He wanted to be
a philosopher and he was drafted in a way into the line of dynastic succession in his teens.
um and subsequently went on, always very dutiful, to be a dutiful sort of uh worker under
the previous emperor Antoninus Pius, and then also was an outstanding emperor in his own
right. The meditations, interestingly, very rarely talk about, Marcus very rarely talks
about his duties as emperor, right? This is very much his private time and I argue in the
beginning of the book that like other Stoics, he had a daily practice and the evidence suggests
that he had a morning practice. As soon as he woke up, he would repeat um principles that
he'd written down to himself. He tried to get them as concise as possible. And so certainly
during that last decade when he was waging war in what's now Austria at the northeastern edge
of the empire against that background of war, yes, he was stealing this private time in the
morning to add to his notebook and to try to move himself forward as a Stoic. Okay, so,
but before we go further, could you give a brief overview of Stoic philosophy for listeners
who may be encountering it for the first time? Yes, it's a large and expansive system, but
I can try to give it in a nutshell. The message that hits me hardest um And the second time
I read it, I was all in as a stoic. The first time I read it, I was romantic and I wanted
big non-stoic emotions. But now that I'm older and I've had some life experience, um His advice
on how to deal with the past and the future and regrets um have been very useful. But in
a nutshell, um stoicism maintains that your happiness is in your control. It's entirely
dependent on you. and your internal assessments. We normally think of say, not getting a job
you applied for, that misfortune, right? As a bad thing that the outside world has imposed
on us. But Marcus would say, first, nature is in charge of the universe and it is entirely
good. Everything that it brings about for us in our lives is good for us, even if we
don't recognize it at the moment and show we should be grateful. And I had uh a realization
that confirmed Marcus's, um yes, what, in understanding of nature. I did apply for a job and didn't
get it and I was down about it. But now when I reflect on that with the advantage of whatever
age I have, I'm grateful I didn't get that job. I wanted to be more of a writer. and less of
an academic. And so that failure ended up pushing me ahead in my literary career. um And so,
yes, I've come around to that philosophy. He's rubbed off on me. I still wouldn't call
myself a stoic. I have trouble joining any group ah whatsoever. ah But certainly when
I was translating and spending so much time with Marcus, that message about my happiness
being in my control is on me. um certainly soaked in and it has been beneficial to me
subsequently. Well that's what I like also. I like the uh dichotomy of control. What is
within my control and what is not within my control? Proheresis? the choice. Yeah, the
choice. The choice, the mental choice that you have to react to the external world, to the
fatisma, right? Yeah, I understand it theoretically and once in a while can practice it and I
feel good about it. But I'm very far from being a stoic sage. There is that split in stoicism
between the theoretical and the practical. And Marcus is aware of it. um When he lays
out a perfected stoic, a stoic stage, it's an ideal and a hypotheticality. He doesn't
name any individual as an example of a perfected stoic. And he acknowledges in a number of
sections that sustaining that mindset is well nigh impossible. And so he says, it's okay
if most of your actions are in accordance with Stoic philosophy. If most of your actions are
just and there will be occasional lapses as well. He also acknowledges that we can take
breaks, whether for respite, food, drinking, sleep, but he says they have a limited time
and you shouldn't drag them out um longer than they need to be. And so he does it in another
section. He yeah, is even he's extreme and he says every single exertion we do everything
we exert ourselves to do should serve some purpose. I mean, that is I mean, I'm impressed
with that ideal and I wish I could reach it, but I can't imagine a living human being um
achieving that. Right. Yeah, it is a very high ideal indeed. So there was the Macho Manic
Wars and also the Antonine Plague devastating the empire during his reign. Does any of that
anguish and his stoicism show up while dealing with these events in the meditations? Yes,
both of them show up in interesting ways. And again, the medit... Yes. Yeah, and how
did he deal with them? Yeah, it shows up. And so first, Macho Manic Wars and then the Antonine
Plague. Certainly the wars show up in meditations, but less than you would think. Two of the 12
books, books two and three, actually have a heading that set them at different military
outposts in what's now Austria. One, a fort on the Danube, and another that was the capital
of the Roman province of Upper Pannonia called Carnuntum. And so we are confident that those
two books, at least, and I think the entire meditations were written during his last 10
years while he was waging war. um Marcus served with a co-emperor, his adopted brother Lucius
Verus, for a few years. And then Lucius Verus died, presumably of the Antonine Plague, and
Marcus had to go and wage the wars himself. He was out of Rome for years at a time. And
the most poignant way in which the war creeps into the meditations is, one second, I need
to get a drink of water.
is where he imagines uh corpses decapitated, arms, legs, heads chopped off. And he compares
that to what a human being does socially when he rejects something that has happened to him
in the universe or he is cruel to his fellow humans. And so Stoicism has a reputation for
being kind of an aloof, excuse me, dispassionate. unaffectionate, unfeeling philosophy. uh But
what we see in the meditations actually militates um against that. Marcus sees himself as being
obliged to be kind to all of his fellow humans because they're fellow citizens of this theoretical
Commonwealth uh called, I translated, it's koinonia in Greek. I translated it as the human Commonwealth.
But even beyond that, there's another layer in which he talks about a concept called oikaiosis.
It comes from the Greek word oikos for house. There's a Greek yogurt that has that name,
oikaiosis. um And that means, housification. How would you translate it? Identification.
That is becoming so familiar with your fellow humans that they are like family to you. um
Good. And so he uses then that image of the war and decapitation. to drive home what humans
do socially, mostly to themselves. The damage is mostly to themselves. The Antonine Plague
shows up in Marcus' biography, certainly, in that there was a rebel named Avidius Cassius,
who was in the province of Syria, Palestine, south of where Marcus was in Austria. And
he claimed that he'd heard that Marcus had died... of the Antonine Plague and declared himself
emperor. And there was uh brief tension between them before um eventually a loyal guardsman
cut off Avidius' head and gave it to Marcus um as proof of death. But the evidence still
suggests that Marcus wanted to forgive Avidius. He wanted to act on his principles, um simply
that humans never purposefully do the wrong thing. They can do things that are illegal,
right? They can knock over a 7-Eleven, but they persuaded themselves that that's the right
thing to do. They're poor and they need the money or whatever, right? And so he then says,
when humans are misguided in that way, it is your duty either to teach them or to tolerate
them. Next, moving on to the Antonite, we're still talking about the Antonine Plague. That
shows up also in one of my favorite short sections in the meditation. in which he describes grains
of frankincense being offered on an altar, burned on an altar. And the ancient Greeks
and Romans both believed that things that smell good, like frankincense, they ward off the
contagion in the Antonine Plague. So that's another place in the meditations where the
Antonine Plague sort of asserts itself. And we can find a parallel with outside history.
But we can imagine how stoicism would have played also in oh dealing with these very big issues.
accepting, mean, stoicism would require people who were dying of the Antonine Plague to accept
that as a good thing that was given to them out of nature. I have a hard time believing
that, but in fact, the good things that Marcus talks about, aren't material possessions. All
material possessions and even your own life and body are matters of indifference. What
Stoics focus on and what Marcus focuses on are the virtues with justice being the king and
then tolerance, for example, subservient to it. And so there's a whole hierarchy of virtues.
And in fact, the whole meditations is quite hierarchical. in terms of the levels of existences
from humans down to material objects with animals and plants in the middle. oh And that's a hallmark
of the classical world, these hierarchies. Right. Well, when I read Marcus Aurelius, I
hear a lot of Hippocetus. There's a lot of Hippocetus. Yes. Marcus quotes him more than
any other Stoic authority. He was the Stoic closest in time to Marcus. He lived about 50,
60 years before Marcus Aurelius. And there are some, well, a fair number of parallels
between Epictetus's discourses. We have four of the eight books of Epictetus's discourses
have come down to us, including one of my favorite characters in the meditation. He's known to
scholars as the Objector. Just a voice. that speaks up and he's almost, it's almost comical,
right? He's the instructor, Marcus the instructor's patsy. His job is to say something naive or
something wrong so that the dominant voice, Marcus the instructor, can step in and correct
him. And there are almost jokes involving the objector. He becomes comical because he's whiny
and he always says the wrong thing. I fell in love with the various voices in meditations
and that's in fact, what prompted me to do my translation. I felt that they hadn't been
captured as distinct voices in previous translations. All right, so that comes to our next question.
What motivated you to add a new translation of the meditations? There are certainly many,
many translations of the meditations. I felt there was a need for a literary translation
of Marcus Aurelius. The previous translations have emphasized him as a philosopher. Also,
a number of, there are different, I see two different classes of previous translations
of the meditations. One of them is overly formal and classical, right? And here's the analogy
I use. You imagine the temple, the Parthenon in Athens with that beautiful white marble,
right? And people get this conception of the classical that it's formal and aloof and cold
like that marble. right? But in fact, the Parthenon was painted with bright colors, right? It was
not this cold aloof marmorial oh construction, but rather gaudy. And so I wanted to translate
the meditations, as I said, into living color. And then there is another group of translations,
which oh in order to make the meditations more accessible to the reader, simplify the grammar
and the sentences and as I see it, simplify the sentiment and I'm with those translations
just because they seem to underestimate the reader. They dumb things down for the reader
and I don't want to do that and especially since I'm doing a little, I was doing a literary
translation when Marcus gives you a long sentence, I felt an obligation, right, to translate that
long sentence and not break it down into smaller units. And so I wanted to capture Marcus's
um literary style. he is, he has a lot of range. He studied under the two most prominent stylists
in Latin and in Greek in his day. One named Fronto, who taught him Latin, and then another
famous um orator, Herodes Atticus, who taught him Greek. And so from, four or five years
old. was writing creatively in Latin and Greek and certainly all of that training shows up
in the meditations which he wrote roughly in the 10 years before his death. All right, so
since we're talking about the translation, I have a question here. You translate this passage
in book four. Take your vacation in those inner little acres of yourself. That image is so
vivid and almost casual. Can you walk us through what was happening in your mind as a translator
when you arrived at that time? Yes, um the word that is used both for vacation and for an
inner retreat um is the ancient Greek word anachoresis, going back or going up is how
we translate it. It's related to the English word for... well, outdated English word for
a hermit, an anchorite, someone who lives alone in a cave and, yes, meditates. um And so,
yes, as I was translating that, I wanted to get both the meanings that he was using. And
so there were opportunities for both. It could also just mean vacation, right, going to the
shore. And so Marcus, again and again, emphasizes that where you are doesn't matter. You shouldn't
be waiting for just the right setting and just the right time in order to begin improving
your life, in order to retreat into yourself and find what's happening there, right? You
need to be able to do that anywhere, right? Even on the battlefield or in a fortress in
upper Pannonia. And so, yes, I wanted to... emphasize in Anachoresis that he's, yeah, he's
using the first sense metaphorically for a vacation and the second is the one that he intends.
And he m inherited that meaning of Anachoresis um from a work called Plato's um Theotetus.
And that's interesting. Marcus has been called an eclectic stoic. I like to think of him
rather as an open-minded stoic. And so rather than cleaving to the great, uh Stoic authorities
like Epictetus, whom he does quote a fair amount, he brings in Aristotle, he brings in Theophrastus,
he brings in Plato. There are some earlier philosophers, they're called the pre-Socratic
philosophers, Heraclitus and Empedocles. He brings them in as well. And so that made me,
in a sense, the fact that he's willing to be eclectic, that he's not going to be doctrinaire
about his Stoicism, but he's going to bring in whatever ideas are useful for him. in his
ethical project. uh I came to respect him all the more for that. He does not have, as one
might expect in a stoic, a rigid, intolerant mindset. But it's rather open and accepting
of ideas from anywhere. I, somebody interpreted it as though, like, the idea of retrieving
into the mind, and the mind is the garden, right? Because the idea of the citadel, the fortress,
and to retrieve within the soul, retrieve within the mind. the fortress image is another place
where the war shows up, and he may well have written that in a fortress. But again, he
says, and this is the ideal of the perfected stoic, right? That person would be using
what he calls the hegemonic cone in Greek. I translate it as the stock translation is
the ruling power. And this is a bit of the divine which has been given to us, a bit of divine
rationality that has been given to us. And our obligation then is to cultivate that hegemonic
cone. And one of the ways we do that is through uh anachoresis, through... uh yet retreating
into yourself. And yes, I find that fascinating that we each have this logos, a portion of
the logos, which is divine rationality inside of us. I, as a poet, um I'm not always seeking
rationality when I am writing. But Marcus, in many ways, um won me over, right, in terms
of this oh divine rationality running the universe. And it makes perfect sense. We humans, we have
the logos inside of us. And so we're in a way that allows us to interact with it and
cultivate it, right? And the lower species, in Marcus's opinion, don't have that faculty.
And so the universe has singled humans out, right? To be able to purge. ourselves and
to be aware of all that we have received. We should be grateful all of the things we have
the gifts we have received from the universe. Right. Makes me think a garden is a perfect
place for a poet. Yeah, I wish. It's still cold. I'm in New York City and it's another cold
day here today. I'm eager to Well, at least you retrieve within the mind. Yes. So yeah,
we'll see. Meditation and I have a long and complicated relationship. I have a kind of
hyperactive, slightly spastic mind. And so it's really hard to tame. It's really hard
for me to control. But I tried a bunch of different kinds of meditation when I was coming out of
a dark time in my life. And I couldn't do Buddhist transcendental meditation just because I was
unable to keep my mind empty. right? But you're told, I know, I may be misrepresenting it,
right? You're told when you're meditating that way, the work is bringing your mind back, back
to that void that's at the core. But I wasn't any good at it. I tried another kind of meditation
called Shinrin-yoku in Japanese. It's forest bathing. um And I did some running. I did my
forest bathing in Central Park, like a good New Yorker. I guess we can call that a forest.
um But at the same time, yes, I was looking into the meditation that Marcus does. And that
was appealing to me in that it's, I'm confident he set aside time, I think in the morning,
right? However many minutes, 10, 15, 20 minutes, right? And then you could make it longer and
longer. And then eventually if you become a perfected stoic, then you're always in that
mindset, right? um And so, but yes, I'm very far from getting there. But Marcus's, form
of meditation I tried and it was uh pretty effective for me but he makes clear when you're doing
your meditation and it's interesting because he had his notebook I think he wrote down what
he realized after the meditation session but he says you shouldn't be dependent on any books
right he actually talks about uh book reading as a kind of the analogy he uses the word dipsa
which can mean alcoholism thirst or alcoholism in ancient Greek And so it's a thirsty dependence,
like you're an alcoholic, you're dependent on these books and he forbids them um in book
two, any books to support his meditation. It has to be just his mind working. And I understand
because then you're dependent on some physical thing outside of you, right? If you're referring
to books all the time. Now I see. So Marcus uses my mental mori, the awareness of death.
Remember you're going to die. Not with fear, but almost as a motivating force. He says things
like, uh inevitable death is hanging over you. How does mortality function philosophically
in his thinking? Marcus uses it as I see it in two ways. And they're not entirely consistent,
I'll confess, right? The first way he uses death, yes, you said um the memento mori,
right? Mom, I'm just having a drink of water here. is to impart a sense of urgency to him.
says, as you said in that quote, inevitable death is hanging over you, right? And it's
sort, mean, he combines that, you, yes, that death is inevitable, so he needs to hurry,
right? You only have a certain amount of time before you die. Marcus sees the events of
the universe most often, he talks about them as being deterministic, right? That cause makes
effect. which becomes a cause, which makes an effect and goes on forever. But there is wiggle
room, right? In that we humans, this is the origin of what will become the concept of free
will in Western philosophy. We can't prevent the fact that we have to die. Everybody has
to die. That's our destiny, right? But Marcus would say, we can decide how we die, whether
we do it well or badly. And the way to die well is to die grateful, right? That's the way
to do it. But he's also including, this is a common theme in both ancient Greek and Latin
literature, when he talks about the present moment, he's using the seize the day formula
or seize the present moment formula. And the threat of death as he talks about it, the urgency
gives all the more pressure, right? to get things done, to make yourself right here in
the present moment. And then elsewhere, oh in a number of sections, uh Marcus says that
your death is just another, it's nothing to be afraid of, right? And so he has the urgency
on the one side and then the other side, he says death is nothing to be afraid of. He
says you went through puberty, you became an adult, you got married, you reached middle
age, now you're an old age and the last, phase is death, right? And just as everybody has
to go through puberty, so everyone has to die, right? And you should accept that. And then
also, because our material bodies are material things, they are objects of indifference.
And so we should be, he uses, I translate it as, we should be nonchalant, right? When
death comes. And Stoics, uncomfortable to talk about, but it's true. Stoics were comfortable
with suicide. Marcus lays out the conditions under which someone should commit suicide.
He talks about obstacles a lot. that's why CEOs and businessmen really like the meditation.
There are obstacles and you turn them in to opportunities to innovate. But if he says,
you're so blocked by obstacles on every way around that you can't make any headway with
and while yes, performing any of the virtues, then you should kill yourself. um And it seems
um there aren't that many sources on the death of Marcus Aurelius, but m an authoritative
one, Diogenes Laertius, says that Marcus refused food and liquids um when he was 58
and dying, and thus hastened, in a sense, his demise. And thus he seemed to have practiced
what he preached when it came to death. Right. If I remember well, his last words were, the
sun is setting. Go to my son. He is the next, right? He was saying, it's my time. I'm going
to go. That was his last words. Yes. So he was still conscious and yet he's here on a verge
of death thinking about his duties, really. In retrospect, Commodus was a very bad choice.
I have great respect for Marcus Aurelius. And, you know, I understand he, he, he and
his wife, um Marcus begat 14 children on his wife Faustina and all only one son survived
and four daughters survived every other child died the infant mortality rate was very high
in Rome and also there was the Antonine Plague and so yes he really suffered with that and
so I understand he chose his only son to be his successor, in a sense, how could he not,
right? And he also wanted the empire to have some continuity from one emperor to another.
But historians, when I read biographies of Marcus Aurelius, they are very down on him for choosing
Commodus when he should have chosen someone else. That's probably one of his biggest mistakes.
meditation, stoicism has had a remarkable revival in recent years. We got Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss,
the entire self-help movements, why do you think Marcus specifically has exploded in popularity?
What does he offer that let's say Seneca, Epictetus does not? He more than um certainly Seneca
and Epictetus talks about everything other than you communing with your mind or you using the
present moment to do virtues, right? He sees all of everything else as a distraction.
And I would argue there are even, there are far, far more distractions now in the digital
age, in the 21st century than there were in Marcus's day, right? I mean, we are tied to
our phones and every time they beep, we have to look at them, right? um And so, That is
one of the reasons why I see Marcus as distinguishing himself from the other Stoics and being more
relevant to the current age. Also, Marcus, like Epictetus, well, I said, distractions over
and over again. Also though, his philosophy has a lot in common with what is called cognitive
behavioral therapy, the dominant approach that therapists take with their patients right now.
And um I confess, I'm seeing a shrink and she uses CBT as well. And we had a lot of good
conversations about Marcus Aurelius, my therapist and um I. And so Marcus again and again says,
and this is, at first it may, At first, I found it difficult to accept. seemed that the
things that happened to me were wrong, that people that were doing things to me were being
cruel or were wrong, right? But we have to accept all of that in Marcus's philosophy
and then make an adjustment, an internal adjustment um to accept what we saw as a bad deed. And
that allows it then not to have any emotional repercussions inside of you. I learned how
liberating that is, for example, when I came to accept and even be grateful for the fact
that I didn't get that academic job, for example. um And so, yes, partly because meditation
deals with distractions and there are distractions everywhere. That's why he's more popular. And
then also because his philosophy dovetails so well with cognitive behavioral therapy. It's
like a self-help cognitive behavioral therapy. You can do it on your own without a therapist.
In my opinion, I think he's also great for leadership. mean, he's a great example in a sense, like
he's right in the middle of a corrupted empire and he's there and he's trying to be good.
And he's trying to be good and reminds himself to be good and meditations all the time. talks
about how to deal with things, how to deal with bad people, to deal with individuals that
are ungrateful, unkind, stupid, foolish, you know what I mean? Like there's a big long section
about that. So I think it's great also for, for just that for leadership, you see a leader
who's actually trying to be good, which is good. You're right, that is admirable. I have thought
a bit about why CEOs and business people like the meditation so much. It's kind of a cult
favorite among them. And certainly for that reason, I like it. Like if these CEOs and business
people are pushing themselves to become good, um I'm all over it. But yes, certainly um
it has been particularly uh popular. I mean, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around its
popularity. And I'm a classicist and I'm was an academic for a while, classes are kind
of amused when some work they study suddenly somehow becomes popular with non-specialists,
right? um But I would like to say I'm not uncomfortable with that. Like, as a literary artist and
a scholar, I try to bridge that gap between the ancient Greek that most people can't read
and then some book that is going to capture all of that and also, yeah, invite invite new
readers in. think there's just a lot of universal themes also in it. As you said, there's always
this constant struggle. see Marcus really struggling also throughout the book and there's that constant
struggle and how he's trying to deal with it. I think there's those universal ideas that
make it classic and everybody's reading it because of just that. He's an ordinary man with extraordinary
responsibilities and he so much and he's dealing with it. I think that's When I read it, that's
what I admire about him. He's just a man who's trying to deal with so much. And he's not
entirely... You're right. I liked him because the humanity comes through. He's not entirely
consistent. As I've said, on the one hand, he recognizes as a Stoic, he's obliged to get
along with everybody. To be, yes. um and to even make them family members, right? That's
an ideal towards which he strove, but in many other sections, we see him as downright cranky,
right? He's going off on the different types of people, right? Whom he can't respect because
they can't live in accordance with nature. And rather than seeing that as a flaw or an inconsistency,
I see that as expressing Marcus's humanity. Humans, live. in a state of inconsistency.
We have ideals, we wanna fulfill them, right? But on the other side, there are all the frustrations
in life um and there are own prejudices which we're trying to overcome. And so you get to
see all of that in meditations. I mentioned that meditations has a lot in common with
CBT. um And I curiously sitting there listening to Marcus talk with his various voices, right?
I felt as I was translating that like I was Marcus's therapist, that I was his shrink.
I talk about in the introduction, the meditations as a kind of psycho drama. It's a school of
philosophy that, I'm sorry, a school of psychology that started in the 20s and sort of boomed
in the 60s and 70s in which you use drama. You theatrically have patients play out um
situations in their lives or even play out. for example, some emotion that is inside them.
And so we see in the different characters in meditations, I call them the instructor, the
aspirant, and the objector. Those are all aspects of Marcus Aurelius as I see it in a psychodrama
trying to work things out, working towards consistency and enlightenment. And how do you bring them
out? How do you? Oh! Tonally, with different translations. The instructors, that's the first
thing I did when I sat down to figure out how I was gonna translate this and how I was going
to sustain what I call charge or excitement in the work. I recognized that it was in the
voices, right? The instructor is a gruff know-it-all, right? And he is really rough. this is, well,
important in a couple of different ways. He addresses the aspirant. the Marcus who's the
learner and trying to become a perfected Stoic, he addresses him as you, as you would expect,
but it's Marcus talking to himself. And that's the great trick of meditations, that you,
right? In that a reader can't help, but take that you that Marcus is using, he's referring
to himself as referring to oneself, the instructor, sounds like he's speaking directly, immediately
to the reader. And that's another reason for the work's popularity, right? This immediately,
what seems like, though he was originally writing for himself, and I'm certain of it, right?
This ambiguous you that reaches out and welcomes in everybody and makes everybody an aspirant
who is moving towards stoic enlightenment, right? um And so the tone of the aspirant, he speaks
in about 10 % of the sections. He uses an I. oh That character I came to love because unlike
the instructor, the aspirant can be vulnerable, right? He could even say, I'm so frustrated.
I'm still not living my life in accordance with stoic principles. I'm trying really hard, but
I haven't reached that yet. And that humanizes, as I see it, the whole meditations project.
oh So there were those two voices and I would say they're almost opposite, right? The gruff
instructor. and vulnerable aspirant. I've mentioned the objector already, and then Marcus frequently
quotes um famous poets and writers, Euripides, Plato, Homer. And so I realized that the meditations
as I was reading it is polyphonic, as I put it. It has many voices and they each have
their distinct tone, each of the writers and the instructor and the aspirant. And so it
was a lot of me listening. um hearing voices, if you will, listening to the tone of the various
passages and making them distinct and also ideally poignant when they reach the reader.
Okay, so that brings me to a question. How should a first-time reader approach the meditations?
Where should they start? That's interesting. I have been talking to a lot of people to
whom I... bought my translation or to whom I gave copies of the translation, I'm very interested
in reader response. um I would suggest, um some of them read the whole thing from beginning
to end, and that's great, but in terms of a personal project, each of the entries is rich
in its own way. And so I would suggest sitting down at the same time every day, like Marcus
did, right, and just working through. two or three sections at a time, even if they're very
short, right? To use them as the catalyst, if you will, for meditations. And so I would
advise taking it slow and doing two or three books at a time. Also, um there's no reason
to go in order. You can start with any book you want, um frankly. um As the book has come
down to us, and I think this is the way Marcus left it, I have a... reason for that. m The
themes recur frequently, but unpredictably, right? And so if you start anywhere, um you
will be, yes, able to move on from there. There isn't a linear progression in the meditations
toward anything. So you can certainly start anywhere. But I guess um the best, what I
see is closest to an introduction to the meditations actually starts the beginning of Book 2. He
lays out the stoic universe in sections 2.2 and 2.3. There is that opening book, which
I like very much, but it isn't rigidly stoic. He's giving gratitude in that section to people
who were inspirational to him during his life, right? Whose influence he respects. He starts
the rigid stoic philosophy, the theorizing um it with book two. And so I'd advise readers
to start with book two. and do sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 as an introduction to the work.
All right, wonderful. So what is your next translation project? Do you have any other
projects? I am a poet as well as a translator. And I've done, I love translating, right? um
It just comes naturally to me. It's one of the things I can just groove on forever, right?
But I've decided this is my last translation. I think I'm done. going to focus exclusively
on my own original work. When I first started doing translation when I was 18, I saw them
as craft exercises, right? In which you have, I mostly have translated poetry, right? In
which you have the words there and you have to get those, yeah, figure out how to translate
those. But you also have to figure out the vessel, the form into which that poetry is going to
go. Or in meditations, for example, this is a formal, some formal originality on my part,
Marcus is big on lists. And so I lay them out in list format. readers have told me they
find the meditations much more accessible that way. But still I saw translation as a craft
exercise, a way to work on my technique as a writer. um yes, so I saw it originally as
something that would help me in my original work. And so I have to, I feel I have to be
done with those exercises and focus wholly on my own work again. But you know, who knows,
I may end up doing another translation. We shall see. I've been spending a lot of time with
classical Chinese, teaching myself slowly classical Chinese. And it's good. I feel like I'm done
with Greek and Latin. I've done enough. And so I need to do something to keep things fresh
for me. And so I translated a lot of classical Chinese poetry. We'll see if that ever comes
out, but it's been good for me. That's great. So finally, Aaron, where can people follow
you and buy your book? Oh, got it. Yes, I do interact with social media a fair amount. I'm
on Twitter at just my last name, at Puchigian. I'm on Facebook with my name, Aaron Puchigian.
I'm the only one in the world. Trust me, nobody else wants that name. um And then, yes, you
can find bookstores. um Yes, Barnes & Noble, for example, or The Strand, and a number of
independent bookstores. And then you can find it online at WWNorton and of course Amazon.
It's readily available. All right. Wonderful. Thank you, Aaron, for being here. It was a
pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for having me. This is a great talk. Thank you. All right.
Thank you.