Children as Leaves

Derren Brown reaches the two books where Marcus Aurelius runs out of comforting things to say about grief. Marcus has buried most of his own children, and Brown puts a real number under an image the emperor borrows from an old poem: a child is no more lasting than a leaf. From there the two men widen out together, from a soul that stretches across the whole universe and finds nothing new there, down to the specific irritation of courtiers who flatter a man they privately despise. Brown ends somewhere practical: how much a person should expect from people who were never going to give them what they wanted.