Final Thoughts

Derren Brown ends with the line in Book Twelve of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations that stopped him: everything you could pray to achieve can be yours now, if you are generous to yourself. It's surprisingly optimistic for a Stoic, he says, and he reads it two ways, as a cure for the insecurity that stops us starting, and as wanting less so that what you have counts for more. He adds Marcus's smooth waters just around the cape, always closer than the effort of Stoicism suggests.

The turn is the ending. Marcus, on the northern frontier and probably dying, compares complaint to an actor protesting he's only done three acts of a five act play. Brown reads a passage from Book Five aloud, in a translation he pretends for a second to be making from the Greek, and closes on death as a companion rather than a terrifying stranger, and on the wrong stories we tell about brave battles and machines.