Inner Worlds

Derren Brown couldn't find one theme in Book Four of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, so he picks the ideas that struck home. First, retreat: the most powerful man in the world needing a quiet place to regroup, and advising that the doctrines you retreat to be simple and few. Brown connects it to losing his faith and losing, with it, the objective yardstick of his own worth. He then turns to fame, which he knows a little about in the UK, and which he says exists only in other people's minds.

The turn comes with change. Brown draws a graph: your aims on one axis, what life throws back on the other, and a real life undulating along the diagonal between them, which modern optimism ignores. Problems, he says, aren't in the way of life; they are life. He closes by setting Marcus's rocky headland against Martha Nussbaum's porous rock, and suggests the rest of us might prefer the rock the water moves through.