Our Stories

Derren Brown starts Book Ten of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations with a line you could never say to anyone else: we can bear whatever our judgment can call a benefit or a duty. Advice like that only works from the inside, he says, and he pairs it with Viktor Frankl writing from Auschwitz about the one thing that can't be taken from you. He also enjoys Marcus's image of eyes that shouldn't only want pale colors and teeth that shouldn't only want pap.

The turn is repetition. Marcus looks across time and hears people moaning like pigs at a sacrifice; Brown hears comfort in it, the same relief a touring performer feels when something goes wrong on stage and is forgotten within an hour of leaving it. Seeing the same dramas played out by everyone, he argues, depersonalizes tragedy into melancholy, and joins you to the rest of humanity, each of us dragging a heavy bag of rocks.