with commentary by Derren Brown
In the 170s AD, on a military campaign along the Danube, the most powerful man in the world sat down at night and wrote private notes to himself in Greek. He never published them. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome, and the book we now call The Meditations was never meant for us.
The Meditations is that notebook: the private Stoic exercises of an emperor reminding himself that only his thoughts and his actions were within his control, and that everything else (fame, illness, other people’s behavior) should not be allowed to disturb him. Derren Brown, in his Rebind commentary, reads it as the warmest, most human account of Stoicism ever written: a book that works precisely because it was never meant to be one.
That fact, that we are reading a book that was never a book, is the first thing Brown establishes. He arrived at Marcus from exactly the wrong direction: a stage magician and former Pentecostal Christian who found Stoicism through Montaigne and wrote his own book on it. What he brings to The Meditations is not a philosopher’s precision but a performer’s attention to what actually works in practice — and what doesn’t.
A Private Notebook, Not a Treatise
“Marcus repeats himself a lot,” Brown says in his Rebind commentary. “It doesn’t have the satisfying structure of a book written for a reader, that keeps you hooked in some way.” But this is not a flaw. It is the nature of what the text is. Marcus is writing for himself, which means he is often overstating things because that is the language he needs to remind himself of what matters. The repetition is intentional. The old mnemonic techniques go back to the Greeks, and Marcus had been trained by the best rhetoricians Rome had to offer.
If our own diaries were read by somebody else, Brown observes, they’d just be interminable. The Meditations is Marcus Aurelius’s diary. The difference is that his diary happens to contain some of the clearest thinking ever recorded about how to live.
The Argument: What Stoicism Actually Is
The book’s central subject is Stoicism, a two-thousand-year-old philosophy that was enormously popular in the Roman world and has been reviving steadily in the twenty-first century. Brown’s definition is direct: “Stoicism is really about dealing with troubled times. How we avoid unnecessary anxiety, how we avoid unnecessary disturbance, and live in what they’d call an easier accordance with fate. That means living in a more robust and tranquil way — two key adjectives — accepting that life’s difficult and moving with it, rather than constantly fighting against it and trying to control things we can’t.”
The central Stoic distinction is between what is within our control and what isn’t. According to Marcus, only two things are truly within our control: our thoughts and our actions. Everything else, which is to say reputation, money, health, how other people behave, and what happens to us, is not. The Stoic practice is to redirect all effort and attention toward the things that can be controlled, and to treat the rest with what the Stoics called “indifference”, not apathy in the traditional contemporary sense, but a refusal to let them determine your inner state.
Brown is careful to distinguish this from the positive-thinking tradition that has absorbed some Stoic language while reversing its core argument. “Our modern approach to happiness is very much about thinking we can control our fates if we’re optimistic enough,” he says. “Unfortunately, none of that’s true. And where it tends to let us down is when things go badly — suddenly it’s our fault, because we must have done something wrong. The Stoics don’t do that.”
The Providence-or-Atoms Escape Hatch
One of the most useful passages in The Meditations (and the one Brown identifies as the load-bearing logical move that allows Stoicism to survive without requiring religious faith) is Marcus’s “providence or atoms” passage. Marcus poses two possibilities: either the universe is governed by a benign divine providence, or everything is a random collision of atoms with no inherent meaning. His argument is that the Stoic practice holds either way. If providence, then we should submit to it and live in easy accordance with its design. If atoms, then we should decide for ourselves how to live well in the absence of cosmic meaning, which brings us to the same place. “Whatever the reality is,” Brown says, “we are naturally guided to Stoicism.” This makes The Meditations one of the rare philosophical texts that is genuinely useful to both believers and atheists, which is part of why it has never gone out of print.
Why It Rewards Rereading
Brown’s copy of The Meditations is falling apart. The pages have been taped back in and it is covered in marginalia. “Every time I read it, I am discovering something new,” he says. “I was suspicious of that. I’d heard that people do that. The first time I read it, I thought I can’t imagine ever reading this again. But actually, if you go away, particularly if you read a bit of secondary literature around it and things that open up other ideas, then going back to it is more interesting.” Much more interesting.
The perennial appeal of the book, in Brown’s reading, comes from the specific quality of its author: this is someone trying to make sense of their own insecurities and difficulties and the challenges of an extraordinary life. “There’s the person we want to be, and then there’s all the stuff in life that’s happening and getting in the way of that,” Brown says. “The person he wants to be is a great human being and a great emperor, and the stuff that’s coming his way is wars and plagues and everything. It’s just a giant, much more colorful version of what we’re all going through in much smaller ways.”