ENGLISH COMMENTARY
is secure against all assaults, and to that fortress a man should flee for safety. He is a fool who has not learned this lesson, an unhappy man who, learning it, chooses to remain outside (ch. 48).
'He that is within the wall and rampart of that City need not fear that he deserves to be an exile: he who ceases to desire to dwell herein, ceases likewise to deserve her shelter.'[1]
Chs. 49–50. Man's judgement is upheld by making certain of the experience presented to it, and by adding nothing to it from itself. All it can add is the recognition that what befalls it is not a surprise to it, but an instance of what it has already learned.
Surprise at and complaint about events is as foolish as to find fault with the shavings in a carpenter's workshop; they are waste, but inevitable results of the material he works in. In Nature's workshop the great Artificer employs what man in his folly condemns as waste in order to create what is new and flourishing; with her handicraft, her material, her own room, Nature is satisfied.
This is the solution Marcus offers to the problem, proposed by the Epicureans[2] and other critics, of waste and imperfection in the Universe. He would have met in the like spirit of optimism any criticism of imperfection, Helmholtz's remarks[3] on the eye as an imperfect organ of sight, or Huxley's censure of the extravagant waste of life in the natural world.[4]
Ch. 51. Two distinct aphorisms. The first is a reminder of moral requirements often proposed by him before, the second an image of the self-dependence of the soul, or rather of its dependence upon a hidden source within.
The vivid words, 'they slay, they cut in pieces, they hunt down with curses', like those in vii. 68, and like Plato's description of the just man broken on the rack,[5] serve to show the power of moral liberty. In a literary sense, they are a foil to the beautiful description of the crystal water rising from the spring, a description which recalls the words addressed to the woman of Samaria: 'the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water
