ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις

The universe is flux; life is opinion.

-Marcus Aurelius

Always trying to find ways to stay connected or reconnect with my sons, the other day I sent a message on Telegram to Jim, now safely ensconced in Istanbul, looking for a little insight using his Latin skills.

I had recalled that years ago, when I was freshly home from the war and trying to make sense of what I'd just experienced and the dissonance of my return to peacetime life, my nightstand book and source of insight and strength was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Remembered, perhaps incorrectly, as one of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius had been adopted in his youth by a truly great emperor, Antoninus Pius, and raised to be the very model of the philosopher king. But things didn't work out quite that way. Antoninus lived a lot longer than expected, leaving Marcus to take the reins of the Roman Empire at the age of forty.

Once he was emperor, Marcus found he wasn't cut out for the rough-and-tumble of imperial politics, preferring instead to write and think. In some ways, he was precisely the wrong man at the wrong time for Rome, as the barbarians across the Danube grew restive, and he spent most of his time in a tent camp in Central Europe, defending the Empire's frontiers. It was here, perhaps longing for the philosopher's life, that he wrote the Meditations, a series of notes to himself on the topic of right living. Meditations isn't a particularly original work, with passages cribbed from the Greeks who came before him. Still, it is recognized as perhaps the best known and most accessible portal into the world of Stoic philosophy.

It was one of those cribbed insights, originally articulated by Democrates some seven hundred years before Marcus was born (consider how we compress all things "ancient" into one era of the human epoch--Marcus Aurelius was as far removed from Democrates as we are from Aquinas), that stuck with me all these years, the line with which I began today's blog. "The universe is flux; life is opinion." I'd hoped that striking up this conversation with Jim would not only provide an entre to a general conversation with him, but also might illuminate a meaning that lies hidden in the English translation. In my seminary days, I found that happened all the time when one undertook the arduous (for me at least) task of parsing the words of one of Paul's letters, or the parallel pericopes of the Gospels, to discern something lost in the journey from koine Greek to English.

But Jim didn't respond, maybe because he was busy, or maybe because my question showed an unseemly ignorance on my part. You see, Marcus would not have written those words in Latin, the official language of the Empire; rather, he would have spoken and written in the same koine Greek with which I struggled at Sewanee and during my friend Tom's endlessly patient Greek lessons and counseling sessions. Jim's Latin, which a dozen years ago was quite strong, would be unavailing.

As I think of it, I should've turned in the other direction and asked Issac, who still seems to have some grasp of ancient Greek. Of course, I recall his training was in Attic Greek, to which koine is sort of a hillbilly cousin, but I imagine he would've had no trouble with my question.

[What a cool thing it is to have young men in the family who read Greek, read Latin, and bring a worldview developed in part by traveling the world. P and I are incredibly lucky].

Turning to the translation issue, the key word here is ὑπόληψις, "hypolepsis", which can convey a number of related concepts. As articulated above, it can mean "opinion". But likewise, one may fairly translate it as "perception", or "understanding", or even "assumption". What might a man have meant with this word, sitting in a tent going on two millenia ago, in a world illuminated by torchlight and filled with spirits and mystery. We struggle to understand our contemporaries at even the most basic level; what hope do we have of grasping the message this emperor wrote to himself in a language that evolved to navigate a world that to us might as well be another planet?

On a related note, this is why I'm completely unqualified to be a judge in 2022, a time when a swath of our judiciary claims the ability to glean the meaning of words written in a society closer to Marcus's than our own in its technology and organization, to tell us what a Constitutional phrase means while denying any measure of subjectivity, either as to the author's intent or the reader's. It is pure hubris, a nonsensical exercise when one considers that the very purpose of language is inextricably intertwined with matters of intent.

Whew. Wandered off the reservation with that one. You should have been there for my two judicial appointment interviews all those years ago, sitting in a government-furnished conference room with the Florida Capitol right outside, a bunch of thirty-ish Federalist Society true believers trying to ferret out a potential libtard "living Constitution" jurist sitting smirking at them in his bow tie. Perhaps the greatest blessing of my life was that my visible disdain for the whole exercise saved me from spending the balance of my career on the bench. I can still tell a dirty joke, let someone buy me lunch, have that third cocktail in a public place. This is better.

Before I leave the Meditations, I want to note one of Marcus's techniques for addressing the questions that comprise an examined life, because it is precisely the vehicle I used this past weekend to improve my golf game. Throughout his musings, he speaks to himself in the third-person; we treat the writings as if they're addressed to us, the future generations that might benefit from his lived wisdom, but really Marcus is talking to himself. And he pretty much never says "I", never speaks in the first person. His admonitions to "you" regarding how to approach the challenges of life make the words approachable to us, but his actual purpose is to remove himself from the events he's experiencing, and to speak to himself as a wise and trusted friend who merely observes and advises. And it allows a measure of objectivity that is fundamental to the Stoic life.

Which is sort of ironic, I guess, when you consider the phrase "life is opinion", which feels awfully subjective. But is it? One might argue that what Marcus is trying to say is that flux and transition are the objective facts of life; whether we are depressed or resigned or joyful in the midst of life's sturm und drang is pretty much a matter of how we process it all. And, except for an inescapable biological component, we own that understanding, which can either be a reactive and rudderless emotional roller coaster, or guided by processes and fundamental concepts that provide the framework Marcus believes will lead to εὐδαιμονία, eudamonia, which we in the twenty-first century West translate as "happiness", although the concept is probably closer to "well-being."

It's probably not a sign of eudamonia here at 407 that I've been up on-and-off since one in the morning, creating task lists in my head for the crush of work stretching from here through the end of the summer.

The framed art lines the floorboards because Peg has directed that I not knock holes in her freshly painted walls when we both know she's just going to move the pictures around once she gets here in a few weeks. You can't smell the photo, but the place carries a tinge of the aroma of the Mexican leftovers on which I feasted when I returned from work at eight last night. I tried to knock down the cheesy, spicy scent by lighting a candle or two, but remarkably there's not a single firestarter in this condo. Peg has a half dozen strewn both at Tara and Wyldswood. She's the pyromaniac among the two of us, and the complete absence of firestarting tools is a reminder that P's not spent much time here lately. Soon perhaps.

Time to get cleaned up and to the office ahead of an 8 a.m. Zoom deposition in a very complicated construction case, then I'll fly to Wyldswood for the night before heading to Tallahassee tomorrow morning for more deposition fun. Then, in sha allah and weather permitting, a long flight to Corning and P.