Marcus Aurelius Arguing With His Bed: Meditations 5.1, Line by Line

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being.” Written in a notebook Marcus Aurelius addressed to himself, that sentence is his answer to getting out of bed: say what the morning is for before the body has had its say, then argue with the blanket until the argument is won. The rest of Meditations 5.1 in George Long’s 1862 translation is that argument, and it runs in a particular order, which is the order followed here.

Who was he talking to?

The book we call Meditations has a Greek title, Ta eis heauton, which means roughly “to himself.” It reads like a notebook. The entries are usually dated to about 170 to 180 AD, when Marcus was emperor and spending long stretches of the Marcomannic wars on the Danube frontier. Some manuscript notes attach Book 1 to the river Gran and Book 2 to Carnuntum, a legionary base near modern Vienna, but those notes are disputed and nobody can place Book 5 in a tent or a town.

Pierre Hadot, in The Inner Citadel (English translation by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998), argued that the entries should be read as spiritual exercises, short drills a person performs on himself to change how he sees things. That reading fits 5.1. Nobody else is in the room. The sentences are addressed to a man who has not moved yet.

First, the question about the mood

Right after the opening instruction comes a question in his own voice: “Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?” The dissatisfaction is treated as odd, almost a clerical error. He has been handed work, he knows what it is, and the only thing that has gone wrong is the mood. A mood, in Stoic terms, is something you can interrogate.

The blanket gets to speak

Then he gives the other side its lines. “Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?” The weak reply arrives with no ceremony: “But this is more pleasant.”

Imagine the scene, and it is only imagined, since the text gives no room: a lamp burned down to a smear, a stone floor cold enough to ache through the sandal, a wool blanket holding the night’s heat against his ribs. Against that, a sentence about the work of a human being has to be fairly good.

He concedes. Warmth is more pleasant, and he says so. What he does next is turn the pleasure into a charge sheet: “Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion?” The blanket, which seemed like a neutral fact of the morning, becomes a rival theory of what a life is for, and a rather small one. The phrase “keep myself warm” is comic work. It makes the most powerful man in the Mediterranean sound like a cat on a radiator.

Then he goes outdoors

Once the blanket has been put on trial, the passage leaves the room. “Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe?”

The logic is simple and a little stern. Every creature he can think of does what it is built to do without a speech. Then, with the bees still buzzing: “And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?” The word that does the work is haste. He asks why he is the one animal on the estate that hesitates, and he does not wait around for an answer that would let him off.

Marcus Aurelius’s advice for getting out of bed in Meditations 5.1 is to reframe the act as the start of work that fits what a human being is for, and to measure his reluctance against creatures such as bees and ants that simply do their part. The passage offers no technique for sleepiness. It offers a reason, delivered as an argument, to be used in the moment before the decision.

Does he let himself rest?

He does. The objection comes in plain: “But it is necessary to take rest also.” His answer: “It is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too.” Nature limits eating and drinking, he says, and he goes past those limits. In his work, he admits, the opposite happens, and he stops short of what he can do. So this is not a man against sleep. It is a man auditing where his own excess falls.

What an alarm cannot do

Think about the moment he is addressing. The body is warm and heavy, the room is dark, and the mind is slow to arrive. (That fog has a name and a biology, which the post on sleep inertia goes through.) An alarm can end the sleep. It cannot say anything. It has no view on whether this particular morning is worth rising for, and it cannot answer back when the blanket makes its case.

Marcus seems to have understood that the first conscious minute is a contest, and that whoever speaks first and best tends to win it. His moves are all ways of getting your side into the room before the other side finishes its sentence. Writing the argument down also made it something rehearsed, and rehearsal is what makes it an exercise in Hadot’s sense. The post on voluntary discomfort covers Marcus’s other, physical exercises in doing without comfort. Thoreau, in the 19th century, thought the machine was the weak part and argued against waking by one.

Lookups for one notebook entry

Who translated the Meditations quoted here, and why that version? George Long published his English translation in 1862, so it is in the public domain and can be quoted at length; most modern translations are under copyright. Long’s formal English is why ‘thou’ and ‘dost’ appear throughout the quoted lines.

Was Meditations written for other people to read? The Greek title, Ta eis heauton, is usually rendered ‘to himself’, and the book reads like a private notebook. There is no reliable evidence that he meant it for publication, and we do not know how it came to circulate after his death.

Is there a well-known reading of the Meditations as exercises rather than as a diary? Yes. Pierre Hadot argued in The Inner Citadel (translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998) that the entries work as spiritual exercises, practiced and rewritten rather than simply recorded.

What we cannot know

We do not know when he wrote 5.1, whether he wrote it on a morning he had just struggled through or as a general reminder, or how often he returned to it. The text does not say that it worked. A man who needs to write the same argument down has at least some evidence that it did not work every time, and a notebook that survives tells us what he wanted to believe about his mornings. Read it as a well-built attempt. Somewhere in the draughty dark of a tent or a villa, a lamp is turned up, a wool blanket is pushed back, and a bare foot finds the floor. For a Roman on the same subject at a much larger scale, Seneca’s essay on where a lifetime goes makes a useful companion.