To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you.
The same with dancing: individual movements and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.
And with everything — except virtue and what springs from it. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.
Apply this to life as a whole.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.2
What can we call this process of disassembling a melody into individual notes? Decomposition, of course! And if you wanted a picture to illustrate this philosophy of life, you couldn’t do much better than this:
(What a perfect image! Even the green grass has been “analysed” into its constituent primaries.)
Marcus’s obsession with atoms. “Or perhaps it’s all just atoms” — meaning, to him, meaningless. If a thing has parts, the parts are real and the whole is not.
And how arbitrary is that “except virtue and what springs from it”?
Could you love a severed hand or head or foot or bone? “Apply this to life as a whole.”
But I don’t find the first word of Marcus’s argument convincing. Nor the second, nor the third . . . and you can see where that gets us.
