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Welcome back to practical stoicism for Copptown. I hope you're doing well and that you're looking forward to this week's meditation from Marcus.

It is the tenth from book five, and it reads as follows.

Realities are so veiled, one might say, from our eyes that not a few and those not insignificant

thinkers thought them to be incomprehensible, while even the Stoics think them difficult

of comprehension.

And all our ascent to perceptions is liable to alter.

For where is the infallible man to be met? Pass on, then, to objects of

experience, how short their duration, how cheap, and able to be in the possession of the bestial,

the harlot, and the brigand. Next pass to the characters of those who you live with, even the best of whom is hard to suffer.

Not to say that it is hard for a man even to endure himself. In such a fog and filth, in so great a torrent of being and time and movement and moving things,

what can be respected or be altogether the object of earnest pursuit I do not

see? On the contrary, one must console oneself by awaiting nature's release and not chafing at the

circumstances of delay, but finding repose only in two things. First, that nothing will befall me, which is not in accordance

with the nature of the whole. And secondly, that it is in my power to do nothing contrary to my God

and inward spirit, for there is no one who shall force me to sin against this.

So I'm going to start by, let's not say correcting, but providing a little bit of insight

into Farquison's last line, because Farquison is the translator who's translating the

book that we're working through for this particular book,

the translation. I want to provide a version of this same text in a less, let's say,

...