---
title: "Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning"
author: "Rosa Ibanez (@nightshift)"
date: 2025-12-07T08:33:38.256Z
updated: 2025-12-07T08:33:38.256Z
canonical: "https://jot.place/@nightshift/marcus-aurelius-at-four-in-the-morning"
description: "How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning."
tags:
  - "close-reading"
  - "nursing"
  - "primary-sources"
  - "stoicism"
  - "translation"
---

# Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

The ward at four is not quiet. It hums. Pumps, ventilators, the fridge in the medication room that has needed a new gasket since before I started, and under all of it the extractor fan, which is the loudest thing in the building and the first one you stop hearing. Overhead lights off, so you get monitor glow and corridor light through the glass at an angle that makes everybody look worse than they are. The coffee tastes like a hot coin.

I keep the Meditations in my bag. Hays, Modern Library, 2002, cover coming away from the spine. I have read it in a bookshop chair and I have read it at 04:20 on an upturned linen box. They are not the same book.

Everybody quotes 5.1. It is the getting out of bed one.

> Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?
>
> Meditations 5.1, translated by Gregory Hays

In the bookshop chair that lands. At 04:20 it does not, because I am not in bed and nobody in this building is in bed by choice. The passage assumes a reader who decides when his day begins. Everything after that line is a negotiation with his own reluctance, and reluctance is a luxury good. I have a rota.

He was not at a spa, I know. Book 2 is headed among the Quadi on the river Gran and Book 3 at Carnuntum, so these are notes written on the Danube frontier during a war and a plague. But also: in 169 he ordered Galen north with him as court physician, and the following spring let him off after a report reached him that Asclepius was against the trip. In eleven years nobody has released me from a shift because a god advised against it.

His problem was volition. Mine is a schedule. The text does not know the difference, and neither do the men who quote it at you in a gym.

Here is the one that works.

> Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, "Why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it?" You'll be embarrassed to answer.
>
> Meditations 8.36, Hays

At four in the morning the danger is not the work. The work is fine, it is a sequence of tasks and I am good at it. The danger is the arithmetic: three hours left, then handover, then the drive, then five more of these, then the rest of my working life doing this, and my back, and my mother's appointment on Thursday. None of it is happening. It is a spreadsheet built in a dark room by somebody who has not eaten since nine.

8.36 does not tell me to be strong. It tells me the spreadsheet is a category error, which is a technical observation, and a technical observation I can use. Some nights the answer to why I cannot endure it is not embarrassing at all, so I skip his last line.

## What the book actually is

He wrote it in Greek, for himself, and the title that comes down to us, Ta eis heauton, means something like the things to himself. There is no reason to think he meant anyone to read it. Not a book. Notes. My Greek is bad enough that I read him in English and check single words in a lexicon, and @marginalia would be polite about that in a way I would not deserve.

And the notes repeat. He tells himself not to be angry at stupid and dishonest people, then tells himself again, and by 11.18 he is setting out nine numbered arguments against anger and then adding a tenth. Nobody writes ten numbered arguments about a problem they have solved. He tells himself death is nothing, four or five times a book. He tells himself to stop wanting to be elsewhere, which is 4.3, and if you have ever planned a holiday during a meeting you know he lost that fight too.

The repetition is the value. It is the only evidence in the book that the method is hard. At 5.9 he tells himself to get back up when he fails, which is a sentence written by somebody who failed recently and expects to again next week.

What circulates online is the reverse. They cut 5.1 at "stay warm," so it becomes an instruction rather than an argument he is losing. They keep the resolution and delete the struggle. The struggle is the only part I have ever been able to use.

## The hour itself

Spanish has a word for the block of night I work in. Madrugada. Not the small hours, which sounds like a poem, and not early morning, which is a lie about what is going on in the building. Madrugada is a place with an address. Marcus is writing about dawn, and in his version dawn is the threshold he has to be talked over. In mine it is what I count down to. @thirdculture/the-words-i-cannot-say-in-english is about that gap.

At 07:00 I hand over. Numbers, then what worries me, then what I could not finish. Then I sit in the car for ten minutes before I drive, which all of us do and none of us mention.

I do not feel improved. I feel like somebody who got through a night. Which is what he was, most nights, writing it down again in case it had not held.