From one of my favorite books…

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others–the living–are those who have pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and and Later.

But the edge is still Out There. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles and LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means of to an end, to the place of definitions.

Here’s what I have learned about edges: They are neither as dramatic or cool as Thompson makes them out to be. I think he’s totally right, they can be really scary. The only people that can tell you about them have crossed a chasm that makes it impossible to ever relate to The Way Things Were.

But if you go around associating them with motorcycles and cliffs and Capital Letters, you’re going to miss all the little ones that are right there in front of you. And you’ll forget all the others you already had the balls to cross and didn’t even know about.

There is reading and then there is researching. When you find a book that you really like, you owe it to yourself to do the research.

Tucker explained much better than I can. He said “ideas have consequences” and we have to look at the person that birthed and embodied the book. Just looking at the ideas themselves isn’t enough, you have to look at what those ideas have done. It’s not always the case, but still–it’s short sighted to act as though the author exists in a vacuum where they can separate their ideas and their personal lives.

The easiest way to combat this is to find the work’s place in history and then explore both backwards and forwards. This is something I have done for a while. After I read Seneca, I kept wrestling with the idea that he may have been an enormous hypocrite. So I started with Wikipedia. There wasn’t much there. Then I went on JSTOR and found a paper called “Seneca on Trial: The Case of the Opulent Stoic” that gave a lot of perspective. (Basically, our notion of his hypocrisy can be traced backed to a single begrudged person) Then I talked about it with Robert Greene and he told me what he knew–his personal history of the work. From there, I got to The Annals by Tacitus which spends a ton of time dissecting Nero and the influence of Seneca. Now, I feel like I can make some conclusions.

If you want to try it with Marcus Aurelius, you should read some of these:

The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I, Chapters III to IV (which cover Marcus and Commodus)

Marcus Aurelius by Mathew Arnold

On Liberty – John Stuart Mill (mentioned briefly but significantly in the middle of the essay)

The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot

The introduction and the last two chapters are crucial to understanding Marcus. The concept of an “inner citadel” was a brilliant metaphor for Marcus’ philosophy. Hadot says that Marcus worked to create a core that fate, hysterics, vice and outside influences could never penetrate. And that he wrote to himself to strengthen the walls. . He warns against the psychological historianism–the idea that we can judge Marcus as a person solely through his work is false. There is no way it embodies all of him, just like this site is only a small part of me. So we have to go deeper, at his rule, his letters, what he strove for. (This is essentially what I am saying here) Hadot is also critical, he examines the passages where Marcus literally begs for death, why he surrounded himself with such awful people, and so on.

The History of the Origins of Christianity Vol. 5 & 6. (I haven’t read these yet but I plan to. Renan is quoted throughout The Inner Citadel and I liked what he had to say)

I am going to start doing this with all my books. It coincides with a project Tucker and I are working on to make sense of his library (with my paltry contribution). If anyone has read deeper on anything I’ve put into my book list, it’d be great if you could email them to me. I am trying to find some way to organize the casual chain of books…

If you’ve read Pressfield’s Virtues of War, you might be familiar with the concept of a daimon. Although the Stoics often called it by a different name, they believed in it too. It’s the idea that we have an inner spirit–a destiny inside us–that pulls and powers us. When you look at accomplished people you see a drive that made the success inevitable. I feel that urge. It is insatiable. That’s why I read so much, always feel like I’m stagnating, it’s the vague notion that I must be heading in the right direction at all times. For the people that’ve asked: that is why I work so hard.

But here’s the thing, I think. A lot of people have that. Maybe even most people. No one “aims” to end up part of a massive shell game, deluding themselves and others. At some point, they broke. When you get to Hollywood you see that most people don’t do anything. I don’t mean that they don’t work hard but that their job literally has no purpose. Again, not in the metaphorical sense–it does not need to exist. They don’t even know HOW to do anything. No wonder they’re unmotivated and lazy. Somewhere, something went wrong.

For me, it’s all about protecting that daimon. I’m absolutely paranoid about it. Were I to lose it, it’d be over. At 20, no less. Your daimon is sort of like your inner-child. Your purity. Your passion. Your clearheadness. The ability to look at problems and solve them instead of accepting them. The drive for a calling over a career. But it is in a constant state of temptation. And when it goes away it doesn’t come back. You make bargains like “80 hours a week for the next 50 years” and “yeah, I’ll sell a product I know is worthless.” Then you’re fucked.

By the time most people have made it through school, they’re gone. 8 years in intellectual prison breaks quite a few spirits. Each year after that, the world weeds us out. Cognitive Dissonance takes care of the ignorance. In preparing for this radically shifting marketplace, I think the single most important thing you can do is to protect that daimon. To prevent and resist breaking.

Here is the quote I try to use:

“Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, lose your sense of shame, or makes you show suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things done behind closed doors.” – Marcus Aurelius