You Must Learn to See | The Stoic Lesson of Marcus Aurelius' Crumbling Statue
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You must learn to see. It can be an ugly world, it can be a boring world, it can be a world of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes.
In 1840 the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Buford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Beauford stopped the young Baldwin. Look, he said as he pointed down into the gutter, what do you see? All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again, and then he saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin a love story, a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter's black water, distorted and radiant.
It's clear in meditations that someone did this for Mark Cerelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things? From the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar's mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase, but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or
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