It too is one of the things required by nature. But the Stoic trains themselves to see through conventional values, to accept death as a part of the ebb and flow of nature.ĭon't look down on death, but welcome it. Conventional values teach us to fear death and hate it, as an intrusion of savage nature into our carefully-ordered plans. The memento mori reminds us that, even amid the security and prosperity of great civilisations like that of Rome or the West today, death can come at any time. My favourite example is the Old English tenth century poem The Wanderer, in which an exiled knight mournfully ponders what has happened to all his old comrades: This exercise developed into a whole genre of literature, known as the Ubi Sunt, or 'where are they now'. Democritus was killed by ordinary vermin, Socrates by the human kind. But it was moisture that carried him off he died smeared in cowshit. Heraclitus often told us the world would end in fire. Alexander, Pompey, Caeser – who utterly destroyed so many cities, cut down so many thousand foot and horse in battle – they too departed this life. The Chaldeans predicted the deaths of many others in due course, their own hour arrived. Hippocrates cured many illnesses – and then fell ill and died. It was the custom of Roman triumphs, for example, for a slave to stand behind the triumphant general in his victory parade, and tell him ' memento mori' – remember, in your hour of glory, that you are destined for the dust.ĭon't take your worldly achievements (or lack of) too seriously, the Stoics counsel, because they won't mean much when your dead. This is an antidote against any excessive vanity over one's achievements, or self-loathing over one's failures. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries.”Ĭonsider, he tells himself, the “decomposition of matter which underlies each one of us: water, dust, bones, stench”.Īnother exercise is to remind oneself how all the glorious figures of the past, the wise, the beautiful and the powerful, are all now dead and buried.
Thus Marcus Aurelius exhorted himself: “Stop letting yourself be distracted.Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh.
#Memento mori free
One way to free ourselves from the body was to remind ourselves that the body is just a vehicle, and one destined for the scrap-heap. Thereby, we became less like animals, and more like gods. Instead, the central aim of philosophy, as declared by Socrates, was to teach humans to free the divine part of them – their soul – from the body and the passions. The memento mori is a meditative exercise to remind the Stoic student that the things of the world – the body, fashion, career, reputation, even family – should not be the primary focus of our minds, because these things can be swept away by death in a moment. This is surprising, and revealing of our own culture, because before the mid-20th century, it was actually the most popular and widely-used of the Stoic techniques. Perhaps the Stoic spiritual exercise that has fallen furthest from popularity and common usage is the memento mori, the remembrance of death.
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