How to Get Through Basic Training

My friend Jerry found his mantra in Marine basic training. It was “a slave can be a Christian.” Jerry wasn’t a Christian and he didn’t intend to be anybody’s slave. But he felt he understood the point of it all: no matter what happens, I am still I, and they can’t take that away from me.[1]

About the same time (though in a different place) I had my own basic training mantra. It comes from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I carried the book with me for several years: a little green hardcover, probably an Everyman. I particularly remember:

The time of a man's life is as a point; the substance of it ever flowing, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful; to be brief, as a stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as a smoke, so are all that belong unto the soul. Our life is a warfare, and a mere pilgrimage. Fame after life is no better than oblivion. What is it then that will adhere and follow? Only one thing, philosophy. And philosophy doth consist in this, for a man to preserve that spirit which is within him, from all manner of contumelies and injuries, and above all pains or pleasures. (II, 15)

And this:

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness-all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading (II,1)

I don’t think I’d embrace this view wholeheartedly today. I’m too assertive or impulsive for stoic detachment, not at all above pains or pleasures. But it certainly served me well at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in 1957.

A side note: my translation was and is the work of one George Long; and I must say I find it vastly superior to any other translation of Marcus I’ve ever laid eyes on. It has a mix of detachment and spooky elegance that suits Marcus to a T. For years I have vaguely assumed that we could date Long to the great age of English translation ion the 16^th-17^th Century—Golding, Florio, Chapman, the kind of stuff Shakespeare fed off. Wrong by some 200 years: evidently he was born in 1800. He was the very model of a Victorian intellectual at times a professor of Greek (At University College, but also, for a short time, at the University of Virginia), and for a while a reader in law. He was active in the Society for the Propogation of Useful Knowledge; he edited editions of Xenophon and Herodotus; Gladstone gave him a 100-pound pension from the civil list. Hard earned and well deserved is what I say, and congratulations to Gladstone for his discernment.

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[1] Turns out the line is from Martin Luther, his Letter to the Swabian Peasants, where he counsels against rebellion. Jerry might not have liked it so well if he knew the whole context.