How quickly all things disappear, our bodies lost, in time even the memory of them will disappear, what is the nature of the things we experience, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain? How worthless, contemptible, sordid, perishable, and dead they are — all this is part of the intellectual faculty to observe. And further considerations. What are they, these people whose judgments and voices confer or deny esteem?
What is death? Someone looking at death per se, and applying the analytical power of his mind to divest death of its associated images, will conclude then that it is nothing more than a function of nature – and if anyone is frightened of a function of nature, he is a mere child.

And death is not only a function of nature, but also to her benefit. Further, how does man touch god, with what part of his being, and when that part of him is in what sort of disposition.

~2.12

The Mediations are repetitive, and so are my reflections upon them. But that’s part of the exercise. It isn’t that Marcus was coming upon these ideas are world busting revelations, he was repeating mantras to himself over and over hoping that they’d stick.

Again, here, he wrestles with mortality, like we all do, steeling himself against its inevitability. Getting upset at a fact of nature is absurd. We all die, all that we ever know will die, all that remember us will die. Even emperors because ghosts, barely visible through the fog of history. Know this, feel this, and death looses some of its power.