Marcus Aurelius, not wise

Marcus Aurelius:

You will think little of the entertainment of song or dance or all-in wrestling if you deconstruct the melodic line of the song into its individual notes and ask yourself of each of them: “Is this something that overpowers me?” You will recoil from that admission. So too with a comparable analysis of dance by each movement and each pose, and the same again with wrestling. Generally, then, with the exception of virtue and its workings, remember to go straight to the component parts of anything, and through that analysis come to despise the thing itself. And the same method should be applied to the whole of life.

Meditations, 11.2, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Of course Marcus lived long before Art Tatum, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and [insert the name of an all-in wrestler of your choice here]. And it seems not to have occurred to him that music and movement take place in and across time.

Also from Marcus Aurelius
On change : On distraction : On Maximus : On revenge

[The translator’s comment on 11.2: “An extreme (and utterly unconvincing) example of the reductive analysis which Marcus frequently recommends and employs.” I’m at a loss to name an all-in wrestler.]