Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream.

Marcus Aurelius

That line above is from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (the version I was reading was “A New Translation“). I was awake at 3 AM and reading at the kitchen table, as usual, and it hit me like a lightning bolt.

As I understand it he’s saying that we are fools in a web of self-deception, something that he riffs on a lot. Here’s another fragment on the same theme:

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig.

It wasn’t only the thought that struck me, but also the tweet-like shortness, without twitter.