WEBVTT

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What I don't know
is why this poem

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is called what it is called.

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It's called "Not the Waves as
They Make Their Way Forward."

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And Virgil is in it briefly
and Marcus Aurelius, but you

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don't have to know anything.

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So I'm just saying it.

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It feels scary
and that it's not.

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It's so much of life.

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Not the Waves as They
Make Their Way Forward.

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Like Virgil, Marcus
Aurelius died

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believing that
his triumphs, when

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pitched against his failures,
had come to very little.

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I don't know.

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Given the messiness
of most lives,

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humble, legendary, all the rest
in between, their interiors,

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I mean, it's hard
to say he was wrong.

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Black night, black train,
freight of worries.

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Things that stay the same.

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Having reached that
point that even

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the luckiest sometimes
never get close to,

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where desire at last offers
nothing more nor less

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than what restrained can.

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Marcus Aurelius wrote down some
thoughts meant apparently only

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for himself, though,
they became meditations.

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A book without, which by now,
he'd pretty much be forgotten.

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It begins with gratitude.

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How it ends is painful.

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If I'm remembering
right, but it isn't pain.

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I do recommend reading
Marcus Aurelius every fall.

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I do.

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It's not very long.

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It gives you a real perspective.

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