The Inner Retreat

Men seek a retreat in the countryside, on the seashore, in the mountains. This is what Marcus Aurelius reproaches his contemporaries with at the opening of Book IV of the Meditations. The reproach holds in a single sentence: you do not need to leave in order to withdraw. The retreat is within.

ancient Greek

Ἀναχωρήσεις αὑτοῖς ζητοῦσιν ἀγροικίας καὶ αἰγιαλοὺς καὶ ὄρη· εἴωθας δὲ καὶ σὺ τὰ τοιαῦτα μάλιστα ποθεῖν. Ὅλον δὲ τοῦτο ἰδιωτικώτατόν ἐστιν, ἐξὸν, ἧς ἂν ὥρας ἐθελήσῃς, εἰς ἑαυτὸν ἀναχωρεῖν.

English

Men seek retreats for themselves — in the countryside, by the sea, in the hills; and you too are wont to long for such things above all. But all this is the mark of a most ordinary mind, when it is in your power, at whatever hour you wish, to retreat into yourself.

The argument is not merely one of comfort. It is metaphysical. If disturbance comes from things, then fleeing things is enough. But if disturbance comes from the judgement passed on things — and this is the fundamental Stoic thesis — then no shore will dissolve it. Agitation follows the traveller. The only place where it can be undone is the place it springs from: thought itself.

It is here that an almost twin intuition runs through ancient China, more than four centuries earlier. In the sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi, the disciple Yan Hui tells Confucius that he has made progress. He has, he says, “forgotten.” Confucius questions him. The disciple specifies: he has forgotten the rites, then the music. And at last he says he has reached zuowang 坐忘 — literally, “sitting in oblivion.”

I let my body fall away, I dismiss my mind, I leave behind form and knowledge, and I merge with the Great Thoroughfare: this is what I call sitting in oblivion.

The two gestures do not say the same thing. Marcus Aurelius keeps a subject that withdraws into itself — a hēgemonikon, a “ruling part,” to which one returns as to a hearth. Zhuangzi, by contrast, suggests the setting-down of the subject, the erasure of the boundary between self and the Whole. One builds a refuge; the other lets go all the way down to the very question of the refuge.

But what brings the two together is a shared refusal. A refusal of the external apparatus. A refusal of the idea that calm is to be found somewhere — a beach, a monastery, a change of scenery. For both, it is precisely attachment to place that constitutes the obstacle. Marcus Aurelius speaks of a retreat at any hour. Zhuangzi speaks of a sitting that no longer needs any support. In both cases, geographical displacement is traded for a motionless movement.

An economy of rest

What Marcus Aurelius and Zhuangzi call into question is what we might name the tourist economy of rest: the idea that one must buy, organise, and travel in order to rest. To that economy they oppose a radical gratuity. Calm is not a good to be acquired; it is a disposition one returns to once one stops exporting it.

Modernity has multiplied anachōrēseis on demand — yoga retreats, meditation courses, getaway weekends. The objection of the two masters bears not so much on these arrangements themselves as on the attachment we develop toward them. The danger is not the shore; it is the belief that we could have no calm except there.

Marcus Aurelius closes his passage with a simple, almost domestic formula: give yourself, then, this rest at every hour. The verb matters. Rest is not found. It is given — by oneself, to oneself. And it is on that condition that it is inexhaustible.