Marcus Aurelius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
For the parts of the whole—everything that nature encloses within the universe—destruction is a necessity; let this be understood in the sense of alteration. But if this were by nature an evil and a necessity for them, the whole would not be well managed, with its parts moving on toward alteration and constituted variously for the purpose of being destroyed. Did nature herself set out to do evil to her own parts, and to make them liable to falling into evil and necessarily bound to fall into it—or did such things happen without her knowing? Both are implausible. And if someone, setting nature aside altogether, should explain these things simply as what happens by their inborn constitution, it would still be ridiculous to say in one breath that the parts of the whole are constituted by nature to change, and in the next to be astonished or vexed at something as though it happened against nature—especially since the dissolution of each thing is into the very elements out of which it was composed. For it is either a scattering of the elements from which it was compounded, or a turning of the solid into earth and of the breath-like into air, so that these too are taken back up into the reason of the whole, whether the whole is periodically consumed by fire or renewed by eternal exchanges. And do not imagine that the solid and the breath-like element in you date from your first birth: all of this took its influx only yesterday and the day before, from the food you ate and the air you drew in. So it is this that changes, which you took in—not what your mother bore. And suppose that you are bound up all too closely with that other thing, your own particular quality—that, I think, has no bearing on what is now being said.