The Socrates Express

1. How to Get Out of Bed like Marcus Aurelius

7:07 a.m. Somewhere in North Dakota. Aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder, en route from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

Morning light slants across my cabin window. I’d like to say it wakes me gently, but the truth is I was not asleep. My head feels as if it’s been tumble-dried. A dull pain radiates from my temples to the rest of my body. A fog, thick and toxic, clouds my brain. Mine is a body at rest but not a rested body.

When it comes to sleep, there are two types of people. The first type views slumber as a bothersome interruption of life, an inconvenience. The second considers sleep one of life’s unalloyed pleasures. I fall into the latter category. I have few ironclad rules, but one is this: do not mess with my sleep. Amtrak has, and I am not happy.

The relationship between train travel and sleep is, like most relationships, complicated. Yes, the rocking motion lulled me to sleep, but soon other kinetic sensations—including, but not limited to, the Lateral Lurch, the Sudden Jolt, and the Undulating Roll (aka the Wave)—jarred me awake repeatedly throughout the night.

The sun summons me from bed with all the sweetness of a drill sergeant. Our demons do not haunt us at nighttime. They strike in the morning. We are at our most vulnerable when we wake, for that is when the memory of who we are, and how we got here, returns.

I roll over, pulling the baby-blue Amtrak blanket against my body. Sure, I could get out of bed—really I could—but why bother?

“Good morning, everyone!”

I had dozed off but am awakened, not by a Lateral Lurch or an Undulating Roll, but by a voice. It is crisp and perky.

Who is that?

“My name is Miss Oliver, your café car attendant. Your café car is open and serving. But if you want service from Miss Oliver you must always wear shoes, shirts—and kindness!”

Good Lord. There’s no going back to sleep now. I reach into my backpack and fumble for a book, careful not to disrupt my blanket. There it is. Meditations. A thin volume. Not more than 150 pages, and with wide margins. The jacket cover features a relief of a man, bearded and muscular, astride a horse. His eyes possess the quiet power of someone with nothing to prove.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, commanded an army of nearly half a million men, and ruled over an empire that comprised one-fifth of the world’s population and stretched from England to Egypt, from the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Tigris. But Marcus (we’re on a first-name basis) was not a morning person. He lingered in bed, doing most of his work in the afternoon, after a siesta. This routine put him at odds with his fellow Romans, most of whom rose before dawn. On the streets of Rome, bleary-eyed children walked to school in the predawn darkness. Marcus, thanks to his elite background, had been homeschooled. He could sleep in. And he did, throughout his life.

Marcus and I don’t seem to have much in common. Centuries separate us, not to mention a not-insignificant power differential. Marcus controlled an empire that covered an area equal to roughly half the continental United States. I control an area roughly half the size of my desk and, truth be told, even that is a struggle. I’m forever deflecting revolts by rebellious business cards, magazine subscription notices, cat hair, three-day-old tuna sandwiches, the cat, Buddhist trinkets, coffee mugs, back issues of Philosophy Now, the dog, 1099 forms, the cat again, and for reasons not entirely clear, given that I live 150 miles from the nearest ocean, sand.

Yet I read Marcus and these differences dissolve. We are brothers, Marcus and I. He, running an empire and wrestling with his demons; and me, feeding the cat and wrestling with my demons. We have a common enemy: mornings.

Mornings set the tone for the day. Bad days follow bad mornings. Not always, but more often than not. Under the covers on a cold and gray Monday morning, rank and privilege count for nothing. Wealth, so helpful in other aspects of life, is useless. If anything, affluence conspires with the duvet to detain you in the horizontal position.

Mornings provoke powerful, conflicting emotions. On the one hand, morning smells of hope. Every dawn is a rebirth. Ronald Reagan didn’t campaign on a slogan of “Late Afternoon in America.” It was his promise of “Morning in America” that catapulted him to the White House. Likewise, great ideas don’t dusk on us. They dawn on us.

For some of us, though, mornings smell of simmering despair. If you don’t like your life, chances are you don’t like your mornings. Mornings are to an unhappy life what the opening scene is to The Hangover Part III. A taste of the awfulness to come.

Mornings are a time of transition, and transitions are never easy. We’re leaving one state of consciousness, sleep, and entering another, wakefulness. To put it in geographic terms, mornings are the border town of consciousness. A Tijuana of the mind. Disorienting, with vague hints of danger.

Philosophers are as divided about mornings as they are everything else. Nietzsche woke at dawn, splashed cold water on his face, drank a glass of warm milk, then worked until 11:00 a.m. Immanuel Kant made Nietzsche look like a slacker. He woke at 5:00 a.m., the Königsberg sky still ink-black, drank a cup of weak tea, smoked a pipe—only one, never more—then got to work. Simone de Beauvoir, bless her, didn’t wake until 10:00 a.m., and lingered over her espresso. Marcus, alas, had no such luxury: he was born some 1,200 years before the invention of coffee.

Suicide, said the French existentialist Albert Camus, is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Is life worth living or not? The rest was just so much metaphysical claptrap. Simply put, if there is no philosopher, there is no philosophy.

Camus’s proposition is logically sound but, in my mind, incomplete. Once you’ve wrestled with his suicide question, and concluded that, yes, life is worth living (for now; existential conclusions are always contingent), you confront another, even more vexing question: Should I get out of bed? This question, I believe, is the one truly serious philosophical problem. If a philosophy can’t extract us from under the covers, what good is it?

The Great Bed Question, like all great questions, is actually many questions disguised as one. Let’s pull back the comforter and examine it. On one level, we’re asking can I get out of bed. Unless you are disabled, the answer is yes, you can. We are also asking whether it is beneficial to get out of bed, and crucially, should you get out of bed. This is where it gets tricky.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume thought a lot about these sorts of questions, though rarely from bed. He divided any inquiry into two parts: an “is” and an “ought.” The “is” part is observational. We observe, without judgment, the empirical benefits of getting out of bed: increased blood flow, for instance, and earning potential.

The “ought” part contains a moral judgment. Not what are the benefits of getting out of bed but why we ought to do so. Hume thought we jumped too quickly from “is” to “ought.” A moral “ought” never follows directly from a factual “is.” (That’s why the “is-ought problem” is also known as “Hume’s Guillotine,” since he cleaves “is” from “ought” and insists on a gap between the two.) Embezzling money from your employer is likely to lead to negative outcomes; therefore you ought not to embezzle.

Not necessarily, says Hume. You can’t move from a statement of fact to a statement of ethics. Getting out of bed may be healthy and lucrative, but that doesn’t mean we “ought” to do so. Maybe we don’t want better blood flow and increased earning potential. Maybe we like it just fine here, under the covers. It is this pesky “ought” that, I think, explains our predicament. We feel we ought to get out of bed, and if we don’t there must be something wrong with us.

To rise or not to rise? Under the covers, warm and coddled, competing impulses duke it out with the vigor of a Socratic dialogue, or a cable news show. The stay-in-bed camp makes a strong case. It is warm and safe in bed, not womblike but close. Life is good, and no less a philosopher than Aristotle said the good life was all that mattered. Conversely, it is cold out there. Bad things happen out there. Wars. Pandemics. Easy-listening music.

It seems like a slam dunk for the stay-in-bed camp. Yet nothing in philosophy is ever clear-cut. There is always a “yet.” Entire philosophical systems, cognitive superstructures, towering edifices of thought, have been built upon that one monosyllabic word: yet.

Yet life out there beckons. We have precious little time on this planet. Do we really want to spend it horizontally? No, we don’t. Surely the life force, pulsing through our weary veins, is powerful enough to wrest a middle-aged man, slightly overweight but not obese, from bed. Isn’t it?

This conversation, in some form, has been taking place under the covers for as long as there have been covers and people to hide under them. We’ve made significant advances since Roman times, but the Great Bed Question remains essentially unchanged. No one is immune. President or peasant, celebrity chef or Starbucks barista, Roman emperor or neurotic writer, we’re all subject to the same laws of inertia. We’re all bodies at rest, waiting for an outside force to act upon us.

I close my eyes and Marcus materializes, as real as the day-old Styrofoam coffee cup perched on the edge of my tiny bed. I can picture him cocooned in his private tent in the Roman encampment along the River Gran, a tributary of the Danube. I imagine the day is cold and damp, his spirits low. The war is not going well. The Germanic tribes have ambushed Roman supply lines. Morale among Marcus’s troops is low, and who can blame them? More than fifty thousand Roman soldiers have been killed.

Marcus no doubt missed Rome. Especially his wife, Faustina, loving, if not always faithful. The past decade had not been easy, marred not only by those nettlesome Germanic tribes but also an abortive revolt by the scheming Cassius. Then there were his children. Faustina bore at least thirteen. Fewer than half survived childhood.

Marcus was a rarity: a philosopher-king. What was it that drove the most powerful man in the world to study philosophy? As emperor, he could do, or not do, as he pleased. Why take time from his busy schedule to read the classics and ponder life’s imponderables?

Marcus’s early years offer a few clues. He had that rarest of childhoods: a happy one. Bookish, he’d rather read than go to the circus. This tendency put him in a distinct minority of Roman schoolchildren.

Later, enamored of the Greek way of life, he’d sleep on the hard ground covered only in a pallium, a philosopher’s threadbare cloak, until his mother scolded him and insisted he give up “this nonsense” and sleep in a proper bed.

The Romans viewed Greek philosophy the way most of us view opera: something worthy and beautiful, and we really should go more often, but it’s so darned difficult to follow and, besides, who has time? Romans liked the idea of philosophy more than actual philosophy. This made Marcus, an actual philosopher, highly suspect. Even as emperor, people snickered behind his back.

Marcus was an accidental emperor. He never wanted the job. It was his predecessor, Hadrian, who set events in motion that led to Marcus being crowned emperor in AD 161. He was forty years old.

Marcus enjoyed a honeymoon period. For six months. Then came a deadly flood, the plague, and the invasions. Aside from these wars, Marcus had relatively little blood on his hands. It’s living proof that absolute power does not always corrupt absolutely. Marcus routinely handed down lenient sentences for deserters and other lawbreakers. When the empire faced a financial crisis he auctioned off imperial goodies—robes, goblets, statues, and paintings—rather than raise taxes. And in an act I find particularly touching, he decreed that all tightrope walkers, often young boys, should henceforth perform over thick, spongy mattresses.

Marcus displayed great courage in battle but, as biographer Frank McLynn says, his most courageous feat was “his constant strivings to curb his natural pessimism.” I can relate. I, too, wrestle with the forces of negativity, always scheming to recruit me to their side. For we wannabe optimists, a half-empty glass is better than no glass at all, or one that has shattered into a hundred slivers and pierced a major artery. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Marcus had trouble sleeping. He suffered from indeterminate chest and stomach pains. His physician, an arrogant but accomplished man named Galen, had prescribed theriac (possibly laced with opium) to help him sleep.

Marcus, like me, aspired to be a morning person. A wide gap, though, separates actual morning people from aspiring morning people. Lying here now, feeling the train’s gentle rocking, the Amtrak blanket warm against my body, it is a gap that feels insurmountable.

You’d think nothing could be easier. Place one foot on the floor, then the other. Pull yourself to a vertical position. Yet I fail to achieve vertical status. Not even diagonal. What’s wrong with me? Help me, Marcus.

Meditations is unlike any book I’ve read. It is not really a book at all. It is an exhortation. A compilation of reminders and pep talks. Roman refrigerator notes. What Marcus Aurelius fears most is not death but forgetting. He constantly reminds himself to live fully. Marcus had no intention of publishing his refrigerator notes. They were intended for himself. You don’t so much read Marcus as eavesdrop on him.

I like what I hear. I like Marcus’s honesty. I like how he lays himself bare on the page, exposing his fears and vulnerabilities. Here the most powerful man in the world confesses to insomnia and panic attacks and to his, at best, perfunctory performance as a lover. (“He deposits his sperm and leaves,” is how he describes the act of copulation.) Marcus never lost sight of the Stoic precept that all philosophy begins with an awareness of our weakness.

Marcus constructs no grand philosophical system, to be picked apart by generations of earnest graduate students. This is philosophy as therapy, with Marcus playing the role of both therapist and patient. Meditations is, as translator Gregory Hays observes, “a self-help book in the most literal sense.”

Time and again, Marcus exhorts himself to stop thinking and act. Stop describing a good man. Be one. The difference between philosophy and talking about philosophy is the difference between drinking wine and talking about wine. A single sip of a good pinot noir tells you more about a vintage than years of rigorous oenology.

Marcus’s ideas didn’t simply materialize. No philosopher’s does. He was a Stoic, but not exclusively. He imbibed other sources: Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, the Cynics, and Epicureans. Marcus, like all great philosophers, was a wisdom scavenger. What mattered was an idea’s value, not its source.

To read Meditations is to witness an act of philosophy in real time. Marcus is live-streaming his thoughts, uncensored. I am watching “someone in the process of training himself to be a human being,” as the classicist Pierre Hadot puts it.

Several entries in Meditations begin with the phrase “When you have trouble getting out of bed…” As I read further, it occurs to me that much of the book is a covert treatise on the Great Bed Question. Not only how to get out of bed but why bother? Camus’s suicide question swaddled in a fluffy down comforter. Marcus seesaws between opposing views, debating himself.

“What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do?”

“Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

“But it’s nice here.…”

“So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them?”

Back and forth he goes. Hamlet under the covers. He knows there are great deeds to do, great thoughts to think.

If only he could get out of bed.

“Good mooooorning, passengers. Peek-a-boo, I see you. The café is still open and serving!”

Miss Oliver is back, more cloyingly cheerful than ever.

That’s it. I am now seriously considering getting out of bed. Any minute now. I examine my Styrofoam coffee cup and notice fragments of Amtrak wisdom. “Change How You See the World” and, on the other side, “Experience the Taste of a Better World.” Not exactly erudite, I concede, but I find the childlike simplicity endearing.

Sonya, my thirteen-year-old daughter, likes her sleep as much as I do. “I self-identify as a lazy human being,” she announced one day. Trying to pry her out of bed on weekday mornings requires a marshaling of resources not seen since Normandy. Yet on weekends and snow days, she springs to life, unaided. When I asked about this discrepancy, she explained, philosophically, “It’s the activity that gets you out of bed, not the alarm clock.”

She’s right. When I struggle to get out of bed, it is not the bed that is my enemy, or even the world out there. It is my projections. Lying under the covers, I imagine a hostile world determined to upend me. Just like Marcus. True, his world featured belligerent barbarians, the plague, and palace revolts. Obstacles are relative, though. One person’s messy desk is another’s ruffian invasion.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle is other people. Marcus doesn’t go as far as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously declared “hell is other people,” but he comes close. “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.” Little has changed since Marcus’s day.

Marcus suggested dealing with difficult people by disempowering them. Revoke their license over your life. Other people can’t hurt you, for “nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can hurt you.” Of course. Why do I care what others think when thinking, by definition, occurs entirely inside their minds, not mine?

I’ve always suspected that at the heart of my inability to get out of bed lies an insidious self-loathing, one I can’t fully acknowledge. Marcus, braver than I, does. “You don’t love yourself enough,” he says, and seems on the verge of self-compassion when, a page or two later, he’s on the attack again. “Enough of this wretched whining, monkey life.… You could be good today. But instead you chose tomorrow.” He saves his sharpest barbs for his perceived selfishness. “When I laze in bed, as I am now, I am thinking of only myself.” Remaining under the covers is, in the final analysis, a selfish act.

This realization gets Marcus moving. He has a duty to get out of bed. “Duty” not “obligation.” There is a difference. Duty comes from inside, obligation from outside. When we act out of a sense of duty, we do so voluntarily to lift ourselves, and others, higher. When we act out of obligation, we do so to shield ourselves, and only ourselves, from repercussions.

Marcus was aware of this distinction, but, as usual, needed to remind himself of it. “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being.’ ” Not as a Stoic or an emperor, or even as a Roman, but as a human being.

“Dee-dah, Dee-dah. Miss Oliver here. Did I mention the café car is open? I look forward to meeting each and every one of you! Dee-dah.”

That’s it. I’m getting out of bed.

I peel off the Amtrak blanket. It offers little resistance. I pull myself upright. What, I wonder, was all that whining and ruthless self-scrutiny about? This was nothing.

I’m about to celebrate my small but decisive victory over gravity when a Lateral Lurch—or maybe a Sudden Jolt, I’m not sure—knocks me off my feet and back into bed.

This is what’s so nettlesome about the Great Bed Question. It’s not enough to answer it once. It’s like going to the gym, or parenting. It requires repeated and regular exertions.

“Dee-dah, Dee-dah. Miss Oliver here again, ladies and gentlemen!”

I pull the covers tight. Five more minutes, I tell myself. Just five more minutes.