Chen Si Lu

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations becomes both a recurring text in Garp’s reading of mortality and a practical instrument in his developing judgment as a writer. Its stark reflections on the briefness of human life echo through his impressions of Vienna, while his response to the book helps him articulate a distinction between grave subject matter and the art that gives it force. Remembered at moments of disappointment and creative concentration, the work links Garp’s sense of death to his emerging confidence in literary craft.

Acquisition and First Reading

In Vienna, Garp buys an English translation of Meditations at a secondhand bookstore. He had encountered Marcus Aurelius in Latin class at Steering, but had never read the work in English. The bookstore owner tells him that Marcus Aurelius died in Vienna, a detail that shapes Garp’s imagination of where the book’s reflections were written: he supposes that the emperor must have lived in the city while composing them.

The passage Garp remembers describes human existence as fleeting and unstable. It compares the body to coursing water and the soul to dreams and vapors, placing bodily life and inward experience alike under the sign of impermanence. Rather than treating the book as detached philosophy, Garp carries its language into his perceptions of the city and into conversation with his mother, Jenny Fields.

A Measure of Literary Art

The book matters to Garp not only for what it says about mortality but for the question of how serious subjects become literature. He considers death a subject of serious writing, yet concludes that subject matter alone cannot account for the difference between Franz Grillparzer and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his judgment, the distinction lies in intelligence and grace—in art.

That conclusion takes shape as Garp reads Grillparzer’s “The Poor Fiddler,” which he considers ineptly told and sentimental. A later critical introduction describes Grillparzer in sympathetic terms, as a complex and troubled man; Garp’s response is that this characterization does not make him a good writer. His confidence in criticizing an established author arrives before he has written anything himself. He even asks Jenny to read the story, one of the few occasions on which he seeks her literary judgment. Meditations thus appears beside an early, consequential act of discrimination: Garp begins to trust his ability to assess how writing handles its material.

The Book in Garp’s Experience of Vienna

As Garp spends time in Vienna, the remembered passage from Meditations becomes a refrain through which he interprets what he sees. Parks and gardens seem to him marked by decay; old people and people with disabilities on the No. 38 streetcar, the flowers at the Rudolfinerhaus, and the worn furnishings of the pensions all reinforce his sense of a city growing old. The book’s meditation on the body’s fate gives a verbal pattern to these observations, which increasingly seem less like separate details than expressions of a single atmosphere of mortality.

His first opera deepens that impression. Because the performance is in Italian, which he does not understand, Garp experiences it as a kind of religious service. Walking afterward toward the illuminated spires of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, he reads that its south tower was begun in the mid-fourteenth century and completed in 1439. Vienna comes to seem to him like a cadaver, and Europe like a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin. The scale shifts from the human body described by Marcus Aurelius to an entire city and continent imagined as dead, while the remembered words continue to frame his view.

Memory, Restraint, and Return to Writing

Garp also quotes the book to Jenny during an evening out, recalling its comparison of the body to coursing waters. Jenny does not share his attachment to the sentiment and objects when he translates everything for her. Their exchange shows that Meditations is not a shared consolation: it is Garp’s chosen language for describing feelings and circumstances that his mother does not necessarily understand in the same way.

Later, a chance encounter with Tina presents Garp with an opportunity he declines. He bows and walks home to Jenny, finding pleasure in the self-denial and, as he suspects, in imagining Tina more than he could have enjoyed an actual encounter. The remembered contrast between bodily transience and the soul’s inward life accompanies this turn toward imagination. The narrative identifies this moment as the beginning of a writer’s long-sought trance, when the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. In July, Garp returns to work on “The Pension Grillparzer.” Meditations does not simply furnish him with a bleak image of death; its language becomes part of a movement from observation and judgment toward literary composition.

The book’s recurrence therefore marks two connected developments. Its reflections make mortality newly legible in Vienna, where Garp sees age and decay everywhere; his response to it also sharpens his sense that writing is judged not by subject alone but by intelligence, grace, and execution. Between those uses, Meditations becomes a private reference point in Garp’s early formation as a reader and writer.