Book Review: MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN by Marguerite Yourcenar

Memoirs of Hadrian: And Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel."

We remember the most difficult times of our lives by the books that help us get through them.

Read during one such "night of the soul," Yourcenar's book reads like an autobiography despite being a fictional memoir of the most lyrical kind. I can almost swear that Yourcenar has, by some unknown witchcraft, channeled the very soul of one of the late great Roman emperors. She called it "sympathetic thought," this decades-long project of hers, "this portrait of a man who was almost wise." Instead of using her considerable scholarly know-how to write a tiresome history, Yourcenar sought to write an "inner reality," showing the growth of an emperor's soul rather than that of an empire. And it is both enlightening and encouraging!

I have never encountered a book like this before! It's a bit like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but more inward-looking. It is written in the form of a long epistle of a man who is about to die, to his successor (Marcus Aurelius himself, perhaps the closest to the ideal philosopher king!). And like Marcus Aurelius' immortal work, this one requires slow, close reading, as almost every paragraph is filled with gold either of the philosophical or literary kind.

An homage to learning and culture, a palliative for weary, cynical souls, this book contained wonderfully insightful passages that I will treasure as I re-read them.

"Not all our books will perish... some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality."

Immortality to Hadrian and his time meant the immortality of Rome Eternal. The burning fire of civilization in a dark age. True immortals therefore were builders of walls and bridges, of things that lasted like libraries and schools, not destroyers and plunderers... "amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead."

"Other Romes will come, whose forms I see but dimly, but whom I shall have helped to mold."

A lot of folks today think that subscribing to a particular religion automatically makes them good people, despite making highly questionable political/moral choices. As if accepting a deity as one's personal savior is the end game, that no further work in fear and trembling is required. This book, and those of the Greeks and Roman philosophers, offered no such easy answer, and a lot of the book deals with immortal questions on morality and civic virtue, when "man existed alone."

Recognition must be given also to the excellent translation done by Grace Frick, from the original French! This must be the finest translated work I've yet read: I honestly thought it was written originally in English.

"What I could say has been said; what I could learn has been learned. Let us turn, for the time that is left to us, to other work."

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