On belonging to nature

The fourth book of the Meditations keeps circling one idea: that a single order runs through all things, and that a human being is a part of it rather than a spectator of it. Marcus writes this line against his own recurring temptation to treat his troubles as exceptions, as if the world owed him a different arrangement than the one it gives everyone. The answer he arrives at is a kind of consent. What arrives in its season, arrives on time. His task is not to correct nature but to fall into step with it.

This week the Natural History Museum in London announced it will reopen a gallery shut since the Second World War. The Nature and Us gallery in Kensington will welcome visitors again from September 16, and, closed to the public since the war, it will explore humanity's evolving relationship with the natural world through 50 objects. A room sealed for eighty years opens to ask an old question: where do we stand in relation to the world that made us? Marcus would recognize the question. He answered it by refusing to stand apart at all.