About

Verissimus — "most truthful" — was the boyhood name given to Marcus Aurelius, long before the purple was laid on his shoulders. It is borrowed here not out of grandeur but for its plain ambition: to write truly, and chiefly to oneself.

These pages are a commonplace book. In an older fashion a reader kept one to copy out what struck them — a sentence, an argument, a turn of phrase — and to set their own thoughts beside it. What follows is that, brought into the open: short essays on living, attention, and the ordinary work of becoming a little less foolish than yesterday.

The author writes under a pen name. The name matters less than the practice.

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