Halt and think it through. Two verbs set the procedure: ἐφιστάντα — "halting, dwelling upon" (standing over a thing as one stands over a written page), and ἐπινοεῖν — "to conceive in addition, to think onto." That is, EXERCISEdefinition here does not describe what is present but completes it in time: to see a thing already (ἤδη) dissolving. The device is the opposite of ordinary imagining, which paints a gloss onto things; this one paints on their outcome.

The object is τὰ ὑποκείμενα. Not "things" in general but "what underlies" — the school's term for the substrate (cf. 9.36 ὑποκειμένη ὕλη). The gaze is addressed not to appearances but to the material of which they are put together.

Three ways of vanishing. Marcus lists not one end but a fan of them: διαλυόμενον (dissolution), ἐν TERMμεταβολῇ (change), σῆψις (rot) ἢ σκεδασμός (scattering). The last two are physics: what is moist rots, what is dry crumbles; the mode depends on the composition. And the proviso ἢ καθότι ἕκαστον TERMπέφυκεν — "or however each is constituted by nature": the list is not exhaustive, and it is not the mechanism that matters but the inevitability.

"As it were to die." The closing EXERCISEὥσπερ θνῄσκειν extends death beyond living things: not only an animal dies — a stone, a cloth, a city "as it were die," each in its own way. This extension strips death of its status as a special event: it turns out to be the common name for what every thing is doing anyway. Cf. 4.36; 6.13. The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one desire.

A note on the translations. Rogovin omits the proviso ἢ καθότι ἕκαστον TERMπέφυκεν ("or however each is constituted by nature"), reducing the close to «или же обреченным на своего рода смерть»; with it goes the thought that the mode of dissolution is set by the thing's own nature. Long keeps it ("everything is so constituted by nature as to die"). Hence TERMφύσις is tagged in the Greek and in both English texts but not in the Russian — there is nothing there to tag.