An interrogation, not an argument. Eight questions in a row, six of them bare infinitives with no gloss whatever: τὸ διαγίνεσθαι; τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι; τὸ TERMὁρμᾶν; τὸ αὔξεσθαι; τὸ λήγειν αὖθις; τὸ φωνῇ χρῆσθαι; τὸ διανοεῖσθαι; Marcus is cross-examining his own wish to live: what precisely do you want when you want to go on?

The list is built as a rising ladder of faculties. It runs from below upward, like a school classification of souls: growth (vegetative), sensation and impulse (animal), speech and thought (human). And inserted into it is τὸ λήγειν αὖθις — "and to leave off growing again": decline is put among the things desired on the same footing as growth, because it belongs to the same faculty. Cf. 6.16, where breathing, nutrition and sensation are gone through and set aside in the same way.

Where the enumeration leads. εἰ δὲ ἕκαστα εὐκαταφρόνητα — "and if each of them is easily despised" — then what is left is τελευταῖον, "the last thing": DOGMAto follow TERMreason and god. Everything has been thrown out of the list except one item, and that one item death does not take away.

And the sting in the last line. ἀλλὰ μάχεται — "but the one fights the other": to honour reason and god and at the same time to be vexed that death will deprive one of the things listed is incompatible. Marcus does not forbid grief; he shows that grief and reverence cannot stand together in one man at once, because their objects contradict. Cf. 12.35, where the same is put through indifference to duration. The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one assent.