
Things I Learned Reading the Same Book 100 Times Over 10 Years - CraneWorm
https://medium.com/the-mission/100-things-i-learned-reading-the-same-book-100-time-over-10-years-6891cc6eef6f
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Ftuuky
>At some point after I read the Hays translation, I picked up another
translation of Marcus — probably one by George Long or A. S. L. Farquharson,
that was free online. I was immediately struck by how the beautiful, lyrical
book I loved had become dense and unreadable. It struck me that if I had
cheaped out and tried to get for free what I’d bought instead, my entire life
might have turned out differently. Books are investments. Be glad to put in
your money.

This might explain why I didn't like the book when I read it. It was dense,
complex and bored me to death. I will try to buy this version and give it
another chance.

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zakum1
The wisdom of it is so relevant. It is amazing that almost everything we
believe that we need to live a good life has been so clearly articulated 2000
years ago (and earlier) consistently by people across a wide range of
cultures. But we still struggle to do it :) and there are huge markets for
people to package up the same ideas and sell them to us over and over again -
or opportunities for lunatics to temporarily sell alternate ideas that lead us
into tragic historical cul-de-sacs

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Djvacto
Definitely looks like this is a book I'll pick up for myself soon.

Anyone else able to comment on their experience reading it, or recommend a
specific edition/translation?

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subjectsigma
A non-religious friend of mine recommended it to me, presenting it as a new
kind of secular philosophy, and I was deeply unimpressed by it.

The book itself is rambling and hard to read. There is constant repetition of
the concepts, paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter he says the same
things over and over again. Despite being described as secular, Marcus
Aurelius leans pretty heavily on 'the gods' as an answer to why some of these
things he says matter. (E.g. do not be mad at nature when bad things like
disasters happen, nature was made by ''the gods'' and is therefore good.
Instead look within yourself ... etc.) An emperor instructing peasants to
mostly just suck it up also came off as somewhat entitled. Overall I was
surprised at how the person who recommended it to me could dismiss
Christianity as nonsensical and inconsistent, when much of Meditations is
Christian morals (Do not cheat, do not steal, do not lie, be humble, be
grateful to those around you, do not be sexually promiscuous, etc.) with
Christ replaced by references to unnamed deities and an appeal to some sort of
innate human strength or spirit.

There's definitely wisdom in there but the book overall didn't resonate much
with me. I would recommend trying to find a free & legal translation online
and reading some of it, and then purchasing the author's translation if you're
still interested. I did not read the recommended translation either, so maybe
I will buy it and see what I think.

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anyfoo
This advice goes directly against the advice in the article, which
specifically calls out not looking for free translations, as they are
apparently “dense and unreadable”.

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subjectsigma
GP asked for opinions and advice and I gave them, make of it what you will.

