>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.
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
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.
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”.
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.