James Mustich's 1000 Books to Read Before You Die discussion

Let's discuss here this book of the month.

Intending to read the Gregory Hays translation (Modern Library edition). Does anyone have any thoughts on the translation into English?

Already I'm finding it hard to follow on audio book. I'll need to listen to a single chapter more than once to process it.

Carlton, I would have to read two different translations to know... but certainly there's always something lost. The version I am listening to is published by Carlile Media and read by Vance Bishop.

To me this reads very much like Solomon's writings in the Bible. Good food for thought. Good points for someone who is looking to improve their heart, their thoughts, and the way they interact with people.

To add context to this “book”, I would quote from the Gregory Hays introduction to my edition:
To understand the Meditations in context, we must familiarize ourselves not only with Stoicism, the philosophical system that underlies the work, but also with the role of philosophy in ancient life more generally.

But philosophy also had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a “design for living”—a set of rules to live one’s life by. This was a need not met by ancient religion, which privileged ritual over doctrine and provided little in the way of moral and ethical guidelines. Nor did anyone expect it to. That was what philosophy was for.

I suspect that Marcus would have been surprised (and perhaps rather dismayed) to find himself enshrined in the Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. He would have been surprised, to begin with, by the title of the work ascribed to him. The long-established English title Meditations is not only not original, but positively misleading, lending a spurious air of resonance and authority quite alien to the haphazard set of notes that constitute the book. In the lost Greek manuscript used for the first printed edition—itself many generations removed from Marcus’s original—the work was entitled “To Himself” (Eis heauton). This is no more likely than Meditations to be the original title, though it is at least a somewhat more accurate description of the work.6 In fact, it seems unlikely that Marcus himself gave the work any title at all, for the simple reason that he did not think of it as an organic whole in the first place. Not only was it not written for publication, but Marcus clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. The entries include a number of cryptic references to persons or events that an ancient reader would have found as unintelligible as we

Carlton wrote: "To add context to this “book”, I would quote from the Gregory Hays introduction to my edition:
To understand the Meditations in context, we must familiarize ourselves not only with Stoicism, the p..."

Thank you for including this.

I am currently also reading Rage by Bob Woodward, and I think a lot of the military personnel who were asked to serve the US in the Trump administration were probably more than a little conversant with the stoicism of the Meditations.

Have just finished and posted my review, which is:


I think that this collection of thoughts has to be read in context, as a common place book for the author, and not as a systematic philosophy. As James Mustich says in his book “1,000 Books to Read before you Die”, this can read “like a twenty first century self-help book”, but “the aphoristic reflections ... are both consoling and inspiring”.
To the extent that I think about philosophy, these thoughts often chime with my own, except for the assumption of rational thinking and the acceptance that everything happens for the best, for example see book 4:9-10:
9. It was for the best. So Nature had no choice but to do it.
10. That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.
The collection can be repetitive and morbid, but is also fascinating; to read thoughts from over 1,800 years ago that sound current (although this observation is dependent upon the translation).

I am currently also reading Rage by Bob Woodward, and I think a lot of the military personnel who were asked to serve the US in the Trump administration were probably more than a little conversant with the stoicism of the Meditations.

In respect of the translation by Gregory Hays, there were Americanisms, and I was flummoxed by the meaning of “gussy up”, an American colloquial term I had heard before, but had to google to understand!

Book 4:43
Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.

I just finished this a few days ago. For me, it did touch on some ideas that have been good for me to think about in a more stoic way. Especially around legacy and what people think of you after you die and how much it matters (aka very little). It's probably trite, but it's comforting to know folks 2000 years ago were also struggling with many of the personal thoughts and issues that we (/I) do today.

As far as the translation, I also noticed some more colloquialisms than I was expecting in Hays', but overall, I didn't have any issues with it (with no frame of reference or comparison)