Does sheer stupidity's carelessness get you down? — Searching for Marcus Aurelius in a world of fools

© 2017 Peter Free

 

02 March 2017

 

 

Does unapologetic stupidity's carelessness get you down?

 

It does me. Repeatedly. Sort of.

 

Below is a decent example. Literary and philosophical types will relate.

 

 

You would that think adding the name of the translator to an online book link would be critically important

 

Anyone with familiar with languages knows how challenging it is to translate from one to another, without butchering tone, pace, poetic nuance, symbology and . . . yada yada.

 

Translators are usually just as important as authors. Especially (maybe) if we are evaluating a version of a text written hundreds of years ago in a mostly vanished or dead language.

 

 

So why do virtually all links to Marcus Aurelius's Meditations lack the translator's name?

 

Amazon.com essentially treats all versions, editions and publishers of Meditations as if they are the same thing.

 

If (for example) you are looking for Maxwell Staniforth's translation of the Roman emperor's work, Amazon's idiotic search engine will happily plop you into one by George Long or an unnamed alternate. And then that description will not tell you anything worth knowing about that version of the book.

 

In fact, Amazon is so dumb that it lumps all customer reviews of the many extant translations and editions of Meditations together into one unwieldy and useless pile. It is usually impossible to tell which translation — much less what edition and publisher — the reviewer is commenting about.

 

And sometimes, Amazon's search box (or its affiliated sellers) deposit you into an assortment that includes titles that are not even Meditations at all. "What the heck, he wuz lookin' fer Aurelius, here's one with some-tin like that on one 'a the pages."

 

I'm not just picking on Amazon. (Although admittedly those folks should know better. After all, they do assert that they are in the book business.) Other sellers demonstrate the same tearing hair sloppiness.

 

 

The moral? — Liberal education is dead because people are too vacuum-headed to understand what it was about

 

Sweet Geezus. This is not just an example of ignorance or precision-avoidance. It's an example of fled common sense and work ethic.

 

And now the U.S. government is trying to push science and technical education, as if those two emphases will magically tolerate even more carelessness in exercising our vanishingly small gray matters.

 

Bah. We're swinging with monkeys.

 

You recognize (no doubt) that this is an expression of very un-Stoic irritation. My Stoic side laughs happily in the background. Paradox.