Now playing: Books That Matter: Meditations

Ranked for listeners who want the whole story: Books That Matter: Meditations in misc. non-fiction, read by Massimo Pigliucci.

One day, about 18 centuries ago, a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders wrote some notes to himself in a journal. What would a truly good life look like? How did he feel about death? Over several years, he would fill a dozen notebooks with thoughts on these and similar questions. The author of these journals never intended to publish a recording. He gave it no title, no internal structure, and took no care to remove his many redundancies. But none of that mattered. He wrote for himself,

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