I hate those monographs which, instead of letting the author speak and
staying close to the text, engage in obscure elucubrations which claim
to carry out an act of decoding and reveal the "unsaid" of the thinker,
without the reader's having the slightest idea of what that thinker
really "said." Such a method unfortunately permits all kinds of
deformations, distortions, and sleight of hand.
Our era... could be defined as the era of the misinterpretation...
[P]eople can, it seems, say anything about anything. When I quote Marcus
Aurelius, I want my reader to make contact with the text itself, which
is superior to any commentary. I would like him to see how my
interpretation tries to base itself on the text, and that he can verify
my affirmations directly and immediately.
-- Pierre Hadot. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, tr. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998),
p. x.