Admirable, and airless.

February, a fortnight of it, in the hour before the house woke, in a Penguin my mother had annotated in pencil and then rubbed out again, which is an essay in itself. The light we get here in February is a dull pewter and the only thing moving in the garden all month was a robin who had taken possession of the washing line. I mention the robin because he never does. Twelve books of a man thinking, and almost nothing gets in from outside.

What is good in it is better than I expected, and it isn't the aphorisms. It's the fact that none of this was meant to be read. It's a notebook. He is talking himself down off something at four in the morning, and the same handful of instructions come round again and again — be patient with the fool, you will be dead soon, the offence is in your opinion of the thing and not in the thing — because he keeps forgetting them by lunchtime. The repetition isn't sloppy editing. It's the sound of a man who has to be told the same thing every single morning of his life. I found that a good deal more moving than I wanted to.

I read the Hays first because it was the one on the shelf, then got the Hammond out of the library in Aberystwyth and had both open on the kitchen table for a week, comparing the passage about getting out of bed in the cold. The Hays is beautiful and clipped and slightly too easy; every line lands as though it were made to be printed on something. The Hammond is knottier and stranger and much closer to a man writing in his second language to nobody at all. I'd take the harder one. The difficulty is honest.

There is one page where the whole book changes temperature. He is talking about the by-products of things, the accidents nobody designed: the loaf that splits open in the oven, and how the cracks were not what the baker intended and are lovely anyway. Figs at their ripest, just beginning to go. Olives falling. The foam at the mouth of a boar. For half a page he is genuinely looking at something outside his own head, the prose comes alive, and there is weather in it. Then he shuts the window and goes back to reminding himself that fame is smoke and the body is meat and all of it passes.

That is my problem with it, and it is a real one. Everything that is not the self is scenery to be got past. People appear as obstacles to be forgiven in advance. His wife occurs once, in a list of things to be thankful for, and never again. No bird has a name. No tree, no month, no season, no place, in a book written on campaign in a river valley in the middle of a long war. Where is anyone else in it? I kept waiting for him to look up, and he almost never does.

The other thing I couldn't shake is what he was doing while he wrote it. Plague through the empire, years of fighting on the Danube, most of his children dead before him, and then Commodus afterwards. You can read the whole of it as the private working of a man holding something enormous at arm's length so that he can keep functioning, and on that reading the coldness stops being a philosophy and becomes a technique for getting through the day. That's the version I believe, and it is the reading that made me stop asking the book to be warm about anything.

There is also, now, an entire industry of men quoting it at one another in podcasts about discipline, which is not the book's fault and has done it no good at all. I came to it tired for that reason and had to make an effort to hear it plainly. If you have the same trouble, the cure is to read a long stretch rather than the extracted lines. In bulk he is far less certain and much better company. Read fifty pages together and you notice how often he is arguing with himself, and losing.

Seven. Useful in a narrow way, admirable, airless. I've been back to two pages of it since March and not to the rest. If you're buying it, get the Hammond. The Hays reads better and tells you less.