In which Mattie admires a translator's intentional omission

In a translation I have of Seneca the Younger's letters, I found myself laughing at a note by the translator. Seneca has one letter in which he rants about writers who waste time on rumors and superfluous knowledge. The last line below represents the translator's footnote from the letter:

... To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperence. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works. In these works he discusses such questions as Homer's origin, who was Aeneas' real mother, whether Anacreon's manner of life was that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them! Don't you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing! When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I'll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning. It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people's ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as 'What a learned person!' Let's be content with the much less fashionable label, 'What a good man!' ... [b]*[/b]     What about thinking how much time you lose through constantly being taken up with official matters, private matters or ordinary everyday matters, through sleep, through ill health? [...]

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* 15 lines (§§39 to 40, on further examples of worthless learning) are omitted.

I don't imagine the irony was lost on the translator.

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Comments

[gerovital h3]

but it is not better to make two moves all
must take into account all the details that work should be good
Your thinking is typical American...