Apuleius
Reading and Writing and Gratitude
It’s easy to get too busy to read, and too busy to write. My sporadic blog posting reflects the cycles of the academic year: some times I’m full of time to post and full of ideas for writing; other times, I’m simply too busy to write. Those too-busy-to-write times seem to come more often than the other times.
Still, I make myself promise to write – books, articles, reviews, essays – as a means of self-discipline. If I’m reading, I’m learning. If I’m writing, I’m learning even more.
But I am busy. So all this posting will do is acknowledge the giants upon whose shoulders I have been sitting this past week: Plato’s Phaedrus; Augustine’s City of God; Mooney’s Lost Intimacy in American Thought; West’s Prophetic Fragments and American Evasion of Philosophy; Apuleius' De Deo Socratis and his Asinus; a handful of Rorty’s essays; Royce’s Problem of Christianity; a handful of books on environmental philosophy (trying to sort out both some ethical issues and the practical matter of next spring’s syllabus!); and, as always, a smattering of Peirce.
No, I don’t usually read quite that many books in a week. (Actually, I think I’m leaving out a half-dozen or so - oh, yeah, there was some Rauschenbusch in there, and some Martin Luther King, too. Lots of social and political thought about religion, politics, freedom, and creativity, mostly.)
Last week was a marathon of reading and writing. The result was a book chapter and sketches of about ten other articles. Not sure they’ll all get written - I only have so much time, remember? But the most important part of this has been not the words on the page, but the way those words have served as a tool for thinking. For that, and for the life that allows me to do that at all, I am very, very grateful.