I find myself uncharacteristically nostalgic. And I find myself responding to reflexes conditioned into me at the University of Chicago, where some commentary on method is de rigeur most of the time. What are you saying, and with what warrant are you saying it? How can you justify yourself, and your work? Why should we care what you have to say?
These are great questions. They are worth asking regularly.
This is my method: I am a leaf on a stream.
Why should you listen to me? I don’t know.
Specifically, I am aware I used the word Rationalism very inconsistently in my last post. Surely, if one topic requires and demands the careful use of words it is Rationalism.
True enough. But I am taking poetic license to wander. Wandering is what I do here. This is not academic work. This is not serious in that sense, but it is very serious in the way we all care deeply about the affections in our world, about who likes us and who doesn’t.
Ideas are my companions. I find them congenial, and as unpredictable as they may be, they are better companions in many ways than the people I know.
Yesterday I was feeling that perhaps the snow capped hills in the back country suit me, as a white wolf wandering the wilds in the night and cold. My fur keeps me warm. My home makes me feel safe.
What that means, what that metaphor means for me, I can’t say with precision, merely that I am doing hard work alone–again–and I am feeling good doing it.
I will comment on discipline, too. It is remarkable I got into the University of Chicago. It was filled with brilliant people. One of the consistent aspects of going to a great school is that quite often you are reading the books of the people teaching the classes. All of my teachers were published authors, and in most courses we read their books, among of course many others. I read 3-4 books a week while I was there.
But although I am certainly capable of hard work, I have never been disciplined. Discipline is doing moderate work consistently over long periods of time, in a planned and unhurried way. I have never been that person. I am an obsessive. I latch onto something and ride it into the ground, then I am done. It is, or in any event, has been, my way.
Few thoughts. This is the sort of thing I do in the dark at 3 in the morning. I like who I am, although I have no idea where it is all going. None of us, if we are honest, do.