Some of you, although of course perhaps not all, may have
noticed that I have not been posting as much on this blog lately, and I thought I
would take a few moments to explain why. Until 2008 I was quite unaware of the
phenomenon of blogging, but as I approached retirement and became concerned
about what I would do with myself, my son, Patrick, suggested that I start a
blog and so I did. I began blogging steadily in June 2009 and at first the
floodgates opened. It had been a while since I had been writing regularly and I
had a great deal to say. In those early years, I wrote a 250,000 word
autobiography online, I wrote enough tutorials, mini–tutorials, and
appreciations to fill several volumes, which eventually found their way onto
Amazon as Kindle books. Thanks for the most part to periodic links by Brian
Leiter, I eventually built a readership that seems now to number perhaps
several thousand people scattered around the world. I taught adult education
courses at Duke University, spent a year visiting at Bennett College in
Greensboro, taught several courses close to home at UNC Chapel Hill, and even
for two years traveled every Tuesday in the fall to New York to teach at
Columbia. I recorded and posted more than 30 hours of lectures on a wide range
of topics. In short, I have kept busy since I retired in 2008.
Time passes and inexorably I have grown older until now, as
I am not too many months from my 89th birthday, I have finally begun
to describe myself, albeit reluctantly, as “old.” Somehow along the way I
managed to develop Parkinson’s disease – I was diagnosed 2 ½ years ago, but the
doctor who made the diagnosis offered the opinion that I had in fact had the
disease for two years before that. Almost a year ago, I was forced to give up
the early morning walks that had been a part of my life for many years. I took
to using what is called a “rollalator.” What
started as a tremor in my left hand has now progressed to “freezing,” a result
I am told of insufficient dopamine getting to certain points in my nervous
system. Last month my wife and I finally sold the little Paris apartment that
has been our delight since 2004.
Although I shall start teaching a new and complex course
at UNC a week from Monday, I am not the man I used to be and the course, which
would have been, 40 or 50 years ago, a demand on my time and energy so slight
as scarcely to be noticeable now consumes my days.
Added to my personal troubles are of course two rather
larger matters that have had an unexpectedly powerful effect on my thoughts and
feelings: the two years and more in virtual lockdown because of the Covid
pandemic and the serious threats to the very life and continuation of such
electoral democracy as we have in the United States. I find myself wondering
what it must have been like to live in Germany or Italy or Spain in the years
leading up to the onset of fascism in those countries.
I am, for the first time since the early 1960s when I was
consumed by the threat of nuclear war, perpetually angry. I have always described myself somewhat wryly
as a Tigger rather than an Eeyore, but it has become more and more difficult to
maintain a bouncy cheerfulness in the face of the world and my own personal
disabilities.
I shall continue to blog, but perhaps not as frequently and not
at as great length as I have been these past 13 years. As I say, some of you
may scarcely notice the change but for those who have noticed I thought I
should say something.