I have been absent from this site for almost a week, not
because the affairs of the world have ceased to weigh upon me but because I
have been obsessed by personal matters so trivial and lacking in larger
significance that they seemed not worthy of mention. Still and all, a blog is a
web log, hence in the first instance a record of personal thoughts and
concerns, so perhaps I should just allude to what has been concerning me.
There
is no exalted way to put this. The people who run Carolina Meadows thought we
had bedbugs, which would have required an enormously time-consuming, invasive,
and disruptive procedure involving, among other things, raising the temperature
in the apartment to 140° for four or five hours! Saturday morning a
representative of the extermination company arrived and after inspecting the
underside of our bed, announce that we had carpet beetles, not bedbugs! This
does not quite rise to the level of a question about Vladimir Putin’s health or
the future of American democracy, not to speak of a desperate national shortage
of baby formula, but for several days it was all I could think about.
Meanwhile, I have been spending the time preparing in my
head for the course I shall be teaching in the fall semester at UNC Chapel
Hill. I love to teach and I have delivered the opening lecture of that course four or five
times in my mind while lying awake in the middle of the night. As I have mentioned, this is a new course
that I have never taught before. In the fall, while I am teaching, I shall be
proposing to the philosophy department that the following fall I teach a
graduate course on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy.
This is a course I taught for the first time 45 years ago. It occurred to me
that if the department agrees to this proposal, I will be a few days from my 90th
birthday when that second course wraps up.
For some reason, that realization has suddenly worked a
marked change in how I think about myself. I have been almost
constantly concerned for the past six months with the limitations on my
mobility and physical capacities caused by my Parkinson’s disease and this has
cast a pall over everything I can do. But, I reflected, I am almost 90 years
old. I am teaching, blogging, caring for my wife, making guest appearances in
courses around the country – not bad for someone almost 90!