KEEPING BUSY

I have now completed all of my editorial work on the four volumes of my collected published and unpublished papers.  It will still be a while before everything is done -- permissions obtained, covers designed, etc. -- but before too long they will go up on Amazon.com as e-books.  There must be a hundred essays, reviews, and the like in the four volumes.  On the one hand, that seems like a big pile of chopped liver, as they say where I come from.  On the other hand, over sixty-two years, that is not even two a year.  Tucked away in all that verbiage are some little pieces that I think are worth a look -- a critique of the work of Hannah Arendt, for example, and my unpublished [indeed, until now unpublishable] report on a conference at Columbia Law School on Immanuel Kant's legal philosophy.  And of course my satirical review of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.  The lovely comment just posted on this blog by Lucille encourages me to hope that a few people will find their way to one or another of the volumes. 

Seventy years ago, I would sit on the steps to the second floor in my parents' little row house and listen to the grownups talking, longing for the day when I would be able to join the conversation.  Writing has always been, for me, a way to join the great conversation of Western Civilization, as a kibitzer, if nothing more exalted.