FAIR WARNING

On Saturday, April 28, 2007, in anxious anticipation of a retirement planned for the following year, and casting about for something, anything, to fill the empty days and weeks after I became Professor Emeritus, I established The Philosopher's Stone, and put up my very first post.  The suggestion to run a blog had come from my son, Patrick, and though I scarcely knew what a blog was [a "web log," I deduced], I thought I had better give it a shot.

In the next few months, I posted another eighteen little comments and observations, but then I let the project lapse as I wrapped up a half-century of teaching and undertook the task of selling a house in the midst of a real estate crash and moving Susie and our two cats, Murray and Christmas Eve, to a condominium apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

I did not return to blogging until June of 2009.  Since then, I have written almost two thousand four hundred additional posts, not counting a book length series of posts devoted to Formal Methods in Political Philosophy on a second, separate blog.  I have written, day by day, an eight hundred page three volume autobiography, an entire volume of multi-part tutorials, mini-tutorials, and appreciations, and observations on everything from the passing political scene to literary criticism.  All in all, in the past six years, I have written well over half a million words.

All of which I offer in explanation [and perhaps expiation] of the fact that I have decided to take a brief holiday from blogging.  This Thursday, Susie and shall once again fly off to Paris, returning on November 15th.  For more than three weeks, I shall not blog.  The universe will have to get along without me for twenty-five days.

Will any of you still be here when I return?  I most earnestly hope so.  It has been, these past six years, a great pleasure, indeed a delight, to read your responses to the notes I have sealed in bottles and cast into the digital sea.  I have no doubt that I shall return filled to the brim with observations, animadversions, interpretations, predictions, ruminations, and meditations.

In all probability, I shall post one last comment tomorrow, but then there will be what we called, when I was a boy, radio silence.

Behave yourselves while I am gone.