As you might imagine, my mind has been occupied with the
minutiae of moving. After an initial
walk-through of the apartment we shall move into, I can report that it appears that I shall actually end up with
more bookshelf space than I have now, which means that I can reunite the
complete German edition of the works of Marx and Engels, which graces my Paris
apartment, with the complete English edition of the works of Marx and Engels,
which sits atop my bookcases here in Chapel Hill. This puts me in mind of a dinner to which my
first wife and I were invited in 1964 on the occasion of my ascension to a
tenured Associate Professorship in the Columbia Philosophy Department. Our hosts were Professor and Mrs.
Randall. The grand old man of the
department at that time was John Herman Randall Jr., a legendary figure who
was, in my eyes, ancient [he was in fact then 65, some eighteen years younger
than I am now.] As Cindy and I walked
into the big old pre-war apartment on Claremont Avenue, an apartment completely
filled with bookshelves, my eye caught a complete set of the Prussian Academy
edition of the works of Kant. To a young
Kant scholar such as I was then, this was the gold standard, the Holy Grail, an
original Ty Cobb baseball card. I knew I
would never have enough money to buy a set for myself [it is now online], and I
recall thinking, “This is what it was to be a professor in the old days!”
Friday, March 3, 2017
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