A PROSPECTIVE REUNION

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!”