November 2 to December 31st, 2017.
Sixty days.
And sixty nights.
More or less.
Since I'm witing this on the 31st at 6:14 a.m., I can't really claim that 60th night. But why disrupt the poetry for a mere quibbling fact, right?
ANYway . . . I just finished my 60th straight daily "15 minute" reading in Copleston's A History of Philosophy, and I've also just finished volume I of that massive, XI volume work. Which I'm pretty happy about. I've been wanting to take this journey for a very long time--at least since I encountered Dr. Paul Matthews at Bellarmine College (sic) somewhere between 1980 and 1983. And maybe even before that.
Shit, I was 23 years old in 1980. My youngest son just turned 23 a few weeks ago. How this wheel doth turn. And now I'm 60, and have outlived my father. And I'm working on my bucket list. Remembrance of Things Past?
✔️
Finnegans Wake?
✔️
Frederick Copleston's XI Volume A History of Philosophy (From the Pre-Scoratics to Logical Positivism and Existentialism)?
Working on it. I / IIth of the way there.
And you know . . . once again I'm impressed by how much you can do if you just push at it every day. I mean, seriously. I've been thinking about reading this series for over half of my life, but the prospect of the whole was just so daunting that I never made more than a tentative start which fizzled out almost immediately. But 15 minutes a day, and it only took me two months to knock back the first volume. Hells yeah. I realize that these sentiments condemn me to Nerd Hell for all eternity, but it's not like I wasn't going there anyway, you know? I'm super-excited about this.
And reading Volume I has been a really effervescent intellectual and spiritual activity. I've been doing some hard thinking on subjects that have piranha-nipped my exposed appendages for as long as I have been capable of thinking. That's better than getting really drunk, taking my underpants off over my head, fucking a girl I don't know, and passing out at a party, ennit?
Is for me.
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