On the one hand, I'm a little surprised that it breaks down to so few pages pd, since for the last month and a half I've been hitting 15 pages a day or more...and for many months before that I was hitting 10 pages per day. But on the other hand, that's even better, in a way, because it shows that to finish this pretty monumental bit of reading wasn't really such a big deal if it was broken down into single steps. I mean...anybody could read 7.8 pages a day if they wanted to.
Of course the question is, Was It Worth Doing? Our survey said...it was for me. It gave me lots to think about. It also put things into perspective for me. For one thing, this whole God and The Afterlife question. One of the things that was very clear, pretty much from the get-go, was that many of the smartest people who have ever lived on this planet believe that (1) there is a God and (2) that our mortal manifestation is not the end of our existence. I have had (and have) more than my fair share of doubts about these things, but I think that it is at least sometimes a good idea to defer to people who are smarter than you are, so in that way this reading has helped me to move forward in my quest to figure out what I believe and why I believe it.
Reading this book has also shot me off into various other directions, so I've become acquainted with quite a few other writers of whom I'd previously not heard, not read, or not read much of, so it's actually given me more roads to wander down. I like that in a book.
So, yes...I'd say it was worth doing. If you're feeling called to take it on, I do have one suggestion, though: after you finish volume 9, skip 10 and read volume 11, then go back for 10. It won't make any difference in terms of chronology, because while 1 - 9 are, indeed, chronologically organized, 10 and 11 are not. And while 11 (Logical Positivism and Existentialism) is interesting and has some fine moments, Volume 10 (Russian Philosophy) was much more interesting, and was my favorite of all of the volumes by several lengths.
Now...as for tomorrow....
It's been awhile, so instead of going on into Volume II, I decided to have another go at Volume I. 505 pages of Buckle-y goodness. So, hey...that's less than two months' worth.
And check out that copyright date, by the way. I am about to start (re) reading a book that is 125 years old. As in Grover Cleveland was the President of the United States (second time around). As in Bessie Smith and Norman Rockwell were born. As in Thomas Hardy and H.G. Wells were still best-selling writers. As in Claude Debussy and Antonín Dvořák were still dropping new beats. As in The Empire of Japan and The Qing Empire were just duking it out in the First Sino-Japanese War. As in Congress had just passed the first graduated income tax. (And the U.S. Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional the next year.) As in the population of the United States was under 63 million, and its biggest city, New York City, had only 1.5 million. Yeah...that was a long time ago.
One of my regrets vis à vis reading A History of Philosophy was that I did a shitty job of keeping track of my notes while I was reading. I isolated a few things, but for every one that I wrote down / wrote about, there were a dozen things that slipped through my fingers. I intend to go back and catch up those things at some point...but I know that there's a good possibility that that won't happen. So I'm going to try to do a better job of it with Buckle. I'm thinking that the best way to do that is probably going to be via dictating quotes and notes as I go, because I know that if I try to stop and write everything down that that will impede my reading and eventually frustrate the shit out of me, and nothing good will come of that. So we'll see how it goes.
Details as they happen.
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