If it's good enough for Tibor Szamuely, it's good enough for me.

Only about a week to go before I finish the 11th and final volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. I was reflecting back on a few things today, and one of the things my light so shined upon me was the fact that this sentence in Volume 10

is the only time in 5,344 pages * that any reference is made to one of my (admittedly many...virtually a legion of) heroes, Henry Thomas Buckle. Which is not surprising, I suppose, in that he was a historian and chess player, not a philosopher. ** And slight though it is, it really delighted me to stumble upon dear Henry Thomas. And made me want to go back for the second and third volumes of History of Civilization in England, which is something I've been meaning to do for about a decade or so now. Well, I am going to have some reading time opening up in about a week, so maybe that's where I'll spend it. Volume I was one of my favorite non-fiction books EVer, so I would mos def be up for it. Hmmm? Oh, sure. NOT in hierarchical order, though, I'd also name Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford by J. Thomas Looney (pronounced Lah-Knee, by the way, so don't get any funny ideas), The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (well, soor-EEE, I like the guy),  The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, Hiroshima by John Hersey, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Oh, and A History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, of course. Oh, and Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, of course. Not to mention The Right Stuff, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. A couple of Norman Mailers, for sure. Okay, enough already. I read a lot. And speaking of...Henry Thomas Buckle had a library of 22,000 books. And that was back in the mid 1800s, when it was a lot harder to order through Amazon, and where downloads took months. So another reason to love him. As if you needed another, right?  Okay. Just wanted to put that out there. More Buckle thoughts to come...probably before you need them.




*Arguably. Wikipedia says 5,344, but I say tomato. 

** On de otter hund, show me a historian who is not a philosopher, knowhatimsayin? ***

*** Or a chess player who's not a philosopher, for that matter. ****

**** Or a philosopher who's not a chess player, but I feel that this teat has been wrung dry.