Grandpa's books ...



Grandpa as a sea cadet. (Digby, Nova Scotia, 1944.)

Grandpa (a long-time engineer for CN) died a few years ago, and Grandma is in a nursing home now, so we're preparing to sell their empty house. At present, we're boxing Grandpa's sizable library. And what things I've found! Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Nietzsche, James, Russell, Freud, Jung, Köhler, Einstein, Sartre, Barth, et al — most underlined and annotated — as well as some (bad) single-volume histories of philosophy. Why, there's even an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology textbook, written by some Jesuit scholar. It's also annotated.

(Yarmouth, N.S., 1950.)

He seems to have sipped willy-nilly from almost every major thinker, without ever drinking deep. (Leastwise there's but a single book per writer.) Yet he never spoke of his readings, not to me anyhow. And I thought he'd nothing but the standard old-man books (about steam engines, military history, decorative gardening, Canadiana). Too bad. We might've had some good talks.

To my reader ...

Diogenes

A report that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all Corinth into a bustle; one was furbishing his arms, another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having nothing to do — of course no one thought of giving him a job — was moved by the sight to gird up his philosopher's cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: 'I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like the rest.'  

Lucian, The Way to Write History

My reader: I don't want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude, so I'm writing a blog to be like the rest.