Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another. And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words,… read article

A blog turns out to be an education undertaken in public. Its proprietor is more student than teacher, and one is fortunate to encounter numerous tutors along the way, between the covers of books and out there in the bigger world. I seldom sit down at the keyboard with the goal of instructing you, like a pompous schoolmarm. More often I want to share something – a book you might enjoy and a sense of the pleasure it has already given me, or some new nugget of knowledge. I would continue reading and writing without you, but you make the experience more rewarding. Here is a 1958 entry in Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014):  “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.”   With the proviso that “experience”  and "every possible situation" include “book learning,” I agree. It’s an old paradox, one the Greeks left us, but the older we get and the more we learn, the more we come to recognize our ignorance. In other words, “adult education” is redundant. Dr. Johnson might be describing the care and feeding of a blog when he writes in The Rambler on July 9, 1751:   “The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.”   Anecdotal Evidence today celebrates its nineteenth anniversary. Each day since February 5, 2006, I have posted something except during the hiatus following spinal surgery in 2019. Now, with a renewed backbone, it’s time to get to work.

Things fall apart

On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.” White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on… read article