How I Spent my Life, [I]

   This will be the beginning of a piece on a topic that might generate a much longer essay and perhaps will one day. When you get old, it is well established, your thoughts turn more often to the past—probably in part because, having retired from an active career, there is less to engage the mind contemporaneously. So it has been with me, now ninety years old, to the point that at night, during spells of wakedness, I recite to myself German songs—or at least their opening lines—which I have not sung since after the age of twelve, when we left Germany for America.

   But there are less trivial ways in which the past creeps into my present mind. I think about what I have done with my life—not in a weighty sense that reflects on accomplishments and failures, but in the quite casual sense as to how I have spent my time. I won’t discuss activities pertaining to family and recreational and just plain living activities.

   First, there is reading and writing of philosophy. That’s first, because I think that I am mostly identified as a retired professor of  philosophy. Second there is my involvement with higher education as something of a commentator and an administrator. Third is a long career as a woodworker.

   This last came first by many years. I took to Laubsägen (jigsaw) when I was maybe ten and never abandoned that engagement with wood. Philosophy was the result of a casual encounter. I had returned from a fellowship year in Europe and visited my undergraduate mentor, then chairman of Columbia’s philosophy department. I had applied for a job as an evaluator of the Voice of America which turned out not to be funded. “So, you might as well sign up as a philosophy graduate students and promptly arranged for a small scholarship. And that’s how I got into philosophy.  More anon.