My Life--Again

How I Spent My Life

   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, at ninety years, 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, though I won’t take up activities pertaining to family nor 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 as an administrator. Third is a long career as a woodworker. Fourth is my involvement with music, mostly passive, as a “serious” listener, and active as a member of various choruses over the years.

   Woodwork came early. I took to Laubsägen (jigsaw) when I was maybe ten and never abandoned my engagement with wood. I “discovered” music when about fourteen and took advantage of New York’s concert scene, while my high school chorus was the first of many to follow. Philosophy was the result of a casual encounter. I had taken a number of undergraduate philosophy courses (there were no majors at Columbia in my day), so when I returned from a fellowship year in Europe and a job in evaluation in the Voice of America was not funded, my undergraduate mentor, then chairman of Columbia’s philosophy department, said: “So, you might as well sign up as a philosophy graduate student” and promptly arranged for a small scholarship. Finally, after a series of department chairmanships, I let my name run in a search for dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern, which made me an administrator, but also led to my writings on higher education, in books and articles.

   There’s an outline. As suggested at the outset, I may flesh this out at a later time.