What Did I Do
I’m
awake a lot during the night. Since I’m not sick and since these periods don’t
bother me, I chalk these intervals up to age. And that is certainly true about
what often happens during these periods: I think about my past. Not brooding
about it, not celebrating it, just remembering, ruminating about what happened
to me at some point in the past or what I then did.
A few
times I listed, so to speak, all the activities that I had engaged in during my
life, leaving out, of course, the ordinary activities of living. On several
occasions I found myself speculating about which of these I had spent the most
time.
I came
up with a number of categories, such as reading and writing philosophy, which
officially became my profession: I am a professor of philosophy emeritus. Then
there was just reading. I’ve read all my life, though I was never an avid
reader, nor a fast one. I’ve read fiction, but except for a brief period when
Fannia and I devoured detective stories, reading novels never became a big
occupation. Properly educated people would rightly look down at me in that
domain.
I once
wrote a piece about reading and writing and confessed to be partial to the
latter, explaining it (if that’s what it was) as a preference for being active
rather than passive. So write a lot, I did, in support of jobs I held, with a
quite a few papers on topics in higher education. And I write a lot about my
favorite subject: me.
Of
course you would be right if you attributed that last fact to a kind of egoism,
though that wouldn’t tell the full story. The basic desire—impulse, if you
like—was to write. And there I was one subject I could write about without
having to bother with doing research. In short, impulses to act are dragged
down by laziness.
When I started this piece, I had more activities in mind. I still do,
but will continue on this theme on a future post. 