I just received a book of German philosophy through interlibrary loan; I knew at the time I was filling out the request form that I couldn't possibly want it once it arrived. The book is by an 18th century thinker named Salomon Maimon. Last names were rare for Eastern European Jews of that time, but he picked one to fit in better among German philosophical circles; he chose this name because of his respect for Maimonides. The book, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, is Maimon's comments on Kant's first Critique, which I'm still interested in even though six years ago I would have scorned someone who continued focusing on program authors in a non-academic setting. I requested Maimon because I read in a book on the history of philosophy that Kant said in a letter, “none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does.”

When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.

Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.

I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.

And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?