sunday school

---

A scholar of philosophy, passing his 65th birthday, muses at an online forum about his recent hopes for that forum, his future plans, and expresses a sense of aging: “It is both funny and a bit scary that you are now older than most people you meet.”

When younger, I always expected to find new perspectives (on a given topic) beyond mine, enlightening and inspiring me, because others had been on that important road longer. I’m no leading light in the cosmos.

But in recent years, I’ve realized more and more that other scholars are recapitulating on a given topic what earlier ones have already covered, newly postureed in their own voice, and often well-oriented to their own times. But new kinds of insight on a given topic get fewer and fewer. And also, voices which were so admirable in past years died.

New roads of inquiry are emerging constantly, of course. I understand very little, all in all, like most everyone else—or at least that’s my prudent feeling. I easily feel I’m a polymath verging on dilletante, but feel enough that I’m doing good work worth sharing.

But, as decades have passed, my own thinking becomes so relative to my own life that there’s increasingly no option but to keep confidence in my own way, my apparent fate of solitudes, because prospects of solidarity, let alone sharing a path of inquiry, become less and less likely. So, Work easily feels like writing to myself—writing for the sake of my path, keeping confidence in the integrity of that, and not giving too much worry about whether it’s useful to others.

So it goes, and learning never ends.

---