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 beyond mine, enlightening and inspiring me, because others had been on
an important road longer. And I’m not going to pretend that I’m the brightest light in the cosmos.

But in recent years, I’ve realized more and more that other scholars are recapitulating 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 get fewer and fewer. And also, voices which were so admirable in past years died.

Meanwhile, my own thinking becomes so relative to my own decades, that there’s increasingly no option but to keep confidence in my own way, because prospects of solidarity, let alone sharing a path of inquiry, become less and less likely, until thinking is almost like writing to oneself—no, writing for the sake of the path itself, keeping confidence in the integrity of that, and not giving too much worry to whether it’s useful to others.

Yes, happy birthday. You’re wise to look forward to many more years. That optimism actually makes more years more likely.

---