Sunlight and Breezes

2010.10.08
Days Remaining: 234

1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!

2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.

3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.

4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.

5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!


* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.