At the beginning of the fifty-ninth year of my flesh
Sir William MacTaggart (1903-1981), “Seascape with sunset.” I have a bid out on this one; the auction is in five days.
Ineunte anno quinquagesimo nono carnis meae, as Augustine might have put it. In other words, I turned fifty-eight a few days ago.
I don’t feel that old. Mid-forties, maybe. A good diet, lots of exercise, and excellent sleep have all done wonders.
I do look that old, though, more’s the pity.
What would I like to be true of me when I turn fifty-nine?
I am absolutely committed to finishing my long-overdue book on Duns Scotus’s ethics. It’s been languishing for quite a while. This summer is make-or-break—so much so that I’m considering postponing my next trip to Scotland so that I don’t lose three vital weeks this summer.
Here I’m transcribing a MS that reports Scotus’s lectures in Paris. I have an early printed edition to help—my paleographical skills are not great—but the edition and the MS differ considerably, and I’m mostly having to wing it.
I also have some archival work to do for an Anselm paper, “The curious afterlife of Anselm’s De casu diaboli.” That involves looking at MSS in Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, Rouen, and Edinburgh and trying to figure out how various “hallucinations” (as we call them in the AI era) crept in to the transmission of the text. I now have a venue for that paper—just no paper yet.
Beyond that, I’m going to be focusing on a translation volume and gearing up for the next big project, whatever that turns out to be.
This fall I’m teaching two small seminars. One is an “Ignatius Seminar.” This is for first-year students; I’m doing Augustine’s Confessions. I’m very excited about this one. I’m also excited to get a second chance at our Philosophical Writing Seminar, which is for philosophy majors. I taught it this past semester. Some bits went well; some didn’t. I asked my students for anonymous comments, and they were candid but kind. I have great ideas, thanks to them, for how to make it work better the second time around. I need to go ahead and create the syllabus while the ideas are still fresh.
I don’t think I know yet what I’m teaching in the spring.
I’m just beginning to look for a place in DC. I think owning, rather than renting—having the same place to return to, time after time—will help me feel as settled when I’m in DC as I do when I’m in Florida. And that should help me develop some semblance of a social life there. So yeah, by the time I turn fifty-nine I’d like to have some people to hang out with while I’m in DC.
Ideally I’ll be living somewhere convenient to my trainer, because fifty-nine-year-old me needs to have a few more pounds of muscle than fifty-eight-year-old me.