| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Perhaps, like me. you have a propensity to collect books without quite knowing why. Over the years I have piled up books by and about, say, Ludwig Witt- genstein, Hannah Arendt, George Santayana, Philip Roth, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Franz Rosen- zweig, Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas Bernhard - and not only not read them, but have no desire to do so. I have kept busy working on other things. And for a decade or two at a time. these texts simply gather dust on my shelves. But then, inevitably. I am drawn to these nearly forgotten volumes and. strangely, they prove pivotal to a new project: l recall. for instance, that Santayana ascended, literally, from the obscurity of a low shelf to earn a chapter in my book on William and Henry James. Wittgenstein made an analogous, if more circuitous, journey from the shadows, waiting untouched, until five years ago when I kept a long-held inner vow to read an- other languishing tome, one that had stared me down so often it had acquired an aura of intimidation: Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason: Wittgen-stein, Skeptirism, Morality and Tragedy. It was indeed intimidating. but also inspiring: that experience opened the door to more Cavell - and to deeper engagements with Emerson - and to Wittgenstein, who has joined the sage of Concord as a central ?gure in my current project on writers. artists. and philosophers who renounce their careers. The peculiarities of this manner of book buying - the absence of full consciousness and the long gap between acquisition and reading - puts me in mind
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