Happy new year to y'all.
The year 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of my moving to Nuevo Mexico and to my beloved Albuquerque... Time has passed, I got older, but no wiser. It's so nice to start anew anyways, or to pretend to do so, at this beginning of the year. On recommence toujours, and that's (as Stanley Cavell once said) very American. This possiblitiy of renewal is at the core of what is America.
This year I will daily update this blog with notes from my personal library, in view of connecting various strains of thought seemingly unrelated one from the other. This will be an experimental field of the CONNECTIVE HUMANITIES, or so I hope.
"As a result, the philosophers who followed Plato and Aristotle, if they still sought balance and fullness of life, no longer dared to seek it in the city. They betrayed their own creed by dodging their civic responsibilities or by turning to an idealized empire or a purely heavenly polity for confirmation; whereas those who took on the burdens of commerce, politics, and war had no place in their muddy routine for the highest possibilities of personal development. The monuments of Greek art, which we now prize, were valid expressions of this life at its loftiest moments. But in part they were likewise material substitutes for a spirit that, had it known the secret of its own perpetuation, might have made an even more valuable contribution both to urbanism and to human development."
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961)
Mumford will definitely be a chapter in my future project on American thoughtscape, along with Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder among others. This also has been on my mind for a couple of decades without materializing itself... But I sense that things are beginning to take shape. By 2018 this will see the day (promises, promises...).
