Night and Day

Oh what a difference a little time makes! And a good book doesn't hurt...Well, I took a nap today because my rear-end was actually getting sore from sitting on it. I must say that is a first.

I awoke with just enough time to run down to the library and pick up a book I had ordered. Brief tangent, I tend to develop a reputation at the university libraries as the obnoxious guy who needs new books ordered almost weekly. I also make no secret of the disgust I feel toward university libraries that don't have books. "You don't have Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind! No wonder nobody is learning anything here." So it begins...Copenhagen is very good about book orders though. I just do it online and then I go the following day and pick up my book. To be fair to USD, and I am not one for "fairness," they did have a nice classical record collection that offered me hundreds of hours of pleasure between classes in my career there...and the grass is nice, green and short. The toilet paper is like sandpaper there though.

Ok, enough of the tangent. I got my book today deciding that I needed some light reading, Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet Armed. This is the first part of a three part biography on Trotsky that I have wanted to read for years(parts 2 and 3 are The Prophet Disarmed and The Prophet in Exile, respectively). Trotsky had a fascinating life, like a Shakespearian tragic figure. Deutscher's account is criticized for being overly romantic (he was a Trotskyite), but I make no bones about my interest in Trotsky. Trotsky to me is just as useful as a fictional character as he is a historical character. Think about that life! Better a fiction in fact. Plus, in studying philosophy you encounter the ideas of "representative men," or "exemplary thought" on the path to reflective judgments and derivation of universals. These are conceptual tools for judgment in a Kantian/Arendtian/Nietzschean sense...the validity is not objective, but not relative. I will not go into it, but suffice it to say that I am thrilled to have my Trotsky biography...although its not helping my lame presentation on the Patriot Act. Now I will return to The Prophet Armed!