A PAUSE TO REFRESH

I have been blogging regularly for four years now, posting almost a comment a day, starting before I retired from the University of Massachusetts.  Two years ago, in 2010, I wrote and posted daily a Memoir that filled three volumes and ran to almost eight hundred manuscript pages.  While writing that memoir, I also wrote and posted, on a different blog, a book length introduction to the use of formal mathematical methods in political philosophy.  My memoir was followed by a series of lengthy tutorials on a wide array of topics:  The Thought of Karl Marx, the Thought of Sigmund Freud, Ideological Critique, How to Study Society, An Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, and The Philosophy of David Hume.  Having run out of topics for tutorials, I undertook a number of mini-tutorials and after that a series of Appreciations.  Taking all in all, I have poured out perhaps five hundred thousand words, not counting the many, many commentaries on the passing scene that are more typical of blogs.

The response has been extremely gratifying.  Though I have not ascended into the empyrean reaches of Lady Gaga [who scores twice as many Google hits as Jesus Christ], nor even achieved the internet fame of an Andrew Sullivan or a Josh Marshall, I have been blessed with an unusually intelligent and learned coterie of readers, whose comments have been knowledgeable, pertinent, and interesting.

But I am beginning to suspect that there are limits to the number of topics on which I can blog with even a simulacrum of competence, so I hope you will not take it amiss if I post a tad less often.  I will, of course, continue to react to the more egregious absurdities of our politics, and I am always open to requests and suggestions.  Perhaps I ought to read a book, as a way of recharging my batteries.  [At the moment, I am making my way through George Dyson's new work, Turing's Castle, by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson.  It is a very odd book, apparently about the invention of the computer.]