A Lost, Lost Book

A Lost, Lost Book May 6, 2018

Every month or so, for twenty five years worth of months, I would reach for this book.  I was a graduate student, much thinner, learning as much as I could and finding a book by A.E. Taylor was like Luke seeing holographic Leia.

I was pointed toward a mentor, long dead, but in print. The commentary looked long, but was fascinating as Professor Taylor pulled apart Timaeus: a book that you must read to understand the history of science and Dante. Taylor was just before C.S. Lewis and wrote apologetics (Does God Exist?), metaphysics, and world-class ancient philosophy, but it was his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus that mattered to me.

Taylor found everyone and commented on everything. He developed a theory about the text that was so brilliant that even though it is entirely wrong, it illuminated the text. I have come to believe that Taylor may have illuminated T.S. Elliot.

Taylor was no Inkling, but his ideas echo in The Four Quartets. Perhaps, I will have more to say about this later.

Today I miss the book. I do not know how, but this book, one I have written in for decades is gone. This should not be important, but I feel out of balance. When I checked out the book, a professor, Deborah Modrak, changed my life by agreeing to supervise my dissertation. She was so luminous and she was willing to work with me.

One of the great moments of my life came toting this book around thinking about Plato, Jesus, and cosmology, when another professor, one Alfred Geier, suggested I work with him one-on-one. Did he get paid? I doubt it. Did I learn? I know it.

At some point, I kept checking out the book, reading it, studying Timaeus. I learned from Modrak the logical rigor to disagree with Taylor about his general thesis and from Geier what had caused him to go wrong. The book, however, was a repository of fabulous learning on this pivotal dialogue and so I kept reading.

And then I broke the spine.

If you are a poor graduate student, with a family, two children born, another on the way, you know the terror. The fine will be high.

Gentle reader I paid that fine.

I was told I could pay the small fine for damaging the book or the Big Fine for losing the book, so I lost it “officially.” I am not proud of this, but there you have it.

And now I have lost a book I lost so I could use it.

It is filled with my notes, in my eccentric annotation so the notes are silenced.

This is not really bad.  I have already started again, thinking, challenging old ideas I had about the text, using what Modrak and Geier taught me.

Still I miss the book. There is a space on my shelf just right for it.

This is foolish.

Tomorrow I will go and fill in the space and move forward.

I will be glad, because old ideas must die to let new ideas grow. Yet that old broken down library copy was one containing the stains from real tears. I miss the old book.

Today turning over my office looking, I found the original fine. I have the useless paper that gave me the book, but not the book.

Sigh.

There is something deep there I should learn, but all I know just now is that I miss the book. If we love a thing, then it becomes real and that book was real. 

Goodbye Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.

 

 

 


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