Who Am I?

The other day my daughter Maren and grandaughter Kylie walked into my office while I was taking photos of books on two of my shelves.

I'm thinking about who I am, I explained. The things I have collected and treasured over the years surely tell something about who I am. And I have a lot of books. These two shelves have mostly books of philosophy, I said, and I've always been interested in philosophy.

The first shelf has an odd set of juxtapositions: the Frankfurt-School Marxist Adorno cheek-to-cheek with St. Anselm and St. Augustine, who is right up against Barthes.

Am I simply interested in anything I come across? Yes, it's true. Over time, it's true. Taste changes. Focus changes. But the interest in ideas is constant, be they religious or anti-religious or simply and aesthetically literary. I would read Augustine today for his take on the nunc stans, but not on God. And Adorno is fascinating for his negative dialectic, but not for his mistaken diatribes against jazz.

Buber's I and Thou / Ich und Du will always be important to me, in part because a fellow Mormon missionary in Germany, Cole Durham, gave me the German edition with his recommendation and led me, perhaps, into my first philosophical reading. Cassirer became interesting as a philosopher of language as my studies took me in that direction. Cavell I discovered through Richard Rorty. And Deleuze and Guatari and Derrida came with graduate studies in the late 1970's.

Vilem Flusser was a discovery one night in Bonn after an extraordinary film about photography and truth by the filmmaker Harun Farocki. In a bar after the film, Farocki answered my question about Derrida being a possible influence by stating emphatically: everything I know about photography and film I learned from Vilem Flusser.


No getting around Foucault in my time, nor would I want to. Besides the books, there was that ecstatic moment in the Woodrow Wilson auditorium at Princeton when he stood under the brilliant lights, his bald head shining like a saint's, and spoke about sexuality to a huge and worshipful crowd.


And Freud: I have his dreams every night.

Habermas -- so logical, so thoughtful, so harelipped, so damned admirable. Heidegger, on the other hand, is so slippery and so mistaken and so fraught with history and so ongoingly influential on me. Holzwege may be my bible. And the two, Habermas and Heidegger, conjoined by Hegel. Holy "h",s!

There's Kant in the middle, after Jung, who I don't like as much as the books would suggest. And Kierkegaard's "Either/Or," forever enshrined in my life by the dedication written by the college girlfriend who gave it to me: "When I'm loving you more than I can stand, all I can think to do is to give you a book." Fond erotic/philosophic memories.

Karl Marx behind a coil of barbed wire. Not entirely fair. I love the seriousness of his thought; and wish he had a funny bone. Alasdair MacIntyre gave me the German translation of his book; and once came striding into my office at Vanderbilt to congratulate me on the fact that my religion (his was Catholic) had just entered its Renaissance period -- proof being the New York Times front page article about the forger Mark Hoffman who had just been arrested for killing a Mormon collector with a bomb.

Leiris, Levinas, Levi-Strauss -- love those "L"'s.

Frau Lou! Nietzsche's lover (and Rilke's and Freud's). I've nestled her up against Nietzsche. And Martha Nussbaum! I've always been half in love with her (and the power and breadth of her thought), especially after she was such a thoughtful reader of my "Immortal For Quite Some Time."

Tillich is a remnant of my first philosophical ventures at BYU. Wittgenstein is a much more lasting influence, especially the idea of language games and truth relative to that sort of context.

The photos cut out lots of books to the left and the right, most notably Plato, who taught me about eros and philosophy, and those by Richard Rorty, perhaps the most influential of all these writers on me. I'd describe myself, I think, as a pragmatist in his mold.

In short: this is who I am. Well, part of who I am. There's also the mountainbike and the backcountry skis.

Not to mention my thoughtful and kind and beautiful daughter and granddaughter.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 7

Chapter 3 this morning, up early again. As it did yesterday, Leselust drew me out of bed.

I opened doors and windows to air out the house. "Air out." True. But also "air in."

The actor arrives in a clearing (Lichtung). The German word is fraught with light, actual Licht, not just the potential light of a clearing. And of course I see Heidegger's Lichtungen and Holzwege in the actor's walking. Walking = Thinking. Walking in certain ways is a fine metaphor for thinking in certain ways.

The actor thinks of the woman, reminds himself that although it is true that he doesn't love her, he nonetheless, when he's with her, feels "geschmückt."

The word stops me short. The woman is his jewelry? He feels ornamented, decorated, adorned, embellished when he is with her?

The more I turn the odd idea over in my mind the more sense it makes. Being with the woman could be "thrilling," "exciting," "comforting," etc. But this is a quiet sense for the goodness of being with her. And the surprising word, the risked idea, feels just right.

"Was that nothing? He had time. He still had time, nothing more human than that."

The gentle thoughts remind me of a mood I often fell into during the year after my divorce:

26 December 2003, Provo

            Christmas packages from Tom and Nate. From Brooklyn, Tom’s gift is a CD of the Henry Jones Swing Trio. I’ve been listening to his long, sweet clarinet improvisations for hours. Nate sent me a deft sketch of a Hong Kong bridge, and a lively description of an old man he was trying to proselytize. I had sent him Ed Abbey’s response to a missionary: “So you’re going to Christianize the savages. Aren’t they savage enough already?”

Nate replied: Dad, I love you.

Ben and Sam and Tim joined Lyn and me for Christmas dinner. She prepared a vegetarian feast that made us forget the taste of ham. The boys seem to be adjusting well enough to the divorce (who knows what lurks beneath?) and have responded generously to the idea of their father with a new partner.

Maren and Brandon brought Kylie and Kadon to see their grandfather, and later Joe and Tracy stopped by with little Jake, adopted in November. We sat around a crackling fire, enjoying the warmth and light, wary only when the children got too close.

            Nothing stands still. Feels good, mostly.

"He had time, nothing more human than that."

The clearing fills with ugly people, not people with physical attribute the actor could name. They are just not beautiful. And why not? He tries to think this through. They are ugly because they are not aware. They don't stop, they don't even think of stopping at the threshold between woods and clearing. The German word is "innehalten" and carries the delicate sense of consciousness, of inner awareness. 

The people are also ugly because of their consciousness-stealing cell phones and cameras. Those are my words: consciousness-stealing. They're abstract in a way this book never is. The narrator describes what the actor is seeing and thinking with words that are not ugly, not ugly because they're not typical, not like "consciousness-stealing."

They are ugly, these people who now fill the clearing, because they have taken on the identities of types: walkers, runners, bike riders, senior hiking groups, etc.

Reading this section I know what will come, inevitably, as it did in Peter's play "Voyage by Dugout." The worst of these ugly people (in the play it was the clueless and aggressive "Internationals") will be riding mountain bikes: "On their specialized bikes, plowing through the wildly disturbed grass, were the four traders of the City and Rural Bank."

Here is my own mountain bike, yesterday morning after the rain and after reading and writing about Chapter 2, here is my "Specialized Stump Jumper" leaning against a bush of mountain mahogany, here is proof of my own typecasting almost 2000 feet above my house with a slope of aspen and douglas fir rising higher to the south, here, in short, is why I leaned over to Zarko in Vienna's Burgtheater at the premiere of "Voyage by Dugout" and whispered: "Don't ever tell Peter I ride a mountain bike!"

Does it make a difference that I rode alone? That I stopped to admire the blue larkspur, the white woodland star, the wild rose? That as I rode I thought about the book I had been reading, grateful for the tempos and rhythms its sentences had drawn my own thinking into?