by day

Actually, here’s roughly the same view by day (though in the opposite direction), taken 2 years ago by friends who were visiting from New Mexico. Central Alexandria.

Alex corniche by night

I’ll have a better photo up tomorrow. But this didn’t turn out quite as badly as I thought… cars racing down the corniche in Alexandria. (I had to tilt the laptop to get the view I wanted from the balcony.)

train post

Hey, it’s my first ever blog post from a moving train… I had the hardest time getting the web service going for part of the train ride, but the problem is at length solved.

If it were daytime I’d take a photo out the window to show some Egyptian countryside in real time. But right now, nearly 9 PM, it’d be nothing but glare.

what to read in Alex

I could go with Antony and Cleopatra, since it’s hard not to get a kick out of reading it in Alexandria. I’ve done that before. And in fact, I’ll take it with me just in case.

I’d be tempted to go with Plotinus, who spent many years there and fits the spirit of the place to some extent, but it would feel phony since the Enneads were written down in Rome, not Alex. The other problem is that I don’t want to carry that massive complete volume of the Enneads with me. One effect of the Kindle (which I don’t yet own) will probably be to encourage more frequent vacation readings of books that no one wants to carry– Proust and Gibbon come to mind, but I’ll throw Plotinus in the same pot too.

Hey, I got it!… The more philosophical writings of Origen. I have them on my shelf but have barely read them. That’s as Alexandria as it gets. And honestly, I literally just thought of that idea while typing this post. A bolt from the blue.

That reminds me of something that would be an interesting survey question for academic types… Which book had the biggest impact on you? Not which one you think is the greatest, or which one you currently like the most. But which book was timed in such a way that it had the biggest influence on your future.

I’m speaking here of fortunate chance timing, books that had to be read precisely when they were in order to push you in a specific reason. That’s why I can’t choose Being and Time as my own award winner, because I made repeated efforts to read that book from ages 17-20, and if I had failed again at 20 I would have made it through at 21 or 22. There was simply no ay I was going to go very far into life without reading Being and Time. Nor would it have made a significant difference to my future whether I’d gotten into Heidegger at 18, 20, or 22. It was inevitably going to happen at some point.

In intellectual terms, my winner might be Levinas, Existence and Existents, the first work by Levinas that I read. It hit me at a formative moment when I must have felt the need for pro-Heidegger criticism of Heidegger, and I still think he’s the best we have in that category. I’m pretty sure that Levinas is going to wear well over the decades, though perhaps not for the reasons that his admirers often think.

In personal terms, it may well be Meillassoux’s After Finitude. If the book had been published 5 years later, or if I’d been told about it 5 years later, that would have made a huge difference for everyone in the s.r. orbit, since that orbit wouldn’t really have existed in tangible form.

I suppose people can be categorized in this way too. There are certain people who are simply our soul mates, and we would have been close to them no matter when we met up. But there are others where it may be all about critical timing– someone who hits you right at the exact moment when you were open to their specific sort of influence, and perhaps if it were earlier or later it would have meant less or even nothing to you.

ADDENDUM: Unfortunately, both Antony and Cleopatra and Origen seem to be in my office rather than at home. Which left me with the sudden urge to read– Josiah Royce. Don’t ask me why. It just came in a flash.

busy bee

Looks like another 1-2 days passed with minimal blogging. But there is much on my plate, including a partly new job description in Cairo that I will discuss as soon as it’s publicly announced.

Otherwise, I have a birthday tomorrow (Saturday the 9th). I still enjoy birthdays, even though at this point each one is another ominous step on the inevitable highway to deep middle age. The tragedy of it becomes a positive, though, since you can use that as an excuse to do something very fun to distract yourself from it.

Last year I went to Sri Lanka, for instance (there’s plenty of time to do that while on sabbatical). This year, with only a long weekend to work with, Alexandria is my destination of choice. The trip begins a few hours from now. As stated here before, it’s by train, and it takes around 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Exiting the train in Alexandria, you feel an immediate rush of cool, fresh seaside air. Though I love Cairo, air quality is by no means the strong suit of the city. Alexandria not only has fresh air, it also has beautiful colors, of a pastel/technicolor sort. There must be something about the moisture up there that gives even minor objects a kind of faint glow.

The Cecil Hotel has a rooftop Chinese restaurant which, along with very good food, has a spectacular view across the harbor over to Fort Qaitbey at the point on the west of the harbor. It’s a medieval fortress, and also the apparent site of the Alexandria Lighthouse of “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” fame, destroyed by earthquake. Much of the ancient city is said to lie under the harbor now.

Many travelers are disappointed by the city, but I’m never sure why. I suppose if you expected lots of ancient buildings you’d be disappointed, because there are barely any. But since I knew that before ever visiting, I was never disappointed.

Whenever I internally play the “if I had unlimited money” game, Alexandria always comes out pretty high on the list of places where I would spend much of the year.

Incidentally, I’m taking my laptop along, and since my net access is through Vodafone, I can blog from anywhere in Egypt other than deep in the desert where even cell phones don’t work.