a good finishing note

One of the best strategic sayings to emerge from the U.S. Civil War was the ominous Stonewall Jackson’s injunction to “always look for chances to turn defeat into victory,” a maxim he often put into practice. (What makes Jackson so ominous? It’s his Old Testament level of battlefield zealotry. When the war first began, he wanted his corps to march into Pennsylvania under a black flag, meaning that every defeated enemy would be slaughtered, with no prisoners taken.)

In any case, this started as my least pleasant writing day in a very long time, but now everything is clicking (“defeat turned into victory”). If it weren’t 2 AM I’d keep the good times rolling, but it’s important to me not to slip into the darkness of a night owl schedule I can no longer handle very well, as too often happens to me when the structure of teaching schedules disappears. So, I’m going to rest on my laurels and try to have an earlier start tomorrow than I did today.

It wasn’t one of my hardest-working days, since I slipped into avoidance tactics whenever things weren’t enjoyable.

Total writing time on the day was only 3 hours and 19 minutes, which is a fairly weak effort on my part, even though they were intensely focused hours. But that yielded a respectable 5,262 words, meaning that about 4 pages of cuts will be necessary (from 17 pages down to about 13). 17 pages in less than three and a half hours isn’t bad, and proves the value of having a detailed outline by your side, even though the pages are still fairly rough. (I mean rough in style; the content is pretty good already.)

The real failing of the day was in taking the long breaks during the tiresome early sections, leaving me with no time for polishing the style. However, I don’t feel in the mood for it today anyway, and it can easily be done whenever I get around to it.

The closing notes of this first chapter are actually pretty stirring, and I came up with some new ideas in the final section, on the fly while writing.

Despite the short chapters there is actually a fairly leisurely pace to this book so far. Given that each topic already has a strictly demarcated piece of turf, it is possible to linger a bit over the set-up, slowly working my way toward the central concepts of the book.

One thing that came up is that I had the chance to show the strange eccentricity of Heidegger’s praise of the pre-Socratics at the expense of Plato and Aristotle. Yes, he has his reasons, but I think they are bad ones. And as much as I adore the pre-Socratics, you ought to sense that something is wrong if your version of the history of philosophy presents Plato and Aristotle as moments of decay. “It doesn’t pass the straight face test,” as they say. We’re just so used to Heidegger saying it that the absolute strangeness of the claim no longer shocks us.