a sort of non-Heidegger year

If one thing has characterized the whole of my adult life until now, it’s that I’ve generally been reading Heidegger a lot. This was true of my later undergraduate years when I was most rabid in my fanhood. It was true of the “Manhattan Project” dissertation years, when I forced myself to read the whole Gesamtausgabe (one of those rare obsessive-procrastinative strategies that actually worked, and bore real fruit). And it was true even since finishing that whole series in 1998, since they’ve continued to trickle out at the rate of 2-3 new ones per year ever since, and I’ve kept up with the new ones.

1987 was the last year in which I did not read at least one full book by Heidegger, in either English or German. Since 1992 I’ve always read at least one full volume in German per year, and usually more like 10 of them.

But not this year. I just never got around to finishing any of the three existing volumes that I still haven’t read. I was going to try to squeeze one in between Christmas and New Year’s, but the other day I asked myself: “Why?” I’ll get to it when I get to it. Time is becoming precious, and there really are better things to read than another collection of 1930’s Beiträge-esque scraps that won’t even teach me much new about Heidegger, let alone about the world.

Let 2010 be my Heidegger vacation year, and we’ll see if it goes on any longer than that. Once an author stops cutting new tracks in your brain, it’s time to move on, at least for awhile.