“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” You may regard this utterance itself as a bit hobgoblinish, but of course it is not my own but that of one of America’s first great thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I invoke it now to salve my own conscience and perhaps attenuate potential embarrassment. I have for many years now been rather punctilious in mounting a essay on a regular weekly schedule--more or less on the basis of "come hell or high water". What I have tried to transform into a moral virtue I now perceive rather along the lines of a foolish consistency, resulting not infrequently in essays of more than usually dubious usefulness.
So here’s what’s up. Later this morning Joan and I are flying to Montreal to spend the Christmas holiday with Luke and Melanie and our grandkids John Henry and Hazel. Travel even so modest as this is a big deal for us old folks, and I want to devote my full attention to getting to Montreal and back and, more importantly, to enjoying our time there. Although I am in theory as glad as ever to learn and to teach, there will be no post on Wednesday the 25th, Christmas day. The odds are perhaps better for Wednesday, January 1st, 2025, but even that is provisional. So let me take the opportunity right now to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. For what it’s worth I am also throwing to the winds a positively epic unbroken streak on Duolingo. Why do I have the odd feeling, so portentous in my own minds, that perhaps these developments are actually ones the world will little note, nor long remember, as somebody or another memorably put it?
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