O, for world enough and time

Today I had the sort of reading day that made me wish I could resign all of my jobs and do nothing all day but pore through books with a pen, notebook, and everlasting coffee pot, thinking about things and trying to figure them out. There simply isn't time enough from sun-up to sun-down to think all of the glorious thoughts one could think. Add to that a lovely wife and a giggling baby boy, and a wild outside world with winds and trees and mysterious places, and it feels something like vertigo. The world is too much with us.

This Lawrence E. Lynch (has anyone ever heard of him?) book I'm reading on Aquinas is quite good. He's so far addressing the question whether Aquinas' philosophy can be taken seriously as philosophy, given that he was foredetermined in a particular religious worldview. So far he's demonstrated quite brilliantly how Aquinas defined knowledge, being, and science. It seems authentic to Aquinas, and shows convincingly how his Enlightenment critics were at futile cross-purposes. Here are two insights worth repeating:
1) Aquinas' method depended on carefully distinguishing the various ways in which truth can exist in the human reason (Some truths being of faith, others of knowledge, others of demonstration, and sometimes the same truth by different ways to different people)
2) What anything is (it's essence, as man's individual humanity) is real only because a unique act of existing makes the individual real.
This simultaneously explains the construction habens esse and answers Sartre and Russell.
In Lynch's praise, he translates Aquinas into English with admirable clarity. Against him, though this is true of nearly every scholarly philosophical work, his own writing is dull and dense...most of the time. Sometimes it astounds me, as it did on my drive home today, that there can be boring things in the same world as Elephants and mandolins and Venus fly-traps.

Also, I've sat on my last post for a good week wondering whether I'm right to leave it up or not. I haven't taken it down yet, and I think I will leave it up with the further disclaimer that I know what a deeply personal issue it can be. I'm probably the last person who has any right to say a word about it. Still, if that word can be heard, let it sound compassionate.