December 13, 2023:

Like elephants at the zoo, the sitters are kindly but they're dumb.

They want me to believe. I want to believe. But they're unable to answer questions asked in good faith.

We read in Luke that Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, where shepherds come to see. But Matthew says it was a house, and the visitors were Magi from the east. They can't both be right?

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shalt not want." Wait — I thought we're supposed to want Him?

They give me a child's bible, The Rainbow Bible, inscribed "Ted & Berta Angell, April 27, 1964". It's been at my bedside 62 years.

December 12, 2023:

Nanterre. The Red University.

The faculty didn't know this, of course.

Yet, one almost certainly did. French, a philosopher, expert in Spinoza, very probably himself an undergraduate in Paris in 1968.

I barely knew him. He was unwell, and left in my first year after teaching a single class on autobiography. For the me of nowadays, he would have been my resource, if only he had lived.

December 11, 2023:

Professor Falstaff, with his clique-ism and his primary interest in undergraduate XX chromosomes, illustrates the flipside of our sometimes brilliant experimental college. He personified the lack of resources available to students when the Philosophy Department of One refused or was unable to be useful. Where "clique" simultaneously describes and underemphasizes a real-world power dynamic. Professor Falstaff was free to be helpful, or not, depending on his whims, on whether you flattered him, on whether you were easy or difficult to work with. And whether you wore pants or a skirt.

The school modeled the "Red University" concept from the height of the revolutionary wave of the 1960s. Conceptually it belongs with Nanterre. The faculty didn't know this, of course. So that Professor Falstaff and his poker partner went on to write frivolous, superficial "histories" intended to yuck things up, in their habitual manner of ironic posturing. Empty self-amusement.

But by "model" I also mean "reduction". A 1/10,000 scale proof of concept. Brilliant, in principle. Compromised, thoroughly, by scarcity.