When I (we) was young, maturity seemed like some end-point toward which…Adulthood a place which possessed its own knowledge and meaning which would become somehow obvious; achieving, falling-into this state.

For more than twenty years we took on the mantles of parenthood, thinking it was grown-up and adult, perhaps in contrast to our children who were small, needed care and guidance, and… who then grew-up.

All these outward facets of being adult have passed. We are here, now alone, now without the others to tell: yet consultants, friends, but not as adults to anyone, certainly not to ourselves.

What will be next – post-adult – beyond the imagination of becoming mature, a category whose outline blurred; what occupation, what place in the world, what to do, who and how to be?

Past-adulthood: a time to re-think, to re-consider; new problems, new notions of activity, a more powerful sense of boredom with more time, shelter no longer a house, where is there to be “at home?”

I like the idea of being (called) a humanist. I try to interpret and understand the notions of humanism and being a humanist through the outlook of being a writer-teacher.

I believe that all humans are a part, each an aspect of this world in physical and conceptual senses. I attempt to take the ideas of the human condition which all of us have thought out, and get them into the minds and lives of everyone’s todays and tomorrows.

I do not merely reject spirituality or whatever visions through which life is seen and lived, but I am sure that life’s problems must be thoughtfully considered, and new analyses applied to new times.

I don’t like everything about anyone, least of all myself. It is not my wish to make anyone feel good merely by playing with their moods. Rather, I wish to praise their confidence in being able to deal with the world as it is, and will be.

I study them as persons like myself, also urged to write and teach and study, trying to walk with them and their ideas as they would peruse today’s world.

I need a great deal of privacy and down-time to absorb what is happening in some constant epochal battles with being in the world. I like to live in the words and minds and ideas of the world’s great writers, thinkers and doers. Thus, I deal in the lives and words of persons who are mostly now dead; whose words, ideas, and products such as books and musical texts have survived. I study them to see how and why they have survived, to see what and how they said, attempting to place myself in their thoughts and times; and bring them in ours.

I play their music in order to discover what they have written in it.

All this I try to tell to others, and especially to urge their own studies that it may become a useful part of their own lives. I like the idea of being a humanist, and want these ways of being and thinking to live actively and thoughtfully in our lives: toward visions of the future.

Yesterday, for the first time, I looked out the windows of my new office; looking out upon the Great River flowing downstream past the East Bank University, a scene of tranquility and beauty – from that distance.

The eastern sky, blue, looking forward to winter’s late dawn over white frozen river’s flowing, and brilliant morning sun. People, Lilliputian from my eighth floor view, reduced to manageable dimensions; I find pleasure in the vision of distance and the distance of vision.

I wonder, now, how that will be: whether I can enlarge vision to fill the conceptual immensity of deep river’s gorge; whether I will ponder anew the riddles of Heraclitus’ flux upon river’s surface or within its current, flowing; whether the frozen aspects of winter will cast my thoughts into some capriciousness, yearning for activity or for inaction; whether I will get lost, searching among the clouds of season’s beings and changings, for the other sides of this globe; whether my mind will drift beyond the beyond I look out upon, into the vastness of being and imagination?

Ahh-h, today is another day. What day is it? Well, I don’t really know. The weather is, well, regular for this time of year.

Awake, my love.

Time to get up.

What time?

Time to get up. Another day. Who am I, you ask? That’s a silly question. I am your husband, your life’s companion.

Get up. Don’t dawdle, thinking, brooding. What’s there to think about.

Now. Get up. Another day.

What time, what day, what weather? Where are we?

Right here, right now. Time to get up. Another day. Just like the others.

Just as good… No worse.

Now the earth is growing old. We are here, observers of the days of our lives, watching. But we have seen it all; all the stories have been told, and we have heard them several times; all the births, the deaths, the goings and comings, we know them.

Living out each day. They’re all the same. Growing older, I suppose, with the earth, yearning a little to rejoin some universal imagination.

No matter now, nor any tears to shed…