Like a lot of people, I enjoy reading novels and short stories. I only write nonfiction (and the occasional bit of whimsical free verse); but I get pleasure on a more regular basis from fiction. This is a source of some wonderment for me, particularly given that I don’t just feel incapable of writing fiction – which is not surprising for someone of an analytic bent with a background in philosophy; I even find the idea of trying to do it vaguely disturbing and illegitimate. 

An annoying but necessary habit of critical thinkers (one of many, no doubt) is making connections between seemingly disparate things. Another is making distinctions within seemingly unified ones. The idea, of course, is to strike some sort of balance: to understand both how things connect and how they do not. 

I’m old enough to remember when college and university bookstores contained a lot of interesting books and journals – and that’s pretty old. Even at my small liberal art college, the bookstore was a marvel. And my favorite holdover volume from those years (aside from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which I wrote about in “The Thrill of Reference”) is a lovely curiosity titled Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, by F.E. Peters, published in 1967 by New York University Press.