Hard Work Makes Easy Reading Or, At

John Updike Is Always Fun. And One Of My Former Students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, Another Former Student.

When I Was A Graduate Student, The Leading Spirits At Harvard Were Interested In The History Of Ideas.

I Think The Hardest Thing To Teach A Student Is That What He Or She Puts Down On Paper Is Changeable. It's Not The Final Thing, It's The First Thing, Which May Just Be The Suggestive, Vague Identification Of Something That You Have To Come Back To And Rewrite.

If You Learn One Thing From Having Lived Through Decades Of Changing Views, It Is That All Predictions Are Necessarily False.

The Theories Of The Major Philosophers Of The 18th Century Secular Enlightenment Were Biblical And Theological In Spite Of Themselves.