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The Return

I'm back from vacation. While I was gone, my garden endured one thunderstorm and wave of heat after another. The result: a lush garden upon return. The above chard leaf is just one example. I also harvested about three pounds of cherry tomatoes, two pounds of peas, a few ounces of berries (currants, raspberries, and mulberries), plus an assortment of odds and ends: a stalk of celery, a mini-sweet pepper, miscellaneous greens, etc.).

Change of Direction

While on vacation, I did a lot of drinking thinking. I concluded that I want to take TDE a different direction. Since age 20, I've been a reader. It's what I love to do, and over the past 25 years, I dare say I've done too much of it (I intensely agree with the observation (made by a fellow readaholic) that it adds greatly to the leisure of life not to feel compelled to pick up a book every time one gets a free moment). I haven't counted them lately, but I suspect my library is nearing 3,000 books. I haven't read them all, of course; not nearly. But I've read a large chunk, often making annotations in the margins and underlinings.

Whereas I used to enjoy finishing a book, I now enjoy going back through the books I read many years ago and seeing what I found interesting at, say, age 25, 35, or even 45. I never knew what benefit I would derive from all those handwritten notes, but I've learned now: they'll brighten my senescence.

And with any luck, they will brighten yours (or, barring your senility, they'll hopefully brighten your day). Starting tomorrow, TDE will start to feature these random passages, normally with additional commentary.

Do I expect it to be riveting stuff? Heck if I know. I do, however, believe it will give TDE a niche hitherto unoccupied in the blogosphere: a Catholic site dedicated to random book passages, and it will allow me to pursue a course of writing that I find pleasant.

What can you expect? It's hard to say, but here's a partial list of authors and topics (listed in no particular order) that have occupied my attention and reading time over the past 25 years: Chesterton, Belloc, Voegelin, C.S. Lewis, Merton, Kerouac, Salinger, Dubay, Kirk, Schall, Dostoyevsky, Nock, Chodorov, Taleb, economics, U.S. history, classical history, English history, Catholicism in general, the Rosary, Greek Orthodoxy, far Eastern thought, philosophy and theology in general.

TDE will continue to be eclectic. It will occasionally feature commentary on contemporary events, as well as garden observations and drinking posts and random humor (and, for days when I can't blog, GKC Shorts), but for the most part, it will present posts that closely resemble the "From the Notebooks" feature that I've used over the past couple of years. I don't know if it will continue as a daily blog. We'll see where things go.

I hope you continue to enjoy TDE.

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