Dear Diary: Reversal?
All I could think of, this morning, was the testosterone replacement piece that cost Andrew Sullivan his job with the Times. “Antlers”! What was I thinking?(How much was I drinking, is more like it — we had been out to dinner with an old friend.) All I knew was that I couldn’t bring myself to read whatever it was that I’d written. I still haven’t.
This decision was facilitated by the fact that it was all that I could do to read the 584 feeds that had accumulated, like mushrooms, on my Google Reader page. We had what is known as “a long day.” I wasn’t put out; I’d been firing on all cylinders for four or five days, and was due for a collapse, or at least a lie-down. Until this year, I’d have spent the day reading. I might not have gone near the computer at all. But now I’m a professional. So I had “a long day” instead.
At the end of this long day, utterly devoid of incident worthy of report, I found myself at a loss for a concluding paragraph until, just a moment ago, I read the following paragraph in the Book of Cake (explanation to follow):
In April 1917 Albert Einstein wrote from Berlin to a friend in Holland of the way in which nationalism had altered the young scientists and academics he knew. “I am convinced that we are dealing with a kind of epidemic of the mind. I cannot otherwise comprehend how men who are thoroughly decent in their personal conduct can adopt such utterly antithetical views on general affairs. It can be compared with developments at the time of the martyrs, the Crusades and the witch burnings.
And how right he was. At least he took his own advice, and contrived to die at Princeton, and not — somewhere else, earlier.