A Classical Education

I spent a lot of time in the local libraries back then (mid to late '70s). I was reading the Classics at San Francisco’s Main Library (I started with Greek philosophy and just kept going until I’d read all the Greek and Roman philosophy and history they had). I was trying to read Immanuel Kant in the UC Berkeley Philosophy Library. (This was the coolest place I had ever seen. The department had it’s own lovely old building right down by Strawberry Creek. The library was in a separate space within the building with a mezzanine.

They seemed to have everything. I could find Kant in the original German, in English translation, and also a German dictionary to help me work out what I was reading.) Nonetheless, I soon gave up on Kant as it seemed to me that he was just inventing words to cover up problems with his reasoning. I had mixed feeling about this as, on the one hand, I loved coming over to Berkeley to use the library -- you walk straight up Strawberry Creek from downtown to get to the building -- but on the other hand it was a lot of effort, and expense, so I was not sorry to move on to other interests.

I was also using the libraries at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State. Going to State involved riding an old streetcar through this long tunnel under the biggest mountain in San Francisco and continuing out about as far as you can go and still be in SF. One day there was a medical or mechanical problem on one of the street cars ahead of me and I was trapped in one of dozens of old streetcars that were stranded in the tunnel. A nuisance, but also kind of neat.

These were the streetcars at that time.

All this took a number of years and I never stopped expanding into new areas of either philosophy or history. And one of the work things that happened soon, made all this studying even easier (see The Book Business).