“When opening an old, well-read book, readers will inevitably find its first and last sheets have suffered more than those in between. It is the purpose of endpapers, or end sheets are they are also known, to protect the valuable text at the beginning and end of a book, essentially taking up any strain of opening the covers which would otherwise be on its first and last sections.”
A textbook co-written by the late Robert C. Solomon and his widow, philosopher Kathleen M. Higgins, titled The Big Questions: A Short History to Philosophy includes a chapter called “The Meaning of Life.”
Topics straight from the table of contents:
What Kind of Meaning?
Children as Meaning
God as Meaning
Afterlife as Meaning
No Meaning at All
The Meanings of Life
Life as a Game
Life as a Story
Life as Tragedy
Life as Comedy
Life as a Mission
Life as Art
Life as an Adventure
Life as Disease
Life as Desire
Life as Tranquility
Life as Altruism
Life as Honor
Life as Learning
Life as Suffering
Life as an Investment
Life as Relationships
The textbook was part of my graduate studies, an independently designed study at Antioch informally dubbed “History of Literacy” which never caught the heart of my intention. Had I redesigned midway, I might have called it “Life as Book.” Given the degree considered transition from codex to print, and more particularly the singling out of a unique book into its own binding, “Life as Book” as redesign may have captured some of the original plan, and also with capstone focused on memoir, a better fit.
More than twenty years later sandwiched between my 61st and 62nd birthdays, Life as Book takes on renewed meaning these 322 days before July 2, 2025 when I will be to-the-day the age when Ernest Hemingway took his life. This blog, then, is a timeline—aka deadline—as I reconsider printed book anatomy in the West—endpapers, along with case binding, front matter, back matter, etc.—as metaphors of life.
In doing so I also honor a mid-1970s tough-love sixth grade teacher from Urbana, Illinois who assigned a project called “My Life” which included illustration and binding of our own edited finished works. Daily walks to and from that school crossed through Blair Park, one of the locations where David Foster Wallace, a year and a half older, may have taught us tennis through the city park program. With that school teacher in Urbana I felt the first urge to identify as someone who “writes.” Also during that year at the corner of Pennsylvania and Vine at Blair I felt a first urge to end this life: “My Life.”
In searching for The Big Questions textbook for this post, I notice widowed philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins recently published again. The new book released March of this year: Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning: Philosophical Reflections on Coping with Loss (University of Chicago Press).
Countdown: 0/322