Vanity

There is a scene in "The Jerk" in which Steve Martin's character goes into ecstacies when he first finds his name in a phone book: "I'm somebody!" It's a somewhat similar thing with a blog, I think--awfully easy to be fooling around on the net one day, come across an invitation to create one of these things, and then it's done and there you are up in front of the whole world (even if nobody else is there). This, too, may be vanity.

But, what the heck, give it a try. The title is of course Erasmus' "The Praise of Folly," with a pun on the name of his friend Thomas More, and the two exemplify for me a sort of Christian humanism that I take as a personal ideal.

So, should I persevere, I hope to reflect here on some things that interest me--philosophy, religion, literature, history, law and politics. I like to fool around in the other languages I've tried to pick up, but I'm a beginner in all. And I've no intention of getting too very personal, certainly revealing no secrets and making no confessions.