Sorry About the Dream, Don
Said I to myself: "I could write my goddamn paper about The Goddamn Man Without Qualities—or I could try to read ancient Greek! I already know the alphabet from that star chart I had when I was seven! How hard can it be?” Rosy-fingered dawn found me touring the bookstores for used volumes from the Loeb Classical Library; Black Oak Books came through with the Oresteia and a slightly water-damaged Books III and IV of Herodotus (including my favorite passage from the Histories!). Only as I was moving to buy them did I discover, written on their respective flyleaves, “Don Davidson, Harvard ‘38” and “Don Davidson, Cambridge 1940.” Which fits the biography.
Young Don didn’t make many notes in his books. A few phrases in Agamemnon are underlined: “justice” and (self-referentially?) “pondered by me.” The back flyleaf has some jottings:
Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.
Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261
Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123
I find it incredibly sad to think that after Davidson passed, his entire library was carted off to a bookstore for dispersal—I guess it seems like a repetition of the mind dispersing into nothing. I will try to properly shelter these two fragments. Like what Benjamin says: “To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”
