Every once in while I will get the notion to send 'fan mail' to a philosopher whose work I am reading and for whose work I am grateful. But I am sometimes too late. The search for an e-mail address turns up an obituary. The last time this occurred was when I wanted to congratulate Robert C. Coburn for his excellent The Strangeness of the Ordinary. I tell the story here and reproduce the obit.
The other day, Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928-1938 (Yale UP, 2004) arrived. It's a stomping tome of 627 pages. But it reads like a novel to this old Husserl man who spent a year (1976-1977) in Freiburg im Breisgau where he studied unpublished manuscripts in the Husserl archive there. Every morning I read a few pages of Bruzina's book hugging myself with mental delight as I am reminded of so many details, people, and places.
I wanted to say to Bruzina, "You have written a wonderful book, man, quite obviously a labor of love, and I am having a blast with it."
We all owe a debt of gratitude to friends and strangers alike who have enriched our lives, wittingly or not, in this way or that. Say it and pay it now if you are so inclined.
Heute rot, morgen tot.
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