Samhain                           Waning Wolf Moon

Sigh.  The Vikings.  Going to the Cardinals for a big game has proved unhappy for us.  Again.  I don’t even know the final score because I turned it off with 6 minutes to go.  Not a pretty sight.

Logicomix is a great read.  If you love philosophy and logic.  Which I do.  I had forgotten my passionate affair with logic until reading this graphic novel.  In my freshman year of college I took Symbolic Logic from Professor Larry Hackestaffe, most famous for wandering the main yard of Wabash College with a six-pack of Budweiser fastened to his belt through one of the plastic can holders.

This was logic in the formal sense with proofs and theorems, logical symbols and head breaking chains of reasoning.  This was my second semester in college.  The first had been tough because German and I did not see eye to eye and I dropped it to avoid failing.  After my valedictory year at Alexandria-Monroe High School, that defeat stung.  The grammar and writing guy was also not impressed with my work, giving me a C for the first term.

Symbolic Logic came along because philosophy was what had been missing in my life up till then, intellectual rigor, unafraid, thought seeking understanding at the most basic, essential levels, colorful characters like Heraclitus, Socrates, Aristotle, William of Occam bursting upon the stage, contradicting each other, going one step further or pulling others one step back.  God, it was exciting.  That was the first semester at Wabash, the same semester as Freshman English and German.

In history and philosophy I did outstanding work, so I dove into them the next semester with a second course in the history of philosophy and the course in Symbolic Logic.  It was hell at first.  The kind of intellectual rigor required for logical reasoning can bring on headaches.  The night before the mid-term I stayed in the library past midnight, my book open, pencil working out proofs, scratching out false starts, feeling dismayed.  It was German all over again.  I didn’t get it, wouldn’t get it.  This was impossible stuff.

I do not remember the problem, but I do remember the moment when, like a lightning bolt, it came to me.  Like Moses parting the Red Sea, the path to logical clarity opened up.   I did very well in that course and learned something about persisting in an academic area that at first seemed impenetrable.  Intuition was a part of my learning style.