In 2006 I decided that instead of studying what I was supposed to be studying, I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley and found a Loeb Oresteia and an Oxford Thucydides; Berkeley is a good town for this. On my way to the register I opened the covers and, there on the flyleaf I saw "Don Davidson," Harvard '38 and '39.
This is what happens to the libraries of eminent philosophers after they change state.
Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:
Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness
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
Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:
"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]
If the date on the flyleaf is accurate, the European war had just started or was just about to start. Either way, young Don's own country would have a couple more years in the Spartan position of standing by.
