reading a bunch of hannah arendt: between past and future and life of the mind. one of those things i've always meant to do, i suppose. she's admirable, and i guess if a fifty-year-old dude can still be gathering models, she's one. her depth of scholarship is immense, and she shares a number of orientations with her mentor/lover heidegger, including a good soaking in greek philosophy and german idealism. but unlike heidegger, she was not a mystic, not an obscurantist, and not a fascist. (i do not, i should say, dismiss or merely deride heidegger: there's no doubt about the depth and innovation, at many moments in many ways). her politics is admirable or at least sensible in a liberal/republican vein. her prose, considering the seriousness of the thought and scholarship, is marvelously lucid: i would say it pointedly rejects the hermeticism not only of heidegger but of much of the german tradition from which she emerged). and her standpoint is synoptic: she's got an angle on the whole thing. hard, in a way, to think of any comparable figure. i'd particularly recommend between past and future: basically a collection of interlocked essays on the idea of history and the development of political ideas such as freedom and authority.