2022: A retrospective
Just for my own sake, I want to take stock of my year. There’s a lot to reflect on, and a lot to be thankful for. Some much-loved activities came to a natural close—the Noonday Prayer podcast became unsustainable, and my regular practice sessions with my violinist friend became irregular before becoming altogether impractical—but in general this has been a year of both welcome continuity and exciting change.
January
For the first time in my life, I have a dog. Her name is Tess—we’re a Victorian-novel sort of household—and I had no idea how crazy I’d be about her. She had a lot of threshold anxiety at first; it was quite a challenge to get her even to set one paw on the stairs. By now she runs up and down the stairs all the time, though she still firmly believes she deserves a treat every time she comes up.
Tess, enjoying a walk
february
My work as a member of the bishop coadjutor discernment committee (Diocese of Southwest Florida) and chair of a faculty search committee (University of South Florida) has come to an end, leaving me free to do . . . whatever it is I actually do. At least I am no longer in the not-at-all-skeezy position of interviewing candidates for a job at one university while being interviewed for a job at another.
march
This is the point at which Anselm completely takes over my life for the rest of the year. Copyedited MS of Anselm: The Complete Treatises arrives, and the report from OUP on my proposed Very Short Introduction is favorable, so I will have published about 315,000 words by or about Anselm by the end of the year.
In this photo from
april
you can see my stained-glass window of Anselm looking over the first-pass page proofs of the translation volume.
It is also in April that I decide I have been coasting (stagnating?) long enough, and I accept the offer of a chair in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University. Notwithstanding the complications this move will introduce into my life, the decision to do something new, challenging, and exciting is clearly the right one.
may
I turn 55, find a studio to rent in Dupont Circle, and begin the exodus from my office. At the risk of shocking the consciences of my academic friends, I must note that any book that had sat unopened on my shelves for the eight years I had occupied that office was either rehomed or recycled. I am blessedly past the point of pretending that I will ever need to look at Being and Time again.
Most of my books are in boxes or bins at this point
June
While Marty is away, I try cooking for myself, with reasonable success. I complete the production process on the translation volume, and I finish writing the VSI.
Roast chicken, rice pilaf, and garlic-sesame green beans
july
The Sewanee Church Music Conference is back in full swing after the COVID interruption. On the first night of the conference, walking back from a very sensitively sung Compline, I introduce myself to a terrier who is accompanied by a man who turns out to be an English professor. We end up talking about Boethius, the fact that there are only two kinds of people (those who have read Middlemarch and those who haven't), and what Diarmaid MacCulloch is writing for his new edited volume.
"Do you work at all on Anselm?" he asks innocently.
Green’s View, Sewanee, Tennessee
The proofs of the VSI arrive while I’m on God’s Holy Mountain. Fortunately there are always bits of the conference I can skip—the time at which I could benefit from an organ masterclass, for example, is long past, if indeed it ever arrived in the first place—so I get right to work. Reading the whole thing aloud in my best RP accent, just to force that extra bit of concentration, works a treat. It’s amazing how the American spellings that survived the UK copyeditor just leap off the page.
august
The Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (SIEPM) is meeting in Paris, and I am there.
The view from my balcony at the Hotel d’Orsay, which was (mercifully) nowhere near the conference site
I’m really not an enthusiastic conference-goer. There’s only so much philosophy I can take in a day. Fortunately, at a huge conference like SIEPM no one knows if you’ve disappeared—you could easily be at one of the other twelve concurrent sessions—and I manage to get in a reasonably respectable amount of philosophy along with quite a bit of sightseeing and walking. I also manage to catch up with lots of old friends, which is the best part of a conference anyway.
september
It is sometime during September—pretty early, if memory serves—that I realize that new challenges are fantastic in their way, but stagnation is a lot less demanding. My students are really good, and even though I’m teaching the same texts I usually teach in Intro to Philosophy, this time is quite different. I have to keep on top of things or they will find me out. It is absolutely invigorating but also slightly scary.
Another new challenge is invigorating without being scary: we have kayaks now.
I should get as much as I can out of living on a lake, right?
october
I’ve been without a trainer (and without a gym) since I began commuting to DC. Clearly it’s time for me to do something about that, so I go looking for gyms near Dupont Circle. All of them, unfortunately, are those high-concept, classes-only gyms, which is not what I’m after. A search for “personal trainers near me” yields a promising result, so, with some trepidation, I schedule an appointment.
He is jacked and shredded and all those other gym-bro words, yet he is somehow unintimidating. He’s an enthusiast, though. Laughably enough, he thinks he can get me down to 20% body fat. Ridiculous, right?
According to the calipers, at least, I hit 20% body fat by early December.
november
When I was preparing my Intro syllabus, I stole an idea from one of my colleagues. He has his students do “PLUSWU” papers: what Puzzled or Lost you? what did you find Unexpected or Surprising? what did you find Wrong or Unconvincing? (On my teaching evaluations everyone who commented on the “PLUSWU” assignments loved them: a rare instance of consensus.)
A student who had the puzzled-or-lost duty for the day commented, “I found this paragraph baffling.”
I responded, “Here, I’ll show you what I wrote in the margin.”
This is why there will be no volume of “The Collected Marginalia of Thomas Williams.”
december
Extra office hours. Multiple drafts of final papers. Hiking (barely more than walking, really) in Valley of Fire State Park (Nevada). Laudatory teaching evaluations, except from a couple of students who thought I graded too harshly (my grade distribution begs to differ). Christmas with my family. Christmas with my parish (celebrant on Christmas Eve, celebrant and preacher on Christmas Day).
Tampa’s three days of winter come to a close, and I am looking out over the lake, preparing to eat Christmas leftovers outside (it’s in the high 60s).
It has been a good year. Yes, I have left unwritten those things that I ought to have written, but it has been a good year.
May Christ, who by his Incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with his joy and peace.