Today was the last day of my clerkship with Judge Barry. It was a wonderful year, in every way.
Today also, therefore, marks my proper return to blogging. I won’t say that it’s a return to wholly uninhibited blogging—this blog has never at any time been wholly uninhibited—but I will henceforth be able to be somewhat freer in my choice of topics and opinions. The old disclaimers remain in force, although one would hope that they would be less necessary. Nothing I say here should be taken as reflecting the views of Judge Barry or the United States courts.
Given the occasion, it seems worth repeating some of the guiding principles behind my blogging here:
The present author is no philosopher, he has not understood the System, nor does he know if there really is one, or if it has been completed. As far as his own weak head is concerned the thought of what huge heads everyone must have in order to have such huge thoughts is already enough. … The present author is not philosopher, he is poetice et eleganter, a freelancer who neither writes the System nor makes any promises about it, who pledges neither anything about the System nor himself to it. He writes because for him doing so is a luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he write. … No, I prostrate myself before any systematic bag-searcher; this is not the System, it hasn’t the slightest thing to do with the System. I wish all good on the System and on the Danish shareholders in that omnibus; for it will hardly become a tower. I wish them good luck and prosperity one and all.
The text is from Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Alastair Hannay trans., Penguin Books 1985).