there's no explosions here Last month, when I was reading Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, I was amused by this excerpt in the introduction written by John Gaskin.

In early 1608 Hobbes graduated BA, having for no ascertainable reason spent one more than the then normal four years at the University... In the thirty years after 1608, Hobbes published nothing but a translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It is strange to speak of the formative years of a man's life as being between the ages of 20 and 52, but so it was with Hobbes. Before 1640 he had probably written no original work. Between 1640 and his death, his philosophical works in English fill seven massive volumes in the Molesworth edition... But the grounds for this extraordinary late flowering were being prepared through what, for Hobbes, counted as his long youth. The biographical chronology is somewhat difficult to establish, and the personal details are fragmentary, but the preparation clearly included Hobbes's knowledge and experience of the forces and events which led to the outbreak of civil war in 1642, together with a number of intellectual stimuli encountered piecemeal in his reading and travels.

I think that, just like Mr. Hobbes, I'm still in my "long youth", the "formative years". But wait for it, something big's gonna happen.

Tonight, that big thing is the "exegesis" I'm writing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. It hurts my brain, so I won't get into it now. Send me your good paper-writing vibes, though, 'cause I gotta grind it out.  | ¶ 8:14 p.m.