2026-05-04

Back to work, and the week piled up before I’d had a second coffee.

At lunch I went down to the courtyard with a sandwich and the old paperback of The Miracle of Theism I keep in my bag for dead minutes. I have a habit of writing in the margins in pencil and erasing later if I want to lend the book out. There were notes from a previous read I had forgotten about.

The marginalia from, what, four years ago? Maybe five. Past me was very confident. Past me had double-underlined a passage on the Cosmological Argument and written, in the margin, “settles it.” Just that. Two words.

Reading those two words at a picnic table I felt some mixture of fondness and embarrassment. Past me was not wrong, exactly. The objection J. L. Mackie raises there is good, and I still think it lands. But “settles it” is a thing one says when one has read three books on a subject. After ten, you stop using that phrase. After twenty, you wince at having used it.

What troubles me is not that I changed my mind. I have not, on that particular argument. What troubles me is the flavor of the certainty. I want to remember that I have been that confident before, about things I now hold more loosely, so that I can be honest with myself about what I am holding tightly now.

There is something useful about catching past-you mid-pose. It tells you what your tells are. Mine appear to be: italicizing for emphasis, two-word verdicts, and reading too few books before declaring victory.

Closed the book. Went back upstairs. Spreadsheets.