I was working in the garden this morning, taking advantage of the persisting mild weather, when the postman called me over in order to sign for a parcel. All he could tell me about it was that it was “foreign”. It was indeed! The package turned out to contain my copy of the Festschrift for my late friend Simo Elakovic, to which I contributed an essay earlier in the year. I had almost forgotten about it, and I was delighted to see that the project had been realised.
Simo was a good friend and colleague of mine, who lived for many years in Dubrovnik before the war in Yugoslavia forced him and his family to seek refuge in Belgrade. I was very grateful indeed to have the opportunity to see him and his family again during a trip around the Balkans a couple of years back.
Of course, I had to just sit down and look through the book, and particularly to see how my own contribution stood up after the lapse of time since it was written. My first impression was one of amusement, as I am the only sociologist to have contributed among an assembly of philosophers. I’m not sure what that says about either me or Simo.
It was interesting to come to a piece of my own writing as if it were new, and aspects of it did strike me of which I had not been aware when I wrote it. Suddenly I had a glimpse of a different relationship between myself and my academic profession. As a sociologist I always took pride in my ability to look at those aspects of the social world I studied, from a relatively objective standpoint. Today I think that I could still defend that claim. What I saw this morning, however, was a definite link between the particular aspects of society I selected for study, and essential elements of my own personality.
So much of my time, it seems now, was occupied with the study of those aspects of human activity that are, in one way or another, concerned with the human search for transcendence. In one sense also it might be said that that is also true of my engagement with art. Writing and painting, it appears, can both be viewed as “mirrors of the soul”.