Tomás Herrera

I retired in June after thirty-eight years as an electrician. For most of that time I knew exactly who I was on a Monday morning. Now I don't. My wife says I am restless. My grandson is studying philosophy at UNM, and he lent me Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism. I read it in one night and then read it again.

I want to know whether a life is supposed to mean something, and whether the work I did all those years was part of that or just what paid the bills. I also want to understand what my grandson is talking about at Sunday dinner.

I want the existentialists, but I want to know what they were reacting to. For ancient philosophy, the course on living like a philosopher and Peter Adamson's podcast, because the Greeks asked how to live before anybody else. For modern, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, since that is where existentialism starts. Then Dreyfus on Heidegger and on existentialism in literature and film, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Arendt's The Human Condition, which my grandson says is the book about work.

For electives, Shelly Kagan on death, since I am at the age where I think about it, and Heidegger on technology, because I spent my life wiring it.

Ten hours. I have the time now. The danger is the opposite: I could disappear into it, so I will keep it to mornings and leave the afternoons for my wife and the garden.

Weekday mornings at the kitchen table, eight to ten, with coffee. Lectures on my walk around the arroyo. My grandson will be my study partner when he is home. Notes in a composition book, one per section.