OK, Boomer!

 

King Solomon in Old Age, by Gustave Dore

One of the rewards for working on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture is exploring new ideas and meeting new (to me) authors.  Right now, the Archive Team for the New York Society for Ethical Culture (and the Ethical Culture Movement) is focusing on the Adler Study in NYSEC's building in New York City.  So far so good; we have photographed the title pages and verso for most of the books in the first bookcase (there are 10), and I have started creating a bibliographic inventory of the case.  Of course, I can't just create a bibliographic entry without looking at the book (if it has already been digitized), so I've been taking quick peeks at a number of those books.  I've never, for example, read Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln.  A quick peek resulted in reading a few paragraphs of the chapter on Lincoln's humor and his religion.  I expect I'll return to that when I have time.  I also encountered Ralph Linton, an anthropologist that I knew through other works.  However, I hadn't seen The Tree of Culture before, and I expect I'll try to read that one before too long.  It was also kinda fun to see Ida Tarbell among the authors consulted by Felix Adler--and later Ethical Culture leaders.  (According to Wikipedia, Tarbell spent some time in Chicago, meeting and working with Jane Addams.  Is there a connection to Ethical Culture???)

Today's fun comes from Ralph Barton Perry, a prolific writer, labeled "a strident moral idealist" in Wikipedia.  So far, I've seen two of his books in the Adler Study, and, given his focus on William James, there could well be more.  Part of my process in working on the Bibliography is to check for online availability, so, naturally, I checked to see if the Perry books were available online.  The Internet Archive (archive.org) is my first stop, but, if they don't have a book, I'll check Google Books (and Scholar), Hathi Trust, WorldCat, etc.  Both books--Puritanism and Democracy and In the Spirit of William James can be found in the Internet Archive.  I didn't look too closely at the former, but I did look at the contents of the latter and read a couple of pages of the first chapter.  That persuaded me to check to see if I could buy my own copy for some, more or less, entertaining reading in philosophy.

After meandering through a rather long list of Perry's publications for sale at rather high prices, I happened to notice A Plea for an Age Movement, published in 1942.  There were photographs of the covers and one or two pages inside.  This poem by James Ball Naylor ("Ancient Authors") was cited on page 5:

King David and King Solomon

    Led merry, merry lives,

With many, many lady friends

    And many, many wives;

But when old age crept over them--

    With many, many qualms,

King Solomon wrote the Proverbs

    And King David wrote the Psalms.

My first thought was:  And we live in the age of "OK, Boomer!"  I bought the book.