I knew a dude (in the most precise sense) in high school who spelled out “Angus Van Osbourne” on his chest with band-aids, and then laid out in the sun in order to inverse-tan the words into his skin. (For the uninitiated, this was a concatenation of the names of the reigning trinity of hard rock at that time, and arguably of all time, Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne.)

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Yesterday, I printed up small sepia-toned pictures of my heroes and hung them up on my wall, under my hand-painted Bulgarian Christ the Teacher icon, and to the right of my print of Raphael’s School of Athens, included for its tiny depiction of Heraclitus. I am not finished yet, but so far I have the young Friedrich Nietzsche (wearing the exact same eye-glasses frames I wear), a middle-aged Jorge Luis Borges, an elderly Martin Buber, an elderly Hans-Georg Gadamer, and an elderly Black Elk. In the near future I plan to add Christopher Alexander, James Dicky and Edwin Muir. I am also considering adding Rene Guenon, Jane Jacobs, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

I told a good friend of mine about what I was doing and he surprised me by observing: “Wow. That’s sort of adolescent.” He didn’t mean it in a mocking or critical way. That was just how it struck him, and he observed it out loud because we’ve known each other for a long time and we say exactly what we think to each other, almost as a demonstration of faith.

It was surprising how true the statement was, but it was even more surprising to me, knowing what impelled me to hang these little picture, how much it enriched my understanding of “adolescent”. I might as well have band-aided “Hans-Jorge Luis Nietzsche” on my chest. It’s the same thing. It is an attempt to weave oneself into some kind of cultural fabric. It is an attempt to put context around my life within which I understand life. It is a longing for the feeling of home.

It is a step toward what Heidegger calls appropriation of tradition.

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I’ve annoyed the hell out of people by screwing up the flow of conversation, looking up passages I felt compelled to quote. “Why can’t you paraphrase it?” I can’t paraphrase it because the content is not only the factual content. It is also the warm and beautiful truth that I am bringing in the present a mind I love and allowing that mind to be present in the conversation. It is making continuity between past and future. It makes me feel like a human being to quote one of my heroes. This is why most of my posts are packed with cross-references and links to other people’s thoughts. It is important to me that I have a heritage, and to quote is to make the my heritage immediate in the form of continuation of tradition.

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A friend of mine told me the story of Pushkin’s last words, how on his deathbed he turned to his books and said “farewell, friends.” If you find this moving, let me know.