Getting to the Heart of It

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I was seated in cafés in Paris, intermittently employed as an adjunct professor, and engaged in a struggle to find my professional place and philosophical voice. I lived in this way for almost six years. At present I am a tenured professor at a prestigious French engineering school, seated at my desk and enjoying the sense of well-being and intellectual liberty that such a position provides.