Life is good

I am spending a week in Cambridge, retracing some of the paths that, a hundred odd years ago, Dharmanand and Damodar Kosambi must surely have walked. Dharmanand was then at Harvard, assisting in putting together the critical edition of the Visuddhimagga, the Pali Buddhist text. Damodar (DDK in brief) was an undergraduate at Harvard, majoring in Mathematics. As a very self-aware teenager – when he was just about 19 years old – he kept a fairly candid diary. Some of the entries from those days are revealing of his growth as a student and as a thinker. There is a lot of mathematics, exercises, notes for self-study, critique of the instructors at Harvard – and appreciation.   One excerpt that is bound to incite some admiration – has to do with the catholicity of his reading.

Writing on Jan. 1, 1927, at 1 in the morning, he says: “I have been sitting up reading some of Mark Twain stories and hearing the factory whistles blow one year into another. That is the only welcome I suppose that is possible for a new year in America.” And then he goes on for a bit on other topics before coming to the list of books he read since the beginning of the journal to the end of 1926. I confess I had only heard of most of these, let alone read them, and in searching, I put together this curated list-

1. Studies in the history of medieval science, (Harvard historical studies, 1924) by Charles Homer Haskins.
2. Traité de mécanique rationnelle (French Edition, 1909) byPaul Appell.
3. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (1926) by Will Durant
4. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London, Macmillan & Co, 1900)
5. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse (1913)  by Havelock Ellis
6. The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (London, Macmillan, 1897) by Brooks Adams.
7. The Age of the Reformation (New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1920) Preserved Smith.
8. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Paris, 1756) Voltaire
9. Siecle de Louis Quatorze (1751) Voltaire
10. Early History Of India (Harvard, 1908) by Vincent A. Smith
11. A History of Freedom of Thought (Cambridge, 1913) by John Bagnell Bury
12.  Les oeuvres d’Ambroise Paré: conseiller et premier chirurgien du Roy (Paris, 1590)
13. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H.G. Wells
14. The Byzantine empire (New York, Holt, 1926) by Norman H. Baynes.
15. Les Contes Drolatiques (Société Générale de Librairie, Paris, 1855) by Honoré de Balzac
16. The Mediaeval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages (Vol. 1&2) (Macmillan, 1911) by Henry Osborn Taylor
17. Agamemnon by Aeschylus (Oxford, 1920) Translated by Gilbert Murray
18. The Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder, any translation
19. Agricola and Germania by Tacitus
20. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
21. Manava Dharma Sastra, translated by Georg Bühler.

He is careful to point out which books he has read thoroughly and which he has not, but the number and range still impresses.  His textbooks are listed then – for English, parts of Beowulf, Shakespeare, Milton,  a Field Artillery manual for his Military Science course, several texts in German, all the available books of his father, Kosambi [Sr.].  Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire,  and Henry Clark Warren’s Buddhism: In Translation (1896).

DDK’s wide interests in the later part of his life are well-known, but here he was not yet twenty years of age, reading (as far as I can tell) texts in French and German, in addition to English and Marathi. Mathematics, physics, and a lot of history, of all flavours… Of course his education at the Cambridge Latin School would have stood him in good stead, but even so. (Many of the books are now free to read via Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive; links are given for all that I was able to locate).

A few days later that month he goes on to describe an exuberant day spent in the Widener Library. Genius and geek, he declared with no trace of self-consciousness, Life is good!