My New Year inspiration

I spent the New year with my daughter and my son. I was with them from 10:30 on New Year’s Eve to 1:00 on New Year. When I came to my place, a little flat in an accommodation for old people (there are 48 flats in this house), I wanted to wash a few dishes, turned on the hot water tap, but I got nothing but cold water. I looked at the little electric ‘boiler’; it stopped working.

I love my morning baths with thorough massage and shower. For how long shall I have to live without these? I could not help thinking of all the difficulties I had to undergo since the Soviets and their satellites, the Warsaw Pact, invaded my country in 1968, and then again since I came to Oxford in 1980. It has been essential for my work to turn any such difficulty into something positive. Inspired, I wrote a letter to the Provost of Columbia University:

‘Dear Marry C. Boyce,

Would you read 'The Phaedrus and the Charmides – Plato in Athens 405-404', which I enclose in the Attachment?

What makes me think that you might be interested in reading my article? In 2016 you launched an inspiring new vision for the school, Columbia Engineering for Humanity. It is your commitment to Humanity that makes me hope that you will be interested in my work. For it has been my interest in and my commitment to Humanity that has kept me working on the Greeks – from Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, to Plotinus – with very little hope of being acknowledged in academic circles.

I hoped against hope that 'The Phaedrus and the Charmides – Plato in Athens 405-404' would be published in the forthcoming Winter edition of History of Political Thought. My hopes were dashed. On Dec. 20, there appeared an addition at the bottom of the first page of the proofs: HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. ????. No. ?. ?????????.

The addition with its question-marks is worth seeing against the background of Barry O’Brien’s ‘Philosophers in knots over Dr Tomin’s Plato thesis’ (The Daily Telegraph, August 25, 1988): ‘A leading scholar responded yesterday to complaints by Dr Julius Tomin, the Czech dissident philosopher, that he cannot get his controversial work on Plato published in Britain. “He holds that the Phaedrus is Plato’s first dialogue, which is contrary to the beliefs of pretty well all scholars in the field in this century,” said Dr David Sedley, editor of Classical Quarterly, and director of studies in classics at Christ’s College in Cambridge. “He is extremely ingenious in his use of arguments, but he has not yet made out the kind of case that people are going to be able to take seriously.’

I believe that no one, who reads 'The Phaedrus and the Charmides – Plato in Athens 405-404', will be able not to take my views on Plato seriously. May I be allowed to present it at Columbia University?’

'The Phaedrus and the Charmides – Plato in Athens 405-404' can be read on my blog, where I put it on September 9, 2021.