I am done with Ideological Origins. Read it all and annotated it, I mean. Maybe done with it, too. I can't believe it is the final word. I cannot believe how the Final Word has been understood. There has been no criticism of it. Not as this devoted and admiring reader has criticized it. I have long thought myself a student of Professor Bailyn. As do generations of others. I have such a desire to talk to him. But I do not know him. So a few weeks ago I fantasized about interviewing him. Asking him questions. But in this mode I would not be a good listener. I have read the book. Parts of it a few times, once, straight through. I have studied it, written about it here. And so I know how my fantasized interview would have gone. I would have reverted to what I know, the lawyer cross-examining. I thought, "That wouldn't be fair." My fantasy interview morphed into a debate. But he is 97 years old. And so I am left with a familiar feeling, a feeling no less familiar for being insufferably arrogant--that I know the truth of what he wrote and no one else does; I read closely--and the white spaces as well as the black marks, and no one else has; I can "correct the cave," and nobody else has. And I am left with the feeling of heartache, anguish, as much as one can feel reading a dusty, scholarly work past its fiftieth anniversary. So, I am probably done with Ideological Origins.