In Cicero’s dialogue “On Old Age,” the great Roman statesman Cato tells us how he occupies his time once he is no longer able to take an active role in public life. First, he was busy on the seventh volume of his “Origins,” a book now lost. In it, he wanted to include all of his best speeches given in important legal cases. This was a treatise on the different kinds of law.

Not long ago I heard a modern parable that goes something like this: In the early 1960s, shortly after committing this nation to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” President Kennedy paid a visit to the folks at Cape Canaveral whose workaday task it was to make his promise a reality.

Years ago, a friend, now dead for many years, gave me a copy of “The Letters of Evelyn Waugh.” I picked this book up the other day. On the inside cover, she had written a note. It reads: “As Flannery [O’Connor] says: ‘Don’t make an algebra problem out of this [book], just enjoy it.’” I smiled when I re-read this playful analysis of Schall’s character.

Thirty years ago this week I arrived at Georgetown as a freshman and moved onto Fourth Darnall. Twenty years ago this week I professed my first vows as a Jesuit. Looking back, I now see that those two events were not unrelated.

As far as I can tell, there are several different kinds of country songs. There are the ones designed to make you feel good about being an American, so good that you want to bomb people who aren’t. Don’t like those much. There are those that suggest all the reasons why you’re perfectly right to get cat-kicking drunk on a lonely Tuesday night. Not wild about those either.

Arizona was a great place to grow up during the 1960s and 1970s. It was there and then that I made my first attempts to understand what it means to be a human being. I was young and often nervous, but I was smart and, most of the time, I paid attention to what was going on around me.

The day after Easter, I was rereading Benedict XVI’s new and brilliant encyclical, Spe Salvi. I have three different copies of this remarkable document, one printed from the Vatican on-line system, one from L’Osservatore Romano, English, and a bound version published by Pauline Books and Media.

As preregistration rolls around next week, it’s worth giving a serious thought or two to the kind of courses you want to take, the kinds of professors you want to learn with, the kinds of ideas you want to wrestle with, the kinds of things you want to learn. In short, it’s a good time to take stock of the education you are getting at Georgetown.

The Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974) spoke on the BBC Welsh Home Service on the 29th of October, 1954. His talk, entitled an “Autobiographical Talk,” was reprinted in his “Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings.” This book was given to me for Christmas. Just recently I began to look at it.

Before anything else, a disclaimer: In this column, I speak for no one but myself. I do not speak for the Jesuit Community. Happily, others bear that weighty burden. I speak for Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., Georgetown Class of 1982.