Lost in Thought, Part 2
Dear Reader,
One of the things I’d originally meant to comment on in my first essay on Lost in Thought is something strange that I did at the outset. Before commencing the read, I went to the back of the book to the index. I was looking for something.
I don’t normally turn to indices first. Yet here I was expecting a name. A name that had to be mentioned because his book is the godfather to this one. And that name, to my great surprise, was not there. Josef Pieper was nowhere to be found.
When I mentioned this to the author, her surprise was nearly as great as mine. She’s even mentioned his writing extensively in one of her interviews, but for some reason, he did not make mention in her book. And to be clear, though surprising, that’s all right. The oversight isn’t some great offense against humanity or intellectual honesty.
In her Prologue, Hitz writes about her own undergraduate experience as the following:
“We all assumed that books mattered for life, but we knew so little about life that our earnest musings must have sounded ridiculous to any mature ear. Every book was connected with every other; the slightest technical detail in grammar or geometry was full of romance and significance that it would be gauche to articulate clearly. We loved the feeling of insight, but were inexperienced in the thing itself. Still, as if to will our maturity into being, our teachers spoke to us as if our ideas mattered and so treated us as free adults, capable of making significant choices and coming to our own decisions about the hardest questions.”
First, I recognize all of this experience. In many ways, it remains my experience.
Second, and this is most important, I think there is a general cultural distaste for intellectual earnestness. We desire earnestness for causes, yes. And we definitely desire earnestness for business success. Intellectual earnestness, though, seems naïve. And that obviously makes one gullible.
Lost in Thought has many things it pursues, but one of them is its gently persistent call for the place of intellectual earnestness, the wonder and the exploration. And that is the strength of the book.
“Intellectual life is not a merely professional activity, to be left to experts.”
And there, in sum, we have the purpose of this newsletter as well. That line is beautiful, and one I’ve long held. Reading and reasoning together is not limited to the cloistered few. And one of the old visions of college education was exactly that, that the intellectual life is part of true human freedom.
Yes, there’s a tension to be held—I’ve learned more about Shakespeare from Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth than I could ever achieve on my own. And yet, as Booth himself would cheerily acknowledge, I can read Shakespeare on my own, without the intersessions of an expert, and gain much for my own life.
Someday, perhaps, I’ll know the best placement for that tension, or its resolution. For now, I humbly attest that it exists, and I will trenchantly advocate for the regular reader. They tend to need more support than the experts, at least on this question.
To intellectual earnestness,
Kreigh
P.S. Some might have wondered, since I’ve written on timely reading before, why I haven’t included any suggestions for our present moment. For one reason, I think the sort of timely reads for these past two weeks are already found with a quick perusal of the internet. Yes, I have many of those reads on my own shelves; and, yes, I’ve read (most of) them. A piece I stumbled across at the time of writing offers another reason I have not included such suggestions; and, for those who’d like a preview, I’ll absolutely be incorporating this piece’s exquisite opening paragraph when I write about recommending reads.
My own “timely” reading has been in philosophy, specifically on victims and victimhood from a philosopher whose practical and academic work I respect. But I don’t recommend the read to anyone else. Not all reflections are universal, and this is one I chose for myself. Different books for different people for different purposes, and all of that.