Last week I gave a talk to students in the honors program at the university where I am a part-time adjunct lecturer.1 The talk was about the liberal arts and leisure and was loosely based on a few essays I have written over the past decade, as well as on my unpublished thoughts about a 1997 Harper’s essay by Mark Edmundson that was, among other things, a blistering indictment of the university where Edmundson still teaches and where I began graduate school the week the essay came out.
Basically, I argued in the talk that we need two complementary metaphors for liberal education: it’s a gym for the mind, and it’s leisured contemplation.
The talk was fine, but the students’ questions afterward were great.2 In fact, I don’t think my answers were equal to some of them. Now I’d like to say what I wish I’d said.
One student, who was sitting right up front, took me aback by asking what she should read, if she wanted the kind of education I was advocating. I was so shocked by the sincerity of the question that I said it almost didn’t matter, because it’s about how you read more than what you read. I believe this is true, but it was the wrong answer at the time. I suggested that, surely, she didn’t want specific recommendations. No, she did. She was all but pleading for them.
In the moment, the best I could come up with was Walden, which is not a bad place to start. And fortunately, Walden is on the honors program’s reading list. But I felt that this was such a paltry response, that I went up to the student after the Q&A to ask her what she had already been reading. She said she had read a lot of Russian novels lately, so I suggested she pick another national literature and focus on that for a while: Greek drama, French fiction, the American essay. And I said that for the latter, my heroes included Emerson, Thoreau, Didion, Baldwin, and so on.
It occurs to me that this is the kind of question that Great Books advocates have a ready response to. It’s to their credit that they have a list ready to go. Even if you don’t really believe in canons, you actually do — what is a handful of book recommendations but a personal canon? Besides, if students ask you for a recommendation, and you say you don’t believe in canons, guess what? They’re just going to walk away disappointed and then ask the people who explicitly do believe in them.3
In my talk, I had drawn a distinction between treating school as a job and treating it as leisure. During Q&A, a student asked what that looks like, practically speaking, in a class you’re taking. I don’t remember my answer. It wasn’t very good. The student had a follow-up: Couldn’t it be the difference between “I have to learn this” and “I get to learn this”? Yes, that’s exactly it, I replied. I wish I had said that right away.
If this student had a Ph.D. instead of having recently graduated high school, she might have said, “I have more of a comment than a question.” But she hasn’t learned that yet. She only knows to be thoughtful, not obnoxious.
A third student asked, “What about students who have to work to pay for school? Don’t they have to treat school as a job?” I get questions like this all the time, and you’d think I would have a better answer. Again, I don’t remember much of what I’d said.
What I wish I had said was, No, they don’t. In fact, If school is more about leisure than work, then it’s that way for everyone. This is basically Thoreau’s point (Kierkegaard’s, too4): The call to live a meaningful life, however defined, is universal. No one is off the hook. In some ways, people who are materially deprived are at a disadvantage when it comes to this task. But in other ways, materially comfortable people are the ones at a disadvantage.5 You are not off the hook because you have to work or because you’re ill or because you’re the King of England, with every imaginable privilege. To say otherwise is to deny the human dignity of those others — or perhaps yourself — whom you want to excuse from the task of a meaningful life. These aren’t my rules; they’re the universe’s.
If a meaningful life is found in leisure (and hey, maybe it’s not), then you have to identify moments of leisure in your life and seek the good in them. If all you can find is an hour a week, then build your life around that hour.
I give talks on things. I’m pretty good. The two big things I tend to talk about are work/burnout and liberal education (also Catholic higher ed). Many groups have hired me to speak on these topics, and your group can, too. But I can also speak about other things! If you want to hear me speak more speculatively about the problem of the moral imagination in an age of AI, climate change, loneliness, etc., I would love to share my thoughts on this new topic of interest with your group.
I have realized that when I speak to a group of only students — a class, a program — they have a ton of good questions for me. When I speak to a university group that includes students, faculty, staff, and community members, the students don’t say a word, despite their teachers’ best efforts to include them. The lesson: If you want students to ask questions, invite a speaker just for them!
From now on, maybe I’ll say, “Start with Walden. Then read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (or maybe Teaching a Stone to Talk). Then Notes of a Native Son and The White Album. Then get back to me.”
And, come to think of it, this is the point of the “universal call to holiness” articulated in the Second Vatican Council.
Camels, eyes of needles, etc.