I have been in D.C. for two weeks visiting G and using the change in scenery to motivate myself to write this dissertation. G lives near the Dupont Circle so in between the hours spent checking equations I have wandered through its many used book stores.
Today I found myself looking at The Undercover Economist and thinking about buying it, since it would help me motivate the eventual Econ 101 I want to teach... and then looking at Amartya Sen's popular work on development, since he's someone I "should have read," and thinking I couldn't read them both in the next month since I would be writing a thesis. In fact, the thought occurred, I probably couldn't read one shelf of the books before me in the next year, or a case of them in the next ten years. In bookstore wanderings last week I developed an ambition to read Edith Hamilton's two books on the Greeks and the Romans. Realistically I probably won't have the time for those either, or if I make the time, it will be at the price of something else important. I can't read all these books. Why do I want to? And moreover what good would it do?
People who do mental, primarily abstract work ("cognition") for a living tend by nature to enjoy collecting the fine ideas for sale at a bookstore. We experience pleasure in holding an idea in the mind and peering at it, turning it around, seeing how the light one idea provides might glint off another idea, appreciating their relations, even their contradictions. Uncomfortably the pleasure does not differ too greatly from that of a satisfied pirate, snug in his secret treasure hall and sieving diamonds through his hands. Mental pleasure is pleasure—a higher one but a pleasure nonetheless. All at once I felt Sartre's nausea for himself—watch as I take pleasure in the literary aspects even of my own pain. It's never ending.
I cast around for a justification. (It must be in one of these books.) For a while I had justified myself saying I read books for the same reason an athlete runs laps. The mental workout mirrors a physical workout; I am ready to "contribute more mental work." But Edith Wharton is not going to make me a better economist, and I am not employed as a humanist. Perhaps some of it will make me a better person, more mindful, more prayerful even—but merely reading St. John of the Cross won't make me a better Christian. I've read Christian mysticism enough to get the idea; what more I have read has been for the pleasure of understanding it more fully. And I struggle to pray ten minutes. Further reading about the interior castle will not make me explore it.
Something else not a justification came to me. Sometimes in these moments you remember something someone once said to you, or something you once read and never quite understood or even had rejected. I recalled the Enneagram type 5 (which I suppose would have to be my type). The enneagram lists under the type 5 attributes my "characteristic" sin: greed. Greed? How could type 5, the thinker, one born with no envy for these... I don't even know, that's how refined I am... these fine cars and chocolates and jewels and money bags, and who is losing even a desire for technology, how could I possibly be characterized by greed? Now it makes sense. It is a greed not for things but for thoughts. Already I have quite a book collection; G talks about reserving a room in our house for a library.
Franny said it best reflecting on her school days:
It is hard to adopt and to keep a regime of prayer, especially when there are so many juicy ideas to pick and to consume.
Today I found myself looking at The Undercover Economist and thinking about buying it, since it would help me motivate the eventual Econ 101 I want to teach... and then looking at Amartya Sen's popular work on development, since he's someone I "should have read," and thinking I couldn't read them both in the next month since I would be writing a thesis. In fact, the thought occurred, I probably couldn't read one shelf of the books before me in the next year, or a case of them in the next ten years. In bookstore wanderings last week I developed an ambition to read Edith Hamilton's two books on the Greeks and the Romans. Realistically I probably won't have the time for those either, or if I make the time, it will be at the price of something else important. I can't read all these books. Why do I want to? And moreover what good would it do?
People who do mental, primarily abstract work ("cognition") for a living tend by nature to enjoy collecting the fine ideas for sale at a bookstore. We experience pleasure in holding an idea in the mind and peering at it, turning it around, seeing how the light one idea provides might glint off another idea, appreciating their relations, even their contradictions. Uncomfortably the pleasure does not differ too greatly from that of a satisfied pirate, snug in his secret treasure hall and sieving diamonds through his hands. Mental pleasure is pleasure—a higher one but a pleasure nonetheless. All at once I felt Sartre's nausea for himself—watch as I take pleasure in the literary aspects even of my own pain. It's never ending.
I cast around for a justification. (It must be in one of these books.) For a while I had justified myself saying I read books for the same reason an athlete runs laps. The mental workout mirrors a physical workout; I am ready to "contribute more mental work." But Edith Wharton is not going to make me a better economist, and I am not employed as a humanist. Perhaps some of it will make me a better person, more mindful, more prayerful even—but merely reading St. John of the Cross won't make me a better Christian. I've read Christian mysticism enough to get the idea; what more I have read has been for the pleasure of understanding it more fully. And I struggle to pray ten minutes. Further reading about the interior castle will not make me explore it.
Something else not a justification came to me. Sometimes in these moments you remember something someone once said to you, or something you once read and never quite understood or even had rejected. I recalled the Enneagram type 5 (which I suppose would have to be my type). The enneagram lists under the type 5 attributes my "characteristic" sin: greed. Greed? How could type 5, the thinker, one born with no envy for these... I don't even know, that's how refined I am... these fine cars and chocolates and jewels and money bags, and who is losing even a desire for technology, how could I possibly be characterized by greed? Now it makes sense. It is a greed not for things but for thoughts. Already I have quite a book collection; G talks about reserving a room in our house for a library.
Franny said it best reflecting on her school days:
"I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth [Matt. 6:19] and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money or property or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping—and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge—when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake anyway—is the worst of all. [The highest resembles the lowest.] The least excusable certainly. I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"When we die our charming divine philosophy, "not harsh and crabbed as some fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets," will die with us.
It is hard to adopt and to keep a regime of prayer, especially when there are so many juicy ideas to pick and to consume.
