Lost in Thought, Part 6
Dear Reader,
Chapter 3 of Lost in Thought provides some great fodder for the reading life. A particularly delightful quote is the following:
“An excellent book, like a fundamental question, confounds us.”
A Confederacy of Dunces remains my favorite relatively contemporary satire. I still don’t know what to make of it, but it’s just great. Neil Postman’s Technopoly continues to leave me with wonderment about how, precisely, to navigate the book’s central argument. The Lord of the Rings remains a thing I understand that I don’t understand, and I love every minute of that experience. (Well, most minutes anyway.) And the Nicomachean Ethics is a work I continue to reckon with, even near a decade into teaching it—and longer studying it.
Can you think of any of your own reads that have left you so? And as a follow-up, how many of these reads did you eventually re-read?
Frankly, the whole section at the end of this chapter stood out to me, but I’ll select just one segment of it for this newsletter’s purposes:
“[W]e academic professionals have lost touch with our origins in ordinary human intellectual activity. We have thus lost the capacity to justify and explain to our fellow citizens or to philanthropists—much less ourselves—why our institutions matter.”
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in that quote, and the chapter does, in fact, unpack much of it. But the reason that I’ve chosen it is simply this: this newsletter exists in part because of that disconnect from “ordinary human intellectual activity.”
Too many feel completely excluded or have been taught, as one pompous buffoon of a professor from my undergrad once announced, “Some have the gift of insight and others do not, and that’s why these intro course are worthless.” That is sheer poppycock, and also, literally opposed to any idea of education. If you think that, you should not be in any classroom, ever. (A good teacher helps others find their feet, developing what insights they can.)
I had no time for that pompous buffoon then, and I have no time for such popinjay foolishness now. Reading and thinking are not the domain of professors and academics alone. There are, I’ll note, plenty of academics who do not think as that former professor of mine, but many do on some level or another.
And frankly, much of education spends so much time on what’s “hidden” from readers that readers never learn the very independence that teachers and professors are purportedly developing in them.
It’s one thing to learn from a guide, leaning on them with varying degrees of need as one develops as a reader, but to never be able to read without a guide or intermediary—that’s a lifetime of adolescence. (I am not, I should note, suggesting that everyone who’s graduated the eighth grade is now a marvelous reader because freedom or life-smarts or something dumb like that. We all have good and bad days as readers, and some readers genuinely are weaker than others. Reading is best approached with a dosage of humility. Humility and a complete lack of independence are not the same thing, however.)
What this newsletter has had as part of its goal is to introduce readers to a variety of modes, genres, and perhaps even methods of reading. The goal is to expose normal readers, such as there is such a thing, to the wealth within the reading realm.
In this vein, this newsletter is a bridge, not the end point. And I hope that it helps some readers recover what just might be another interpretation of Zena Hitz’s main title. Lost in Thought can also be interpreted as exploring what we’ve lost as thinking persons, what we’ve lost as we consider thinking, not simply how one can become lost in thought. (Given the subtitle and the text, the fundamental purpose of the book is clearly how a person can become lost in thought, but one has to get to those before that singular meaning can be established…)
I was fortunate enough to encounter real mentors unlike that bloviating stentor from my freshman year of college. And I hope you have, too. But if not, perhaps this newsletter can serve as partial fodder for your own thinking, as you consider what a reading life for ordinary folk might look like.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh