Life Advice Archives - Page 6 of 10

Alice in…Sunderland

History has many cunning passages.

Bryan Talbot, author and illustrator of comic books, moves to Sunderland (England, not Massachusetts) for reasons unrevealed. He then commences on a multi-year examination of his adopted town.

The result: Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment.

The book is like a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Charles Dodgson, better known by his penname Lewis Carroll, spent some time in Sunderland. That is the primary connection which gives the book its name and which, truth be told, allowed the book to have a title which kept it from being so incredibly obscure that nobody would have ever read it.

The book itself is a meandering journey through history. It relates the history of Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to anything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything…well, you get the point. Since Lewis Carroll was in Sunderland, Talbot then has an excuse to relate everything related to the author and everything related to the book and everything related to the real Alice and everything related to Alice’s family, the Lidells, and then the entire history of the Lidells, which is apparently a rather large and ancient family.

After a little over 300 pages, it is reasonable to ask if there is anything that is not less than six degrees departed from Sunderland. This is not, to put to mildly, a tightly constructed book. It is more akin to a wandering conversation with a person whose attention span lasts on average a quarter of a page and at most four pages. Not surprisingly, the quality of the narrative is all over the place, from intensely interesting to trivia that only someone entering high stakes trivia contests would find worth knowing.

What saves the book from being a chore to read is the art. This is a comic book. The art is extraordinary. There is a larger variety of style than in any other single book I have ever seen. Maybe the complete Sandman series has this much variety, but that is a massively longer work. The artistic style changes from page to page, and remarkably it works. As the narrative jumps all over the place in the type of thing being discussed, the art just follows along.

The reason to read this book then has absolutely nothing to do with Sunderland. Truth be told, it is hard to tell how interesting Sunderland itself is, because unless you are paying very close attention, it is nearly impossible to tell which historical bits take place in Sunderland and which are just stories connected to something that is connected to Sunderland. By the end, I am not even sure if Alice Lidell was ever in Sunderland; I know Lewis Carroll was there, but if I cared enough to do so, I’d have to Google to see if Alice was ever there or if all the stories about the Lidells are in this book simply because they knew Carroll who spent at least a day in Sunderland. (At one point, one of Talbot’s avatars in the book asks the avatar of a local historian why none of the Carroll biographies mention the time he spent in Sunderland. One might think that implies the connection is weak.)

Besides watching Talbot at work, weaving history and art into some interesting visual treats, is there anything worth pondering in this book? Two things.

First, everything you know about Lewis Carroll is wrong, well unless you have read Talbot or maybe some biography that gets it right. All the popular ideas about Carroll are simply not true. Carroll was not obsessed with little girls, he was quite sociable in the company of adults, the idea that Carroll was a pedophile is totally unsubstantiated and without merit, and the story that Alice in Wonderland was composed in one afternoon when Carroll was on a boating expedition with Alice and her sisters is not true. So, feel free to read the Alice books for what they are—remarkably clever little puzzles and wordplay.

Second, a book like this is a wonderful reminder that everything is connected to everything else. Take the town where you live. Imagine delving into all the quirky history of your town. You’ll discover a wealth of stories. Those stories and the people in those stories are connected to other quirky stories and people who are them connected to get more stories and people. Next thing you know, you’ll find a connection to an entire world out there. All starting from your neighborhood. No man is an island. Similarly, no town is an island.

Why does this interconnectedness matter? It should remind us of the joy of learning things. There is a serendipitous joy when you just start noticing what you are reading and seeing and visiting and watching. Think of the last two books you read, and then find the connection between them. Maybe the connection is obvious, but maybe it isn’t. But, there is most certainly something interesting in the connection between those two books that would not be apparent from either book in isolation. Start noticing those connections and a whole new world will open up.

Your whole life is like that. At one level, it is one thing after another, but at another level, there is a world of wonder, a world of interconnected wonder, all around you just waiting to be noticed.

Burning Books

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work.”

Ray Bradbury wrote that in 1953 in Fahrenheit 451.

Fast forward 67 years. The same thing could be said today, which all by itself in incredibly curious. If Bradbury was right in 1953, then shouldn’t we be further along in the destruction of books and learning than we are? How have we spent nearly three-quarters of a century right on the verge of the book burning apocalypse?

Actually, it isn’t just the last seven decades. Plato complained about the same thing.

The importance of Fahrenheit 451 is thus not about banning and burning books or the death of reading. Books and reading (like cockroaches?) seem to keep finding a way to survive. But, what is obvious when pondering Bradbury is that reading has neither become more nor less widespread over the decades. There are still readers, to be sure. But, people who regularly read for pleasure day in and day out are, and seemingly always have been, a small percentage of the population.

I read this book in an independent study with a couple of ridiculously bookish students—I am pretty sure they both read more than I do. We ended up spending an incredible amount of time talking about Millie, the wife of the protagonist in the novel. She spends her days watching her interactive television; three full walls in the room are occupied by the television, and her fondest dream is to get the fourth wall also converted to a television. Truly immersive TV! She has friends over, and they all sit and immerse themselves in this all-consuming TV. (Don’t laugh; it would look just like four people sitting in the same room all looking at their phones.) Our protagonist pulls the plug on the TV and reads to them the last two stanzas of Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Millie is annoyed and frightened by this book thing, turns in our hero to the book burning authorities, and flees. She is one of those people who really see no need for books. Here is the question: what can we do to convince Millie that she will be happier or better off if she shuts off the TV and reads?

Truth be told, I was greatly disturbed by the end of my conversation with my students. I want to say I am absolutely certain that Millie would be much happier if she was a reader. But, how do I know that she would be? How do I know that Millie will be better off reading the poetry of Matthew Arnold than she is by watching the latest mindless TV show? As my students (who are too clever for me) were very quick to point out, the fact that I am better off as a reader than I would be if I just watched TV all day is not the question. I, as they love to tell me, am weird.

How about this: Books make you think. Is that a good thing? One of the book burners in the novel notes:

If you don’t want a man unhappy, politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none….We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

So, what if someone doesn’t want to think? What if someone likes simply being entertained and knowing there is good and evil and so you always know the right answer to everything without having to think about it? (Cue a reference to the cable channel your political opponents like.) Then I come along and say: “Look, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and you should read all these books and be endlessly tortured by never really knowing the ultimate answers to all of the multitude of ultimate questions.” Have I just made that person’s life better off?

Fahrenheit 451, the book, is a great example. We have here a book that says we should not burn books. Lots of people have read this book. It is popular in high school English classes; it isn’t hard to guess why English teachers like to assign it. Everyone loves the message that those evil people over there want to take away the books we good people should read and we should fight against them. (One of my kids had a unit on banned books in 9^th grade English; each student had to pick a banned book, read it, and then present it to the class. But, the teacher assured us at Parents Night, don’t worry. She would not let the kids choose any inappropriate books. As hard as it is to believe, the teacher said this with zero awareness of the irony.)

Quiz Time: How many people after reading Fahrenheit 451 and its message that reading all these great books is the most important thing in the world, have gone out and read “Dover Beach”? The novel has the excerpts quoted above; when the poem is read in the story, the characters are stunned and brought to tears. But, what percentage of the readers of Bradbury do you suppose set out to find the full poem and read it? And if they had, would they really be happier and better off?

OK, maybe it is because people don’t like poetry. But, Bradbury also makes use of the books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation. He argues they are so vital to the preservation of civilization that it is massively important that people have those books so cemented in the mind that they will survive nuclear war (or coronavirus?). Did the readers of Fahrenheit 451 find those books and read them?

I am, truth be told, a bit surprised how hard it was for any of us to come up with a compelling argument that Millie’s life would be better if she was a reader. I know it would be; deep down inside, I have no doubt about it. But, finding the articulation of that knowledge, finding the way to show that reading and books are important, vitally important, not just for the knowledge, but vital in and of themselves, finding the way to articulate that is difficult.

I keep coming back to Hamlet:

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.

That is the reason we need books and reading; they are keys to unlocking the potential of that godlike reason. But, the argument that this is what we were created to be may not be not enough to persuade Millie that she should read.

Bearing Life

A question I have long enjoyed posing to anyone who is willing to listen to me pose unanswerable questions is: Why does everyone consider Shakespeare’s tragedies to be more realistic and deep than his comedies?

A related question: why doesn’t everyone realize P. G. Wodehouse is a Great Books author?

Milan Kundera points the way to an unusual answer in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

It is a bit hard to classify the book. It is most certainly one part novel; it is also one part philosophical musing. Does the book belong in the fiction section because there is a story which has a lot of philosophical musings in it? Or does it belong in the non-fiction section because the story is clearly just a framework for the philosophical musings? On such questions hangs the fate of my library. But, I digress.

We all know about the burden of life. Life is full of heaviness, those things which weigh on us, which we spend our days figuring out how to endure. Life is a serious matter. What we decide to do has consequences, and those consequences matter. We are often faced with decisions and we don’t know which path to choose, but choose we must and then we must face the consequences of our choices. This is hard. Life is heavy.

There is an alternative way to go through life:

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

That is the alternative. Don’t treat life as heavy at all. Treat it as light. There are no weighty concerns in life; just do what you will and float though your life never being weighed down by the things of this world. As another character in the story muses:

She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

So, here you are faced with the burdens of life. Do you too yearn for lightness? Before you answer, remember this: if you shed the burden of heaviness, you will forever be tormented by the unbearable lightness of being.

Why is lightness unbearable? It is obviously an odd notion; by definition, light things are easy to bear. But lightness of being is not easy to bear. Why not?

Imagine you are living your newfound life of lightness, unburdened by the weight of the world. You are faced with a decision. You then realize this:

We can never know what to want. Because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives….There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

That is the unbearable lightness of being. What is your life worth? “What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.” If your life is light, ephemeral, if nothing you do really matters, if no choice has any real consequences, then what exactly is the point? You flit through life and people are born and people die and things happen and none of it really matters at all.

And then you wake up at 4 AM and realize that nothing you do or ever will do has any meaning and the cold terror grips your soul that you are utterly irrelevant, that everyone you meet is utterly irrelevant, that everything you do is impermanent and you can do neither good nor ill in the world, and stripped of all meaning you face another soulless, meaningless day. And tomorrow will be the same.

At that moment, something inside you rebels, insisting that surely everything is not pointless. Surely caring for those you love means something. Surely there are tragedies in life that have meaning, that cause pain. Surely it is not a matter of total indifference whether the box someone hands to an 8 year old kid contains a toy or a bomb.

At that realization, we are trapped back in the heaviness of life. The burden of living returns. Lightness is more unbearable than heaviness. At least with heaviness, there is some importance to the struggle with the decisions of life, some reason that what you do might matter, some hope that you may be able to do something good in this world.

Heaviness or lightness? It’s not a great set of options.

There was, however, a reviewer of this book who offered an interesting third option:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Knightian Unhappiness

Given the choice, would you rather have happiness or knowledge?

Seems like an easy question to answer. But, it is not so obvious.

I first ran into this question decades ago when I was reading a collection of Voltaire. “The Good Brahmin” tells the story of a learned intellectual in India who is absolutely miserable; nothing in all his learning has brought him joy and he is miserable at the thought of not knowing the secret of happiness. The story then tells of a poor old woman who was supremely happy as long as she could bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Voltaire notes he asked all of his friends whether they would prefer to be the miserable Brahmin or the happy old lady. Every single person chose the Brahmin. ‘Tis better to know than to be happy.

That seems like the wrong answer. Surely happiness is better than knowledge. But, I too would rather know than be happy.

I was reminded of this essay in a conversation with a student about The Bluest Eye. In that novel the girl with zero prospects in life ends up insane, but happy. The student claimed the book had a happy ending. I was, to put it mildly, incredulous. Surely having the little girl end up insane was a tragedy. Obviously, right?

But, this student insisted, what better ending was possible for her? Short of an absurd deus ex machina, there was no possible happy ending for this little girl. At least being insane, she was happy. So, the novel ends on a happy note because the best possible thing happened and the little girl is, after all, happy. Would I prefer she was knowledgeable and miserable? Would that be a happier ending?

I didn’t have a decent answer. Well, truth be told, I didn’t have an answer at all. It’s my Voltaire problem—I say being happy is important, but I would pick knowledge over happiness even if the knowledge made me unhappy. The little girl is certainly happier than she would be if she had stayed sane, but even still, her insanity does not strike me as an occasion for celebration.

Since I have been pondering this problem for three decades, it is not really all that surprising that it didn’t get solved by a conversation with a student about Toni Morrison.

What was as surprise was Frank Knight.

I was going to a conference on Knight, which required me to read a decent chunk of his writings. Don’t feel bad that you have never heard of Frank Knight; unless you have had a very unusual education, there is no reason his name would have ever shown up on your reading list.

Knight was an economist at the University of Chicago in the mid-20^th century. His primary contribution to economic thought was the idea of Knightian Uncertainty. You don’t know what will happen in the future. Sometimes you have an idea about the probability of possible future outcomes. If you don’t even know the probability of possible outcomes, then you have Knightian Uncertainty. Like I said, that is his most important contribution to knowledge and you are thinking, “Uh, it is obvious that sometimes people don’t know the probability of future events; how did he get the idea named after him?”

But, it is not Knightian Uncertainty which is relevant here. Instead, in the midst of an essay about Ethics and Economics, Knight considered the idea that we all want to be happy. Obviously coming upon this passage shortly after the conversation with my student, I was suddenly quite alert.

This argument of economists and other pragmatists that men work and think to get themselves out of trouble is at least half an inversion of the facts. The things we work for are “annoyers” as often as “satisfiers”; we spend as much ingenuity in getting into trouble as in getting out, and in any case enough to keep in effectively.

Well, then I started to go back into my lull. Saying things I want to do are “annoyers” seems like just a verbal trick. Nothing to see here…but then Knight goes on

It is our nature to “travel afar to seek disquietude,” and “’tis distance lends enchantment to the view.” It cannot be maintained that civilization itself makes men “happier” than they are in savagery. The purpose of education is certainly not to make anyone happy; its aim is rather to raise problems rather than solve them; the association of sadness and wisdom is proverbial, and the most famous of wise men observed that “in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Thus the pursuit of the “higher things” and the crasser indulgences are alike failures if the test is happiness.

Oh my. The pursuit of higher things…all those Great Books…is a miserable failure if the test is happiness. Knight continues:

But the test is not happiness. And by this we do not mean that it ought not to be but the simple fact that that is not what men want. It is a stock and conclusive objection to utopias that men simply will not live in a world where everything runs smoothly and life is free from care. We all recall William James’ relief at getting away from Chatauqua. A man who has nothing worry about immediately busies himself in creating something, gets into some absorbing game, falls in love, prepares to conquer some enemy or hunt lions or the North Pole or what not. We recall also the case of Faust, that the Devil himself could not invent escapades and adventures fast enough to give his soul one moment’s peace. So he died, seeking and striving, and the Angel pronounced him thereby “saved”…

Can this possibly be right? If you found yourself happy, would you really immediately invent a problem just to give yourself a better life than the one of being happy? If you lived in Eden, would you eat the fruit just to get out of the place?

The pleasure philosophy is a false theory of life; there abide pain, grief and boredom: these three; and the greatest of these is boredom.

Would we all really prefer pain and grief to the boredom of happiness? I want to say the answer is obviously not….but….but….well…

I can rescue all this by simply asserting that I derive happiness from my futile struggle to read (and read again) every book worth reading. The problem is easily solved by simply asserting the happiness is your goal by definition, so whatever you do is by definition aimed at bringing you happiness. So, creating problems for myself, striving to be better, learning new things do indeed bring me pleasure.

However, no matter how much I try to define things this way, the problem still remains. I know that while I would like to finish the collected works of Wodehouse, while I enjoy steadily plugging away at this, I will not be happy when I finally do so. After all, as soon as Wodehouse is done, the collected works of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott beckon. The more I read, the more I discover I want to read. So does the continual striving after an unattainable goal make me happy? Why? Shouldn’t reaching the goal make me happy?

Would I prefer to be insane and happy? Not in the least. Is Knight correct that we do not want to be happy? I don’t think that is right, but I cannot figure out where he is in error.

The Love of Scrooge

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Obviously, I recently reread A Christmas Carol. I’ve been reading this story every December for three decades. If the definition of a Great Book is one which you can reread many times and always discover something new, then A Christmas Carol is indisputably a Great Book.

If T.S. Eliot were to write A Christmas Carol, it would begin with an old man, stiffening in a decaying house, unconsciously saying, “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?” In the face of a dying world, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge. When I have noted in the past that we are living in the Waste Land, I am frequently met with an objection that the world isn’t all that bad. Indeed, to compare us all to Scrooge will strike many (most? all?) as absurd. So, consider anew Dickens’ tale. And then ask yourself, Whom do you Love?

Love has been unbelievably corrupted in the modern world. Consider this: When I say I love my wife and my kids, everybody nods politely. (Or, if they are Mount Holyoke students, they say “Ahh, that’s so sweet.”) If I say I love humanity, well, it’s actually just boilerplate and nobody will bat an eye. But if I say I love my students, then either it sounds like another banal triviality or something sounds a bit off. And if I were to look a student in the eye and say to her, “I love you”…well, you can imagine the reaction.

But why? The second greatest commandment is what?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22: 34-40, ESV)

And, what does it mean to love your neighbor?

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, ESV)

Now I can say I love Humanity and that’s OK. But the Good Samaritan didn’t love Humanity; he loved the hurting man on the side of the road to Jericho. He loved him enough to make sacrifices for that man; he cared enough for that man to take the time to treat the man as if he was important, solely because that man was inherently important. The Good Samaritan is a model of love.

And Scrooge is also a model of love. Scrooge is what we can become. Because of Christmas, because in the juvescence of the year /Came Christ the tiger, we have the possibility of loving our neighbors.

Yet, we have no language with which we can express that love. I do love my students. It’s my Christian obligation to do so, but that doesn’t make the love somehow less genuine.

Some of my students I love a lot. I hope those students know that, but sometimes I am not sure they do. It is surely a sign of the poverty not of our language but of our culture that I cannot simply tell those students, “You know, of course, that I love you.” Most of the time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much. But every now and then, I have been talking to a student, for whom the simple statement “I love you” would make a world of difference, and yet because of the degradation of our culture, there is no way to say those words without the very real risk of them being terribly and horribly misunderstood.

We all know that feeling loved is vital to the human soul; it is not some strange accident that the two greatest commandments are both about Love. And yet, we have lost the ability to express the very idea of a love without an overtone of the romantic or the erotic or the merely abstract.

And so, this Christmastime, I want to say to those students, both current and past, with whom I have a deep bond of friendship, and I hope you know who you are: I love you. A lot.

If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol yet this year, I’d highly recommend it. And, even better, read the text from which that book draws its moral lesson. Then, emulate Scrooge at the end of the story, and pick someone you know who is not a member of your family and for whom you feel no romantic or erotic attachment at all, and tell that person, “I love you.”

A Conversation Between Friends

“[There] is a certain kind of activity (not yet extinct) which can be engaged in only in virtue of a disposition to be conservative, namely, activities where what is sought is present enjoyment and not a profit, a reward, a prize or a result in addition to the experience itself.”

Michael Oakeshott wrote that in “On Being Conservative.” (The essay is in the book pictured to the right.)

I was reading this essay for a conference I recently attended on the definition of conservatism. (The conference was great, but nothing which follows is in any way related to the conference.) There I was merrily reading along, thinking about politics and culture and the conservative sensibility, when that sentence caused my brain to come to a screeching halt. Epiphany!

Over the years (now, I suppose that should be “decades”), I have had many students stop by to argue about politics. There is a certain type of student who wants to talk about politics, both theoretical and practical, with someone who disagrees with her. (Alas, not all students are like this.) At Mount Holyoke, it is not easy to find people with different political views. Lots of groupthink at Mount Holyoke.

Now I have a rather curious two-fold reputation on campus: 1) I am a conservative, and 2) I am an iconoclast, so I am happy to while away many hours defending the opposite of any position someone wants to stake out. So, students who want to debate some political idea or other stop by.

There is one part of this, though, that has always puzzled me. More often than I can count, students will hit the end of the discussion thinking about who won or lost the debate. At first, I thought the students were joking, but over the years, I have realized they aren’t. They really do think about who won or lost.

I have never been able to figure out what to make of this winning or losing. I didn’t even know we were in a debate. I just thought we were having an enjoyable conversation. There are no winners and losers in a conversation; there is just a pleasant trying out of ideas and wandering all over the intellectual landscape.

That is why the passage above from Oakeshott halted me in my tracks. He is perfectly describing my life as a professor. I talk with students in my office because of the enjoyment of the conversation itself. The conversation is the aim. If you want an education, then the best way to get one is to simply pause and enjoy discovering whatever turns up in the wandering, serendipitous act of conversation. Learning is its own reward.

This is also exactly why I am constantly assigning books in classes other than the textbook and why I run reading groups and independent studies all the time. Reading books is another form of conversation; you are talking with an author, wandering along a new way of thinking and pausing to consider whether the argument is insightful or not. Reading is its own reward.

I had never before connected this idea that being a teacher means having conversations in my office about every topic under the sun with the idea that I have a conservative sensibility. When students discover I am a conservative, they always think first about national politics, but truth be told, I am not nearly as invested in national politics as I was when I was young. It’s vastly more enjoyable simply to have a conversation with a student for nothing other than the goal of having a conversation.

So, I paused at Oakeshott’s sentence above, realizing that my whole approach to being a teacher may be the product of my conservative sensibilities. If so, this explained another long-standing puzzle: why don’t all the other faculty on campus enjoy endless meandering conversations with students?

After pleasantly ruminating a bit, I got back to the essay, and suddenly, in the next couple of pages, I had another jarring sensation.

But there are relationships of another kind in which no result is sought and which are engaged in for their own sake and enjoyed for what they are and not for what they provide. This is so of friendship. Here, attachment springs from an intimation of familiarity and subsists in a mutual sharing of personalities.

That was a really interesting definition of friendship. But even more so, one page later: a friend “is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into.”

And there, in Oakeshotts’ definition of “friendship,” I discovered the most perfect description of the relationship I have with all those students who stop by to have those marvelous conversations.

Many students have asked me why I spend so much time talking with them. They wonder what I am possibly getting out of the conversation. They never believe me when I tell them that I enjoy the conversation. They never seem to understand that I really am happy to talk with them about anything at all, about politics or science or poetry or their own personal struggles in life. It makes no difference to me whether the conversation is hysterically funny and lively or deeply serious. This conversation between friends is its own reward.