I sensed that I belonged to a broader community of human beings than the community of scholars. What was the point of studying philosophy and classics? What conceivable difference could it make in the face of the suffering world? It did not help that the academic world is famously, and truly, insular. Events and ideas from outside it enter through

To say we sought status and approval sounds more bloodless than it was: we wanted it at the expense of others. We observed and cultivated, for instance, the thrill of the critical academic takedown, a ritual act of humiliation that usually took place in public. A cutting book review, a devastating objection from the back of the lecture hall: these

the value of intellectual activity lay in the search more than the achievement.

We studied what mathematicians and scientists wrote and tried out what they practiced or experimented. We then saw scientific and mathematical thinking as a human endeavor rather than a body of established facts to be memorized or a prefabricated skill that had been determined as necessary by nameless and faceless authorities.

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.

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.

My family did not undertake intellectual practices and concerns as a means to an end. They did not consider them to be preparation for life, but rather a way of spending one’s time that had its worth in itself.

The standard for success of an activity was enjoying oneself in fellowship with others; such endeavors included the arts and crafts projects that no one would ever buy, and musical performances whose value would evaporate at too great a distance from the campfire.

His secular contemporary, Arnold Bennett, claimed in How to Live on 24 Hours a Day that it would suffice to take a daily half hour of focused thinking, combined with three evening sessions a week during which one read seriously for ninety minutes.