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

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.

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.

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.

By contrast, our inquirer undertakes video games to understand better their appeal to human nature, but finds herself drawn into the compulsive pursuit of distraction, to cascading, increasingly joyless victories in pixels. Likewise, it would take an unusual discipline to maintain contemplative distance from one’s own drunken bender. The FBI agent

is perhaps a cliché to say that our humanity is displayed best and enjoyed most when faced with serious limitations, but it is true for all that. Without distractions, we notice what is around us. Without rewards, living closely with others, we see how our activities and actions meet or fail to meet real human needs. We become more able to focus on

Intellectual activity nurtures an inner life, a human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection for its own sake. There are other ways to nurture the inner life: playing music, or helping the weak and vulnerable, or spending time in nature or prayer—but learning is a crucial one.

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

Intellectual activity nurtures an inner life, a human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection for its own sake. There are other ways to nurture the inner life: playing music, or helping the weak and vulnerable, or spending time in nature or prayer—but learning is a crucial one.