In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
Category: Life & Love (Page 3 of 5)
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
G.K. Chesterton, The Thing, “The Drift from Domesticity” (1929)
Of what avail is any amount of well-being, if at the same time, we steadily render the world more vulgar, uglier, noisier, and drearier and if we lose the moral and spiritual foundations of their existence? Man simply does not live by radio, automobiles, and refrigerators alone but by the whole unpurchasable world beyond the market and turnover figures, the world of dignity, beauty, poetry, grace, chivalry, love, and friendship, the world of community, variety of life, freedom, and fullness of personality.
– Wilhelm Ropke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (1960) (Available for free download here.)
“You come from the Lord Adam and Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth; be content.”
C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
I am grateful for each of the articles in this series about “crossing the Tiber”, particularly for the authors’ understanding, compassion, and holistic approach.
We’re all carnies, though some people are in denial. They want to be above it all, above the mayhem of laughter and people and lights and animals and the dark sadness that lurks in the corners and beneath the rides and in the trailers after hours. So they ride the Ferris wheel, and at the top, they think they’ve left it all behind. They’ve ascended to a place where they can take things seriously. Where they can be taken seriously.
Let them have their moment. You and I can eat our corn dogs and wait and smile. Solomon smiles with us.
The wheel turns. The earth spins and runs its laps. We all go around.
N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl
“You surprise me, Holy Father. You are young, and yet you have such old ideas.”
“You’re wrong about that. I’m an orphan, and orphans are never young.”
“But the majority of churchgoers are not orphans.”
“Says who? You really think that the only orphans are those without a mother and father?”
The Young Pope
As the grandson of Iowa farmers, as a man with specialized academic degrees, as someone working to revive education, this article is relevant to my core.
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-08-031-f
“Does a liberal education so broaden the minds of its pupils that it turns them into learned cosmopolitans who cannot go home anymore? In other words, how can students go back to the farm after having read Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare?”
“The humanistic education I received over the course of too many degrees enabled me to escape my past, at least partly.”
“By so broadening the mind, does it narrow the person? By liberating the educated person to see things whole, does it shackle that person to a blindness than cannot recognize the full scope of our humanity?”
“I am haunted by the potential narrowness of a liberal education, since it tempts us to look at students and ourselves as merely minds without bodies, that is, without reference to the families and communities in which we learned to talk, treat others politely, endure eccentric neighbors, root for football teams, and fall in love.”
“For without the real generation of children who learn about the West and its virtues from parents, neighbors, teachers and pastors, a liberal education may become little more than a game for cosseted academics, or a disembodied five-foot shelf of decorative books, cut off from real people whose lives and communities embody and situate the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
One doesn’t realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.
C.S. Lewis
Throughout the law school experience, my greatest trouble has been solitude. To a melancholic, solitude is often a refuge, a warm and soft den where thoughts and emotions can be safely acknowledged, unknotted, mourned, and wrangled. But when the solitude is inescapable, when the den gives way to a cold, endless cave, the melancholic mind and spirit encounter no safe refuge. The realities of law school not only stretched solitude into a cavern, but also exacerbated the need for the den.
The degree of loss was my greatest surprise. To an extent, I expected some solitude, some loss of relationship. Intuitively, I braced for greater distance between myself and my extended family and friends. This occurred, but that distance grew in relationships where I did not expect it to grow, laying bare the previous strength of those relationships.
Survivors warn prospective law students of this phenomenon, but they are usually quick to add that new relationships from within the law school community will fill this void. That prospect doesn’t necessarily hold true for non-traditional law students, those not inclined to participate in the binges typical of worldly grad students and those with families demanding – and deserving of – any and all spare moments. To be sure, I have made friends of many of my colleagues, and I appreciate the pleasant conversations, practical assistance, and care that we have exhibited for each other. Yet, most of them (the “kids”) can only relate to a small portion of my experience – balancing school while managing family, career, and adult life were mostly foreign to them.
My first realization of loss occurred within the first month or two of my 1L year. It was then I first noticed the loss of respect, and I grieved that loss for a while – and perhaps still struggle to put it behind me. My former ability to command respect, to look people in the eye and know that there was mutual respect and a willingness to speak and act toward common goals, was gone. Professors don’t hold students in high regard, nor should they, in a manner of speaking. However, I felt that my age and experience – in some cases exceeding those of my professors – should have set me apart from other students in the eyes of professors, inclining them to engage me on another, fuller level. Not only did that not happen, the opposite often occurred.
The simple fact that law school exists largely in the theoretical, usually with only one outlet per course (a final exam), is practically to blame for much of the solitude. There are few outlets for the vast amounts of knowledge and ideas that we take in, and even those few outlets tend to be narrow and limited, divorced from human realities. Perhaps the role of a new legal associate is designed to be a gradual release of this built-up pressure and isolation, which could be dangerous to people. Yet I can’t help but believe that the legal profession would be better off with a different system, perhaps even a “reading into” the profession under tutelage and experience. The legal clinic is a help in this regard, but it is not wholly sufficient.
The vast intake of knowledge creates the need for a sufficient outlet. But couple this knowledge with the weightiness of life, philosophy, and theology, and the melancholic needs the soft den of solitude all the more to emotionally work out the mass of problems that have been absorbed. Yet that solitude needs to be broken by relationships that beckon the melancholic to come back out of the den, to not wander further into the cold recesses of the cave. When there isn’t time or space to hear those voices, and when the flow of knowledge itself carries the melancholic further into the bowels of the cavern, all he can do is read on in wide-eyed terror or look away in cynical indifference.
Coming to the end of law school, and winding my way back out of the cave, I do begin to see light and hear welcome voices. My wife and children have been remarkably resilient, as have a few friendships. But I worry whether I will ever be able to relate to people as I once did, or if the terror and cynicism left indelible marks that can ever be overcome. At the end of this ride, I wonder if solitude will ever again be the comfortable den, or if perhaps, in some way, the new den may not include solitude at all.