Down in the Depths

I read a great deal when I was in college.  Some of that reading was even done for class.  But for the most part, I read on my own, wherever my interests lead me.  I did have a handful of excellent professors, to whose insights I will forever be indebted, but the university was then, at the time of my enrollment, well on the way to the state of near total desuetude we see today.  Any highly educated person of my generation is almost certainly self-educated, because the institutions of higher learning we were reared in simply never provided us with the systematic tutelage in wisdom and culture that is the whole point of a university. 

What this meant for me was that I spent many days and evenings wandering through the library stacks, pulling off whatever seemed interesting and piling teetering mounds of old volumes on the desks to pour through for hours at a time.  This was the manner in which I first encountered the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the works of Edmund Burke – not in class, not as part of the curriculum, but through the fortuitous whims of a curious young man.   

I was an undergraduate at New York University, and so the library in which I spent so much time holed up was the Bobst Library, a squat, stark, brutalist monstrosity that is just about as ugly as human beings can contrive to make a building.  Its boxy exterior of near featureless burnt-orange granite constitutes a visual affront to the Washington Square Park neighborhood in which it stands, which is otherwise composed (or was at the time) of quite charming brownstones.  The interior of the library is sterile, industrial, and entirely incommodious – just the last place in the world one would want to curl up with a good book.   

And yet I did – repeatedly.  I was still at an age when the world was a dizzying mystery to me (it is only slightly less so now), and the authors and thinkers I encountered at that time seemed to hold out to me the magical lore of its workings.  The very names on the spines shimmered like runes, charged with some inexplicable power to mold the future: Chesterton, Johnson, Pascal.  To crack their volumes was like partaking in an arcane ritual, through which the secrets of an ancient and illustrious company were passed into my unworthy hands.   

It was an exhilarating experience.  I can still remember, quite distinctly, the walks home after such reading sessions, and the elation which seemed to float me on my way back to my dorm room.  To this period I trace my own intellectual birth, to this first real encounter with the wisdom and beauty captured in our learned traditions.  Whatever expansion of perspective I have gained in life – and God knows, it is still far too slight – I trace back to this first stirring of the spirit in me, and to the poets and thinkers at whose feet I figuratively sat for so many hours, awakening to the contours of my own being. 

And it all happened inside that hideous building.  In the bowels of that modernist excrescence, surrounded by the inhuman physical bleakness that was such an apposite expression of the spiritual state of the era, I came to know myself.  The musty old books on the shelves preserved an insight and a form of life that everything in my environment was calculated to expunge.  So long as I had ears to hear, the wisdom of the past could never be wholly cast into oblivion. 

You will forgive the note of self-importance if I say that there seems to me to be something profoundly symbolic and relevant to our age in that experience.  The times are becoming increasingly hideous, with all manner of brutal and inhuman phenomena enveloping our daily lives.  As the project of modern civilization lurches and lunges toward its fated demise, the spiritual and physical wreckage it strews about our lives turns ever more ominous.  No period in our history could seem less propitious towards the rebirth of the human spirit than our own. 

Yet it is happening.  All around us, we can spy sprouts of the life of the mind springing to life again.  Interest in old books is reviving, and being shared in a variety of novel venues that the internet has allowed to proliferate.  Old ideas about man and society are being reconsidered; stale cliches left over from the Enlightenment are questioned more and more assiduously.  Artists and architects are relearning the techniques of their forbears – so long scorned and neglected – and slowly transforming our built environment into one that is fit for human beings. The cynical nonsense that has been the lingua franca of Western mandarins for generations is now contemptuously thrown aside, and real thinkers frame their purposes in terms of an earnest pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty. 

And at the heart of this stirring is the classical schooling movement, which has specifically defined its mission to be the awakening of young minds to goodness, truth, and beauty.  No longer is it necessary for young people to go seek out the sources and reservoirs of these things on their own; now, from the earliest stages of development, they are introduced to the glories of the human spirit, and inducted into that happy company acquainted with the best that has been thought and said.  That elevation of the spirit that accompanies a close study of the classics is theirs from the beginning, and may inspire them towards forms of life so much richer and more dignified than anything our society presently offers.

This is slow work.  Its fruits will not be fully evident for years to come, for generations even.  But one thing I did learn through those hours of study was that all the great movements in the history of the human spirit began like this: by rejecting the limits imposed by the decadent culture of the age, and returning to the accomplishments of the great souls that went before us, in order to learn a better way of being in the world.  It is not lost on me either that many of those accomplishments were achieved in times of confusion and violence, and stand as a kind of everlasting indictment of the human crudity that repeatedly leads to confusion and violence.  So I have much hope.

Which is not to say I am optimistic.  No, the times are too far gone to suppose that we will escape the consequences of decades of spiritual and cultural malfeasance.  But one of the greatest blessings bestowed by a liberal education is the privilege of walking in the presence of timeless truths, and so never completely subject to the lies and the destruction of the age.  All over the country, in hundreds of classrooms, thousands of fortunate children are beginning to walk on that journey, and where the power of truth and beauty will lead them – and where they will lead their world in turn – we can only imagine.  The future shimmers again, even amidst the dark present, and when I contemplate the prospect of a generation taught to live in awe and reverence of their own nature, my own spirit floats with elation, as it did when I was young.