It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
— Wallace Stevens, “The Well-Dressed Man With a Beard”
I agreed to a retirement deal last week. I will work one more year and then hand over my keys and my parking permit and thus place the period at the conclusion of the 35-year-long paragraph that is my academic career. The decision has stirred up a swirling mix of emotions and thoughts about the way that I have spent those years. My first teaching experience was as a graduate-student teaching assistant in 1981. You could probably write the next clauses: no cellphones, iPhones, iPads, laptops, Google, Wikipedia, searchable databases, social media. The world has changed a great deal in the 35 years since. But for 30 of those years, I felt reasonably comfortable believing that, however much the trappings changed, there were constants in the liberal arts. I felt that I could get up in the morning and go out the door to a familiar purpose, fulfilling a familiar and honorable duty to the young people whom I served.
As my family knows (all too well), I am at heart a hermit. It takes a great deal of effort to get me out of the house in the morning (or, more accurately, to get me into situations where there are people — I’m perfectly happy getting up and shuffling to the kitchen, brewing some coffee, opening a book, reading for an hour or two, throwing on something, taking a walk with the dog, returning to the book, or to the notebook and writing). So the job from which I am retiring — directing an office of admissions and academic advising in a liberal-arts college — well, all my jobs over a career of teaching, advising, and administering in liberal-arts colleges have been challenging. They have cost me something in what might have been my soul, if I believed in such a thing.
The value of education is to train the mind’s tendency to roam. Not to curtail it, but to give it discipline.
One reason I have continued to make the effort to get out of the house is that I fervently believe that the activity of a liberal-arts education, at its best and most essential, is an activity that equips one to be comprehensively alone, to be full of resources when one is “caught without people or drink,” as we all will always be caught sooner or later and more often than not. A former president of Barnard, Judith Shapiro, put it quite well: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.” A liberal-arts education does lots of other things, but if it doesn’t do that, if it hasn’t made the inside of your head an interesting place, it has failed. As long as I thought I was equipping students to handle being alone at times in their lives, I was willing to make the psychic sacrifice to get up and out the door and into the office.
But the past few years suggest to me that I’m no longer contributing to that, because the people running the liberal arts have other things in mind for the students. The goal of inspiring them to cultivate the spirit of introspection, of patience, of slow and stumbling curiosity, has been replaced with a bullet-pointed list of action items that stress ceaseless movement, engagement, service, entrepreneurial expense of spirit, always doing, doing, doing in ways that are, without a doubt, socially useful and progressive and “changing the world, one idea at a time,” as the new motto of my current employer has it — though, frankly, what they really celebrate is that students and faculty are a humming beehive with a swarm of ideas all at once changing the world. It is all somewhat breathless.
… there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of those people who have none.
— Henry James, The American
T he change is evident in all manner of things. One notices, for instance, how certain words and phrases bubble up at certain times in the stream of discourse in the academy. “Engaged learning,” “engaged scholarship,” “active teaching,” have become a foam in the stream. Forms of the verb “catalyze” and the noun “community” pop across the surface repeatedly — at a recent meeting of peer institutions where the topic was “engaged learning and scholarship,” we learned how an idea catalyzed curricular changes; how a network of courses was a catalyzation of a praxis; and the word “community” proliferated to such an extent that it became difficult to tell what it could possibly denote. Over and over, the intellectual work of the academy is described as “thinking through” one or another topic, problem, or challenge. Never thinking, but thinking through.
Thinking through histories and structures of inequality, through environmental degradation, health-care disparities, oppressive practices … all of that activity is useful, vital, transformative. It will lead us all to more-fruitful and just arrangements and will especially sensitize to inequity the fortunate few young people who make it to the selective campuses that practice engagement. But I have always believed that a college education (be it at an elite institution, like my present employer, or at the community college where I first encountered the transformative power of the liberal arts in my own life) must not only equip one to think through a complex knot of problems and engage with communities in order to catalyze positive change, but it must also equip one to think. To be alone with one’s mind in the long stretch of life meeting the untold number of moments when one’s fundamental aloneness will confront one.
And not just or only during moments of crisis. Just as important for one’s well-being is to have something interesting going on inside your head when you are stuck on the security line at O’Hare watching the minutes tick down toward your delayed flight’s departure. Or on the line at the Motor Vehicles Department or the Social Security office. Of course the hive leaders of our present moment have spread across the worker bees any number of gadgets to both distract us from our aloneness and keep us at our active tasks on behalf of the hive.
But apt the mind or fancy is to roveUnchecked, and of her roving is no end
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
What does it mean to be alone? First, there is the brute fact that Philip Larkin describes of those moments waking at 4 a.m. and facing what is always there — “unresting death, a whole day nearer now.” Those times when the etymological force of alone bears in on you: all one, a totality of being that is you. Those 4 a.m. encounters are encounters with the totality that is your experience of living in the world and the totality of extinction awaiting. But that other kind of aloneness, that lonely-crowd phenomenon, jostling down a city street or sitting in a waiting room with only children’s magazines on the table and your iPhone in your other jacket. That, it seems to me, is just as powerfully solitary as the wee-hours panic. Those are times when it is extraordinarily useful to have things inside your head to absorb your attention.
But the mind, as Milton reminds us, is apt to rove, and through its roving the mind is apt to become lost in “fume, / Or emptiness, or fond impertinence.” Hence the value of education: to train the mind’s tendency to roam, not in order to curtail the roaming, but to give discipline to it. The gadgets the hive masters have scattered around us, beguiling us with their blinking shining surfaces and their endlessly inward-pulling magnetic seduction, tiny portals through which our attention is sucked into distraction or, even more sinisterly, into endless work tasks, these gadgets distract us from our minds while enforcing the roving tendency of mind toward fume and emptiness.
A recent issue of The Boston Review featured a forum on education. Most of the contributors agreed that the preprofessional, quasi-vocational training that passes for education (both secondary and tertiary) in much of the United States is simply fitting cogs for the machine. The alternative most of them offer, though, is fitting cogs for a different kind of machine and is quite amenable to the engaged-active-community-building-catalyzing education championed by contemporary liberal-arts educators. Education for progressive citizenship, for informed democratic decision making, for jury service. One contributor, though, expressed an alternative desire to any of the instrumental forms of either vocational or engaged education. Lucas Stanczyk, of MIT, put it simply and persuasively:
The most important reason to improve education is not to make children fit for tomorrow’s job market. Nor is it to make them capable of voting well and serving on a jury. It is to help people escape a life of vapid consumerism by giving them capacities to appreciate richer pursuits and to produce their own complex meanings.
Amen. In this, Stanczyk echoes a patron saint of contemporary academic social science, John Maynard Keynes, who long ago, in an autobiographical essay, urged that the true value of education is for building a better life, not through accumulation of wealth but rather, “love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.” Producing one’s own complex meanings, creating and enjoying aesthetic experience … those, in fact, were the ends I believed I was striving for, to aim our students toward the, sigh, “learning outcomes” a liberal-arts education was meant to fulfill.
Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,… Save
That in the very happiest of intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave—
Richard Wilbur, “Mind”
H ow does one produce complex meanings? Or create and enjoy aesthetic experience? One way is to memorize poems. This is a habit I picked up, fitfully, in a course I took at Middlesex County College in 1974. The instructor (alas, I cannot remember her name) had us memorize short lyric poems in order to lead class discussions about them. The one I was given was Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” It has never left my mind. Indeed, it returns often and often without my willing it. Not all of the poems have so successfully lodged in my head. But I continue to make the attempt to commit to memory and to resurrect in memory as many as I can.
Why? There are many good reasons, but here’s the one that really keeps me at it: I forget things. I forget yards of things, acres of things; entire counties worth of material have vanished from my mind. That’s probably why I’m such an obsessive book buyer and photocopier of articles and copier of interesting phrasings. I’m terrified that everything I’ve ever known is eventually going to disappear from my brain. As, of course, it will. I am buried in paper: books, magazines, journals, manila folders stuffed with sheets of paper, scraps of paper with jottings, bits I’ve cut out of newspapers, even whole New York Times from momentous days. And still, with all that paper surrounding me, barricading me, I will lose. Whatever is stored in the cells in my skull will sooner or later deteriorate, wither, desiccate like a leaf on the sidewalk of a sun-drenched city, losing all of its moisture, its color, its definition, shape, size and finally crinkling into dust to scatter to the wind. That is going to happen to you, too, and to everything that is in your head.
To have by heart a handful of the most wondrous words crafted into poems is worth any number of lines on a CV.
Forgetting, after all, is what death is. I do not have the consolation of a religious faith. I do not believe that a personal immortality awaits whatever marks of me are encoded on the cells within my skull. Forgetting is part of the long process of letting go, the early stages of the eventual collapse of the whole system, the first slipping steps into the oblivion. Of course, in one way or another many of the poems I am lodging there remind me about all this. That is one of the great uncanny things about the poems and one of the reasons I work at them instead of, say, keeping up with the latest trends in critical theory, or this year’s “must-see TV.” The culture is adept at enhancing forgetting. In fact, it seems that the whole direction of modern civilization has been a process of blurring, dissolving, breaking off, like graveyard sculpture in weather.
This notion was brought home to me when my eldest son and I were in a sailboat on Pine Island Sound, the large body of the Gulf of Mexico behind the thin strip of barrier islands stretching north toward Sarasota. We had run aground on a sandbar. Boaters refer to local knowledge, the necessary bits of information about the immediate environment that keep your boat afloat as you course through the shifting winds and tides of those coastal estuaries. Neither my son nor I, nor the sailing instructor with us, had enough local knowledge to sail us free of the sandbar. But the motorboats whizzing by, and the motorboat that eventually threw us a line to pull us free, none of them needed local knowledge. They draw at most a foot into the water, their engines swivel up to come free of any obstructions, and they carry their blissfully unaware occupants scooting over sandbars and shoals with the oblivious assurance of the machine. The details held in store by local knowledge are no longer necessary. Soon they will disappear with the local sailors still patient enough to bother acquiring them.
The irony is that the same fate awaits those blissfully unaware people in their whirring machines. Down their carved names the raindrop will plow just as well. None of us is any better able to find shelter from the weather. The diversions of the contemporary mass market allow consumers to maintain the implacable surface of being hip and keeping worry at arm’s length. Of course I succumb easily to the seductions of a good television show and can lose hours watching the detectives impersonate the more complicated and often much duller gestures of what happens in the real streets. But at the end of an evening spent watching the simulacrum, an unease settles in my gut, and it is only by intoning silently like the vespers one of my poems that I am able gradually to lift the fog of distraction and disease engendered by that glossy verisimilitude.
Indeed, last night, after an evening sunk in the latest streaming series, I found myself muttering “Spring and Fall.” Was this any more satisfying, to know that sorrow’s springs are the same, no matter, child, the name? Was it somehow better for me to remind myself that though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie, I will come to such sights colder by and by? In fact, yes. The exercise of stretching my mental muscles around Gerard Manley Hopkins’s intriguing syntax in order to get to what the heart heard or the ghost guessed is an exercise that pays in remarkable ways. There is consolation in the work itself, in that exercise of finding the thing said so well, despite the bleakness of the thing. There is consolation in the beauty of the despair shaped into the memorable verbal token of this beautiful object that exists in the nowhere of my consciousness, Hopkins’s consciousness, the book in which I first read it, wherever finally a poem can be said to exist. I can carry it with me even if the paper upon which I first read it yellows and disintegrates. And you can carry it with you, should you choose to, no matter that Hopkins himself is now mouldy dust. We have made a dwelling in the evening air.
The high-sounding shibboleths of the current academy are no more or less subject to manipulation by mendacious self-promoters than those of any other contemporary profession. Rectitude of purpose does not shield that purpose from perversion of its goals. What happens, though, when the purpose and the goals change utterly? Not that I am lamenting a lost golden age, only a lost opportunity.
The complaint is all too common now, both within and without the academy, that its venerable ideals are being corroded by the rising acidic waters of, call it what you will, the corporate mind-set or neoliberalism or bureaucratized managerial assessment. So long as the shibboleths and the activities they betoken do not upset the managerial, neoliberal, corporate goals of capital and finance, the masters are happy to allow their myrmidons to catalyze away. But the atmosphere being created is toxic to the habits of mind that drew me to the liberal arts.
To have by heart a handful of the most wondrous words crafted by human ingenuity into poems is worth, I have always thought, any number of lines on a CV or awards or grants. Late at night, once the computers have shut down and the smartphones have stopped buzzing and televisions have gone dark and the rooms have settled into their creaking recovery from the day’s bustle, once you are finally alone with yourself, what will sustain you?
David N. DeVries is associate dean of undergraduate education at Cornell University.
