Rethink.

“I can feel it in my bones / Gimme Sym­pa­thy” — Met­ric, “Gimme Sympathy”

My edu­ca­tion to this point started in earnest in grad­u­ate school.

Before high school, the only two books I read with any seri­ous­ness were the Bible (no, I haven’t read all of it) and Robert Fulghum’s All I Need to Know I Learned in Kinder­garten. Both books caused a change in my mood when­ever I picked them up and started read­ing; it felt like no mat­ter what, I was going to get some­thing that would be inspir­ing and could be put to use immediately.

I still had that feel­ing read­ing both books in high school, but there was so much more to go through — there was world his­tory to be mem­o­rized, dates and bat­tles and tac­tics; short sto­ries that depicted a vari­ety of peo­ple I couldn’t oth­er­wise relate to; National Review, mat­ters of pol­icy and cul­ture school didn’t address in a way school would never take seriously.

I left high school not being able to read a poem, and I didn’t real­ize what phi­los­o­phy was in the least until my junior year of col­lege. I didn’t think phi­los­o­phy or poetry were impor­tant for any­thing — pol­i­tics was about pub­lic ser­vice, and every­thing I had read exhorted me to ser­vice. Solomon’s wis­dom built a great nation; what one learned in kinder­garten were basic rules for deal­ing with peo­ple; world his­tory meant I could win money on Jeop­ardy! should all else fail; short sto­ries gave a clue as to who I should look out for; the right polit­i­cal posi­tions solved all prob­lems and there wasn’t really a need to know much more.

Under­grad wasn’t a wake-up call, but it helped plant seeds that some­thing was wrong with this pic­ture. Wil­son Carey McWilliams lec­tured bril­liantly on Aeschy­lus, tak­ing the Oresteia and explain­ing that the city was born of this ten­sion between pre-legal notions (aveng­ing the death of a fam­ily mem­ber, etc.) and insti­tu­tions divinely founded. William Dowl­ing explained how to look at a poem, tease out the speaker and audi­ence, and explain how they relate to each other.

Then I went and took a course on Wittgen­stein and real­ized that there were any num­ber of top­ics and issues that could very eas­ily go over my head. How does one even describe the prob­lem of how it is we under­stand that an arrow points?

My lat­ter years in under­grad I started keep­ing a jour­nal. Around 2003 I started blog­ging. The sort of posts you see some­times fail, some­times suc­ceed, in this blog were never at this level of detail in the jour­nal or the blog then. There was still one more upheaval of thought to occur — noth­ing had been put together yet.

A good exam­ple of how I used to think or work with ideas/situation/a text can be seen in a more devel­oped, elo­quent way in most pun­ditry. Typ­i­cally a pun­dit takes an aspect of a sit­u­a­tion he doesn’t like and stays focused on that aspect. There may be allu­sions to other issues, but there’s no sense of the whole: no sense there’s an inter­con­nected series of phe­nom­ena, each depen­dent on the other, that analy­sis tries to give you a sense of, a way to nav­i­gate around.

My first year of grad­u­ate school I met Peter Lund, whose abil­ity to see crit­i­cal issues in Greek drama and Plato is still the abil­ity I trust uncrit­i­cally: when Peter’s “wrong” about some­thing, I have to check my read­ing, because I’m most likely not see­ing the best ques­tion pos­si­ble. Peter wasn’t offi­cially a teacher of mine — he was/is a col­league. It didn’t take me long, after he had empha­sized out some pecu­liar­i­ties of Xenophon’s line of argu­men­ta­tion, to start putting the full weight of the crit­i­cal appa­ra­tus I had been hon­ing unknow­ingly all these years into action. From then on, the major project has been build­ing famil­iar­ity with more his­tory, more phi­los­o­phy, more poetry, more dis­tinc­tions, more metaphor, more argu­men­ta­tion, more peo­ple in order to cre­ate one thing: a more hon­est world.

That’s what this blog is about. I cringe when I read old entries: many times I won­der “What the hell was I think­ing” and can’t fig­ure it out. I’m edit­ing and I haven’t got­ten to every­thing, may not get to every­thing. It’s not impor­tant any­way; there’s lots of stuff out there more finely crafted, by other authors who are mas­ters of their art. Here we meet as equals, the one thing miss­ing from my edu­ca­tion up until grad­u­ate school.