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- Author: Zena Hitz
- Full Title: Lost in Thought
- Category: #books
- Like the right kind of hiking and the authentic love of learning, leisure can in principle be found and used anywhere, but it thrives only under certain conditions: free time, exposure to the outdoors, and a certain mental emptiness.
- The leisure activities that count as a culminating end of life have a sort of timelessness. When we are at leisure, we stop counting the minutes toward the goal, because the goal is precisely what we are doing: hiking in the wilderness, engaging in thoughtful conversation with oneself or with others, sitting around the fire with those we love. Sometimes, leisure takes the form of an intense activity. Staying up all night talking, cataloging the weeds in the garden, John Baker’s bird-watching—all may be undertaken with great energy. The freedom of a leisurely activity is the freedom from results or outcomes beyond it, not the freedom of rest or recreation.
- Aristotle thought that our ultimate end constituted our conception of happiness. That is, we hold as our ultimate end whatever we believe a happy life to consist in. He also believed that human nature gave happiness definite contours: some ultimate ends will be satisfying, and others not. Our conception of happiness can be wrong. Contemplation, in his view, was the only thing that could structure other human desires so that a human life would be satisfying.
- For all these reasons I say the philosopher remains quiet and minds his own affairs. Like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, seeing others filled with lawlessness, he is satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content. —PLATO, REPUBLIC
- We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join in the general scramble, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient liberation of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the fighting shape. —WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
- Perhaps we ought to think of intellectual life as having not so much an object as a direction: toward the general past the specific, the universal beyond the particular, the reality behind the illusion, the beauty beneath the ugliness, the peace underneath violence—we seek the pattern in instances, the instance hidden by the pattern.
- Humanistic learning also hopes to cultivate excellence in perception—for instance, of human reactions or human events. So, for example, the study of literature might enable us to see that we ourselves, like Elizabeth Bennet, have been blinded by self-regard and have failed to perceive another person as he really is.
- Consider by contrast to our above examples a person who faces death after a long illness with clear eyes, with gratitude, with honest acknowledgment of suffering, without consoling herself with fantasies of future projects, without pretending that her life as it is will survive death, without trying to control the time or the manner of the end with staged theatrics. Here is the dignity of facing the world as it is—the dignity of “thought,” as Pascal puts it.
- Hillyer emphasizes the contrast between the “drab and colourless” monotony of his ordinary life and a “limitless world” disclosed by books. But his interest is not in mere escape or denial of the real world. Rather, he describes seeing reality for the first time, as in fact seeing through the false monotony and diminishment of ordinary life. He finds something more real, not less. His mind’s opening “like a flower in the sun” indicates the inner resonance, the catching on of the books to a deep part of who he is.