Preface

I’ve been a teacher for many years now, and one of the best things about teaching is the way it presses you to revisit decisions you made in decades past, to defend and explain actions that for you long ago ceased to need defense or explanation. What you find precious strikes some, or all, of your students as wholly without value; and they want to discuss matters in class that if you had your way you’d never consider again. Nevertheless, there you all are, stuck in the same room together several hours a week, for a dozen or more weeks.

It’s possible, of course, if you’re the teacher anyway, simply to ignore the problem and do Your Thing as you define Your Thing. In this context I think often of one of my former teachers, who commented that he had taught a particular course for so many years, and taught it in precisely the same way, that he often had a sensation, when he was in the middle of a lecture he knew by rote, that he could stroll right out of the classroom and his voice would simply continue droning its familiar drone until the appointed words were all said.

I vowed when I first heard this story that I would somehow avoid this dreadful fate, and that vow commits me to noticing when my students are and are not paying attention, when they’re puzzled, when they’re annoyed, when they’re bored. It commits me to answering them as faithfully as I can when they wonder (either openly or covertly) why we do what we do, read what we read, ask what we ask. And I am very glad that I made that vow, because it has prevented me from settling prematurely on easy and facile accounts of my calling as a teacher.

Among the fruits of that vow has been a series of books, of which this is the third, that attempt to communicate to the general reader much of what I have learned over the years by taking my students’ questions and boredom seriously. The first is called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and the second is called How to Think, and now here we are discussing the value of paying attention to old books that come from strange times and are written in peculiar language and frankly don’t make a whole lot of sense. Much of what I have to say here is what I have tried to convey to my students, though rarely in terms as explicit as I lay out here. Maybe some of my former students will read this book and think, Oh, that’s what he was up to.

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind. Like the poet Yeats, I often find that thought, and indeed life as a whole, is like a winding stair: you keep revisiting the same points, the same themes, but at higher levels of experience. From those ascending vantage points a given idea, a given feeling, a given perception, is recognizably itself and yet somehow different. One’s understanding of it becomes richer, sometimes in ways that are continuous, sometimes in ways that are revolutionary. I have tried to mimic that spiraling ascent in the pages that follow. A theme or notion is introduced, considered, dropped—and then picked up again later in light of additional readings, further reflections. Certain images and events and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.