Via the comment thread on this post over at Michael’s place, I found myself clicking over to a thought-provoking essay in The American Scholar on the disadvantages of an elite education. Written by literary critic and former Yale prof. William Deresiewicz, it is a well-argued—if sometimes slightly off the mark—criticism of the increasingly shallow nature of education to be had in the Ivy League.
Deresiewicz argues, among other things, that those who value learning for learning’s sake often find themselves ill at ease in the US’s top-tier schools. He says:
...Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.
I don’t know whether this is a fair criticism. If it is, it isn’t a phenomenon limited to the elite schools. People who “see their education as part of a larger intellectual journey” aren’t all that thick on the ground in state schools either, from what I can tell. Community colleges seem to have a lot of them, though that may be more a function of student’s ages.
I’m not sure it’s fair to finger schools in general for this state of affairs, though they may do less than they ought to counter it. There isn’t much in American society that rewards learning that is engaged in for its own sake, not as a means to an end. Uncertainty is reviled, a state of being from which one must emerge as quickly as possible. Contradiction is considered unpleasant. Doubt must be resolved at once.
You see this in writing. Doubt as a literary theme has been superceded by snark, or schadenfreude, or something else that doesn’t introduce existential queasiness in the reader. The fact that much of what is important is unknown and perhaps unknowable matters little. Which is of course a longwinded way of rephrasing this thing I used to be fond of declaiming, namely that doubt is the only interesting theme in writing. I wrote that once to my friend Sharon, who promptly asked me if I was sure about that. I wasn’t, and I’m still not, but it sounds good for now.
Contemplation is crucial to the life spent learning, and with few exceptions contemplation is not a team sport, and so this next passage from Deresiewicz’s essay — the one that prompted this post in the first place — comes as little surprise, though it is disheartening nonetheless:
I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?...There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?
I’m a slow learner: until this summer, at nearly half a century of age, I had never lived by myself. I’d been alone often enough, especially in the last few years, but I’d always had spouses or housemates of family members who would be coming back home soon. Solitude was something I went away to get. This summer, solitude was my baseline: in a settlement of thirty people or fewer, none of whom bothered me unless I wanted to be bothered, and with the nearest town 20 miles away and hundreds of square miles of despoblado hard up against my back door, solitude was easy to come by.
That solitudinous summer went hellaciously fast, aside from the excruciatingly slow parts. (Those slow parts took place when I was feeling the lack of company, usually in the aftermath of an argument on the phone or — though our friendship does in general support Emerson’s above contention — in the six or so hours after The Raven’s taillights faded into the Ivanpah Valley dark after a weekend visit had ended.) There were days and days where I didn’t speak a word except to myself, or to the feral cats that grew to trust me a little over the months. If the loneliness ever threatened to crowd out the solitude, all I had to do was walk outside. Is it cheating on the solitude if you count the tarantulas and leopard lizards as companions? I’ll admit I had better conversations with them than I ever have with Harvard MBAs.
It is a privilege, in the senses of fortune and social stratum both, to have had the opportunity to experience solitude like that. If everyone went out to the wilderness for contemplation then there’d be no contemplation possible there. This comes, in fact, perilously close to 19th-century thinking, touting of the wilderness as a resource from which one can extract contemplation and therefore redemption. But what are the alternatives? Paving huge swaths of desert valley to make an airport, so that people might more easily race from one glorified anthill to the next? Wallace Stegner had it right (if unnecessarily gender-specific) in his Wilderness Letter, when he limned one of the consequences “if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed”:
And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
I suppose you could add “ableist” to that gender-specificity criticism above, what with the “vertical,” but I have to concur with the rest. If you’re deprived of the ability to spend time singly, separately and individually, whether by circumstance or through fear of solitude, my hunch is your thinking is gonna suffer. In a less-quoted part of the Wilderness letter, Stegner forwards a passage written by Sherwood Anderson some 90 years ago or so:
I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet.
We have too much of shrillness these days. Shrillness, the flip side of snark, is that aspect of speech that develops when a person has forgotten how to doubt himself, has neglected to ground-truth her fervent and absolute convictions. Unlike passion, unlike anger, unlike the justifiable and healthy spirited defense of all the good and threatened things we cherish, shrillness is brittle and ineffective. “Shrill” is these days mainly used as a gender-laden word, a modifier attached to women with opinions. This is unfortunate. It is also ironic. Shrillness is the voice of privilege threatened, and its range and distribution correspond with those of power.
It is killed by contemplation. Solitude extinguishes it.
Very nice! I think you got it right with the communicating part. Are you communicating with the wilderness (or its inhabitants) or are you contemplating it (or in it)? I find I do both, probably more of the latter, but communicating always seems more worthwhile.
Mmm. Good thoughts. I’ve learned, over time, that my surface extroversion covers an essentially introverted core; I may have a larger tolerance for group activity and the presence of others than other introverts, but when my psychic “glass” has been filled, I need time to be alone, or I get seriously irritable. And yet, it’s not that I dislike being with people. Quiet friends, or ones who respect their own need for solitude, are refreshing, but very hard to find. (D. is a keeper because he is both quiet and gives me space, without being antisocial or aloof.)
I was on a ten-week NOLS trip once, and it taught me the limits of my tolerance for being cheek-to-jowl with a small group for weeks on end (about a month was the limit before I had to insist on being given an afternoon alone before I killed someone - even then I could occasionally hear not-so-quiet whispers wondering what I was doing). The other thing that surprised me was when, at the end, we had a 2-day solo experience, where the only contact was a boat going by our stretch of shore once a day to see if we were okay (via a bandanna-flag system). By that point (age 28) I’d spent many trips alone, some of them not only alone in the going solo sense but genuinely away from human contact for a day or two. Some of my tripmates, ages 17-25, had never been out of earshot of another human being at any point in their lives.
I don’t know who was more freaked out: them at the thought of a solo, or me at the thought of people who had never been alone.
In whatever state you decide to be in, I wish you well.
I’m not sure how that affect the alone thing, but it’s a data point.
Heh. On a graph of the quality of conversation on the Y-axis plotted against the total set of things animate and inanimate with which conversations can be had on the X-axis, the Harvard MBA would be at an X-intercept.
I have been completely alone for short periods of time many times (max I think was a few weeks). But it was always in a city between jobs. I am scared of being alone in the wilderness. As long as I can be sure that help is at hand if I make a phone call, solitude doesn’t bother me at all. Just give me some books, or the internet, or some greenery in the yard or in the far horizon to get lost in. On the other hand, if I’m with company I can never withdraw into myself. I have to make small talk and include everyone. You would think I’m a social butterfly who can never be alone.
Interestingly, Hugo has a post up about DOUBT today too. Maybe he is cribbing from you!!
I have only been lonely once in my life, for like 4 hours. It was awful. The experience made me able to understand what others were talking about, because I adore solitude and always hoped to marry an overachiever or workaholic so I would be assured of AT LEAST 6 hours alone a day. In fact whan i did get married (late in life) the biggest threat to the marriage was the LACK of solitude.
But I read a lot. Is it really solitude when you are READING a LOT?