Lost in Thought

In 'an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for an escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others?' The author answers her own question in this important book in which she reminds us that the humanities are about humanity, and essentially about cultivating an inner life; in the universities, this should be about learning for its own sake, and transmitting the corresponding questing habits of mind and heart that broaden and deepen our humanity and understanding. This requires leisure and time for contemplation to create an inward space for refinement of thinking and perception. The danger is that these values are submerged by ambition and instrumentality where the intrinsic is forgotten. I was struck by the author's observations about leisure, where we 'stop counting the minutes towards the goal, because the goal is precisely what we are doing' – for instance walking in nature.

In the chapter on the intellectual life as a refuge from the world, the author illustrates her thesis with reference to people such as Augustine, Einstein, Goethe, William and Caroline Herschel, Simone Weil, Malcolm X, St John of the Cross and the ornithologist John Baker, who wrote that 'the hardest thing of all is to see what is really there.' These people all developed an excellence of perception that takes time and a certain ascetic discipline to mature as well as cultivation of what she calls the virtue of seriousness. The final main chapter discusses the uses of uselessness, beginning with a splendid quotation from Seneca and reminding readers that 'the

social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human' (p. 188) rather than matters of money, social success and politics.

Of particular interest to Network readers is a section on 'opinionised universities' where the author writes that: 'if intellectual life essentially involves a reaching out past the surface, questioning of appearances, a longing for more than is evident, then it has next to nothing to do with what is commonly called "knowledge"– the absorption of correct opinions. And yet correct opinions are what our contemporary intellectual institutions traffic in: correct opinions about literature, or history, or science, or mathematics.' (p. 192) Later, she writes that 'education seeks primarily social and political results rather than the cultivation of free, thoughtful human beings.' She continues: 'Opinions rarely change…opinions are fixed in place by a network of socially directed impulses of fear and ambition. We change our minds when we change our clique, our social circle. At the level of opinion, our reasoning powers operate backwards to justify predetermined choices. Our social world is our intellectual comfort zone.' Such peer pressures are a fundamental challenge to an independent intellectual and spiritual life, but our very humanity depends on cultivating inwardness, inner space and freedom - which this book so eloquently upholds.