Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
By Zena Hitz
Princeton University Press, 2020

Readers not already well-disposed to the condescending flapdoodle of philosophy may get their hackles up when reading the very beginning of Zena Hitz’ Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, since her opening autobiographical sketch paints a portrait of an idiosyncratic intellectual upbringing against a backdrop of seeking, which tends to imply some one discreet thing that will eventually be revealed - discovered - to be the object of that seeking, the retroactive validation of it, bound to that seeking by what Hitz refers to as “invisible but powerful threads.” This adds a teleological element to life that life does not, in fact, possess and the illusion of which is the basis for all philosophy and all religion. The prospect of being schooled on the purpose of life for 200 pages, even by a writer as immediately engaging as Hitz, is fairly dreary. 

Particularly if it comes larded with patronizing assumptions: Hitz is an academic, a teacher at the great St. John’s College in Maryland, and as her book’s Prologue makes clear, she has a long history in academia - long and not exactly always euphoric:

In exchange for my comfortable salary, excellent benefits, and ample control over my work schedule, I delivered preprocessed nuggets of knowledge in front of a crowd and doled out above-average grades upon their absorption. The teaching that formed the central activity of my professional life seemed nothing like the lively and collaborative pursuit of ideas that had enchanted me as a student.

The fact that the author might be disillusioned with the mental wasteland of academia is encouraging (although it’s worth pointing out that not all college teachers degenerate into the kind of canting automaton she describes above), but the encouragement pales every time she, making her livelihood from an intellectual life and now writing a book about the pleasures of intellectual life, implies that authenticity must be free of intellectualism, that “full, ordinary human life” is composed of, for instance, “work, service, friendship; leisured time in nature; conflict, frustration, and suffering; swimming, crafts, singing in the choir, and radiant, lovingly prepared liturgical celebrations” - without a hint of book-larnin’.

But introductions are notoriously tricky, and Lost in Thought, thankfully, is free of condescension - and it’s full of wonder, full of the joyful smiles of somebody who’s been saved, or saved herself, from empty toils of ledger-sheet learning. In her good-natured way, Hitz chastises the increasing commodification of intellectual endeavor. Real learning, she writes, is “hidden” learning, the kind that “at bottom must be withdrawn from the pressure to produce economic, social, or political outcomes,” and in its own discursive way, her book seeks to address the two major questions that attend such a claim: can such disembodied learning actually be done, and is it of any use? Some delightful reflections flow from pursuing these questions, and they often come back to Hitz’ contention that there’s an inherently private element to what she’s describing:

Learning is a profession, as I found; it is a way of achieving money and status and of supporting the educational machinery already in place. But it begins in hiding: in the inward thoughts of children and adults, in the quiet life of bookworms, in the secret glances at the morning sky on the way to work, or the casual study of birds from the deck chair.

“What good is intellectual life?” is Lost in Thought’s essential question. And the answers will buck up the courage of anybody who’s been driven by the 24-hour news cycle to wonder if human life is just a tinny recording of travesties on infinite loop:

What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective, to remind oneself of one’s human heritage. 

This is a book to savor in your quietest reading nook. Which is very much the point.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.