I was looking at my bookshelves this morning. I purge them from time to time, but I still have at least 500 books, many of which I have not read [this is off topic, but some are what I call “eternity” books, by which I mean that I would read them if time were endless, but which I can’t justify reading now, when I have so many projects that–rightly or wrongly–I feel warrant my attention and execution].
What I was thinking is that all of them are portals, gateways, to something else. They have no meaning in themselves, except in terms of what they do to you, to how you think, how you feel, how you interact with OUT THERE. Books are not and should not be an end to themselves. They are meant to support action, doing, daring, feeling, discovering, failing, succeeding.
I think the failure to understand this is perhaps one of the root failures of our intelligentsia. Far better the carpenter who reads to relax than the academic who does nothing else. The latter quite literally sucks intelligence out of the room, since he has abandoned the project of improving the world, outside of the politics he attaches to himself as an ersatz conscience.
When you look at “writers” like Jacques Derrida, the text is literally and specifically made the end. He reveled in his very uselessness.
A true Liberal Arts curriculum would support businessmen, politicians, and manual laborers in guiding our nation into the future. What we have is systematic deception, intellectual corruption, and systematic failures in synchrony between thought and action.
I was dreaming yesterday of a time ten years from now, or so, when thousands of men and women would converge somewhere to build a literal old style stone cathedral to Goodness, to a renewed sense of national–global–identity, purpose, and wholeness (which again in my iteration includes countless room for individual expression). We would have to relearn stonemasonry. We could use doctors and lawyers, and academics. It would be a grand adventure.
I am likely ridiculous, but so too was the person who dreamt up Notre Dame. Castles in the mind become castles in the sky become roofs and steeples that shelter one from the rain.