From the Notebooks
From 2002:
It dawned on me today that I haven't gotten engrossed in a book in quite awhile, possibly as long as five years. In the past, there were books that grabbed me, fired my imagination and intellectual motivation. They threw so much good stuff at me that I felt like a machine gun target–and loved every minute of it though at points I felt like my head would explode.
It seems there were many such books, one or two a year: Kirk's The Conservative Mind and Enemies of the Permanent Things, Voegelin's Science Politics and Gnosticism, the Gilson Reader and his Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages and God and Philosophy and The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Pieper's Guide to Thomas Aquinas, Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and Mystics and Zen Masters, Ware's The Orthodox Way, Meyendorff's St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, Belloc's Europe and the Faith, Oake's Pattern of Redemption (biography of von Balthasar), Lewis' Mere Christianity, Jaeger's Early Christianity and the Greek Paideia, Deane's The Social and Political Ideas of St. Augustine. There are others as well (books by Muggeridge, for instance, and a few fictional books like Percy's The Moviegoer and stories by, and articles about, Flannery O'Connor).
I've tried to go back and re-claim that exciting experience. But Kirk's books haven't been able to re-enact it for me; I put his Age of Eliot down after a hundred pages or so. Neither has Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers suffering a similar fate as Kirk's Eliot, though I am going to try his brief book Methodical Realism.
I don't know why, but I have a couple of ideas. (1) I don't read as much as I used to. I used to spend 90% of my free time reading, 10% writing. Now, that's reversed, if the 90% of writing time includes time working on Gilbert! I'd love to push those percentages to the 50-50 mark. (2) Perhaps I know a lot more than I used to, with the result that I'm less easily impressed. The partial listing set forth above of books that overwhelmed me would, by themselves, take the thunder out of many other insights, plus I've read a ton of other things on top of them–such as over a dozen books by Chesterton, the bulk of the Voegelin corpus, many other Belloc books, etc. and page-full etc., plus hundreds of articles. I suspect this is the reason I picked up Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, and was disappointed at myself: I just didn't enjoy it that much and I'm pretty sure it's my fault, though I'm not sure how I could have changed the result. (3) I have less time for serious reading. This is related to the 10% problem above. What exacerbates it, is that the 10% is pre-bedtime reading, odd ten-minute blocks here and there, reading during breakfast or dinner. I suspect that I never would have been absorbed by Gilson's works if I had been trying to read them over breakfast with five kids talking at me. (4) Intellectual laziness. (5) Bad luck–the books I've been trying just aren't that great. (6) Combination of some or all of the above.
Related links:
Perhaps the best primer on medieval metaphysics available. Short, easy-to-read, packed:
