Lost in Thought - A Review

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For all the criticism that academic pursuits get for putting someone in “an ivory tower” there is an awful lot of rat race that goes on.

When I would comment on the chaos in our department or a major corporation, mostly due to the ineptitude of a former boss, I would frequently be told “that’s the nature of the business, this isn’t like a university.”

The thing is, if it ever was such a thing, universities are no longer places of quiet rest and contemplation. The pressure to publish and present or miss promotions and tenure is real for many young faculty. More experienced faculty often are still trying to find elbow room for their ideas, publishing opportunities, and respect. To read the stories of the life of C. S. Lewis and his own accounts in That Hideous Strength, I think the halcyon days of a peaceful, irenic university faculty life are more urban legend than real history.

What, then, is the value of the intellectual life? Is it really just another hyper-competitive sphere of life, without any different potential than the rest of the corporate grind?

In Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz explores the possibility that the intellectual life has potential for enjoyment on its own.

This is the sort of book that is good for young academics wondering if the mountain is worth climbing or for older faculty wondering what joy there can be in a community that is often polite in the midst of savagery.

What Hitz finds is that, while academia is not for everyone, there is a joy in the process of learning for its own sake. She argues that learning has inherent value. It is worth pursuing even if it does not result in greater riches and measurable wealth. It does, however, require the space of time and energy that come from leisure—exactly the reason why it is so hard to justify learning for its own sake in our harried and exhausted culture.

Even for those outside of the ivy shrouded walls of academia there is value in intellectual pursuits. They provide a refuge in a hostile world as we touch the minds of many who have gone before and lived fuller lives. Hitz explores ways that being a bookish sort of person can lead to relief and blessing in the midst of struggle and difficulty.

Learning, however, must be pursued for its own sake to have the full effect. If the point of learning becomes to climb a social ladder, to be cutting edge, or to win approval, then it is perverted and many of its benefits are reduced. She writes, “Intellectual life is artisanal toast for the mind.” The idea being that it must be enjoyed to be worth the cost.

More significantly, learning must not be pursued for the sake of politics. In that case, learning becomes about indoctrination. This is true whether the guiding lights of the institution lean right or left. Real learning is meaningful when it wrestles with the thorny thoughts of different perspectives to come out the other side with transformative power.

This is a book that is inspiring for those outside of academia who are inclined to continue learning and growing but struggle with the value of those efforts—heaven knows that has been my fate for several years. Lost in Thought provides reassurance that reading, writing, and seeking to grow intellectually have a purpose even if those efforts are not rewarded with academic titles, publishing contracts, sabbaticals, and the other trappings of the university.

The Courage to Be Happy

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Not too long ago, in a quest to answer a question about lyrics in a Ben Rector song or find the end of the internet—whichever came first—I stumbled across a review of Rector’s latest album. The gist of the review was, His music seems pretty happy, which is surprising given the state of the world.

That sentiment is pretty common in popular culture. The review is in a relatively minor website, by no means a strong editorial force or significant cultural shaper. However, I think that is what a lot of people are thinking.

“How can I be happy when there is so much wrong with the world?”

There is war in Ukraine, abject poverty is horrible, it feels like the culture has gone crazy, my email inbox fills up faster than I can deal with it. The deficit is huge, there are issues with the environment, inflation is insane, the stock market it down.

Seriously, why can anyone be happy?

The Erasure of Distance

This sentiment of warranted unhappiness because of distant problems is a peculiarly modern issue.

One of the blessings of modern telecommunication is that it erases distance.

I can call someone on the other side of the world in a second and have a clear communication with them. I can also talk to the person sitting in the cube next to me using the same tool. In fact, I can hold a teleconference and have a discussion with half a dozen people that are thousands of miles away. Grandparents can speak to their grandchildren live, with video, and even watch in real time distant family events like baptisms, plays, birthdays, etc. This would seem miraculous just a few decades ago.

But the erasure of distance is also one of the curses of modernity.

Every problem in the world is now an immediate concern. I can get live pictures of people bleeding out in the street in Ukraine. I can see children starving to death on another continent. Flooding a world away pops up in my news feed with a higher frequency and realism than the family next door who just got a cancer diagnosis.

There is no separation. There is no local community. Every global problem is blasted into my pocket begging me to do something about it.

I don’t believe there is any more evil in the world than there was a hundred years ago. However, we can be much more aware of all sorts of evil, with vivid depictions, and demands for immediate action.

The Feeling of Futility

The demand for action is what makes the experience the most miserable.

When there is a car crash and we are the first on the scene we can provide first aid, call the ambulance, and hold someone’s hand as they weep over their lost child.

When there is a flood in the next county over, we can go and muck out someone’s living room, provide a bed for a neighbor, or get meals ready for disaster relief workers.

Truly local problems provide real ways that we can do something. We can take a casserole to the family who just lost a loved one or whose matriarch had surgery. There is something meaningful.

All we can do when we see the horrors of the world while scrolling through our phones is send a small donation, repost something to “raise awareness,” and feel a little bad by proxy.

The inability to really fix the big problems of the world leads to a feeling of futility.

The feeling of futility can lead to a sense of despair, which causes people to wonder why anyone can be happy when there is so much misery in the world.

The Courage to Be Happy

It takes courage to be happy in the face of the constant deluge of negative information we receive. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the motto of all forms of news media. We have to find ways of coping with the overwhelming flood of information.

One way of responding to persistent negativity is what comedian Bill Bailey humorously demonstrates through the “Not Too Bad” approach, with the additional caveat, “All Things Considered.” As he describes it, this is the process of dialing down expectations to a reasonable level so that things are really not as bad as they could be.

Frankly, that’s the way I generally approach the issue. First, I try to limit my consumption of bad news. Second, I dial down expectations and try to remember that things aren’t really as bad as they could be. Living in the Midwest, I am frequently reminded that I am not alone in my approach.

But that’s not a particularly good way to live life. This sort of pessimism leaves one consistently expecting the other shoe to drop. It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Things will probably be worse in a few weeks, so enjoy the moderate misery of the day.

It takes courage to be happy. It takes internal strength to shut off the flood of sadness from the world and say “Thank you” to the God of the universe who created everything from nothing, instilled the created order with wonder, and gives us breath every single moment. It takes stubborn, persistent, relentless effort to remember that things are not only “not too bad,” but that they are, really, pretty darn good most of the time.

Sometimes its good to take a moment to count your blessings, push off the negativity, and take a moment just to be grateful for the inherent goodness of the world. Given my own sin and depravity, things are much better than they ought to be. Most of the time, if I’m really honest, things are pretty darn good.

The Satisfaction of Good Stories

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I recently took an entire week off work. It was mainly to finish my book for B&H Academic, tentatively called From Futility to Hope: A Theology for Creation Care. I also tried to unravel the knots of stress and encroaching burnout I was feeling from months of busy work, teaching Sunday School, trying to finish the book, with the only break since the New Year having been invested in the not-so-restful travel to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

To set the mood for what I hoped would be a creative and productive week of editing, I kicked the week off by reading a completely fluffy book: Lee Child’s first novel, Reacher: Killing Floor. It was a recommendation from a friend. It sounded interesting because I was looking for some relatively mindless reading that I could consume without too much effort.

Reacher met the mark. It was largely predictable and cliché. It was filled with the nearly-super hero who went to “the Point,” which is what Naval Academy graduates call their second choice. There were cultural inconsistencies, a really odd career timeline for Reacher (which Child acknowledges), and attractive women who were suddenly attracted to the rugged protagonist. Aside from the lack of sharks, the book is prime beach reading.

The story had few redeeming qualities, other than being quite engaging and thoroughly entertaining.

Sneaky Serious Content

The introduction, however, was a sneak attack on the person looking for brain candy. There are some nuggets worth considering that Childs tossed into his introduction, added fifteen years after the book was first published.

When mulling the genre of this novel, Childs assesses why his books were widely popular. It was because he was writing for the audience, but he wasn’t writing down to the audience, which results in cheesy, overdone fiction. Instead, he notes, “Along the way, I discovered I was the audience.” He quotes Chesterton on Dickens, “Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.” Thus, he’s writing lowbrow fiction in exactly the fashion he would like to receive it.

There’s a secret there, I think. C. S. Lewis, in his essay, On Three Ways of Writing for Children, describes (1) writing down to children, (2) writing for particular children, and (3) “writing a children’s story because a children’s story is the best art-form for something you have to say.” Lewis affirms the second and participates in the third way of writing to children. The first he describes as being “generally a bad way,” which is pretty severe criticism in the vernacular of the British Isles.

Childs’ assessment is fair. It is obvious in Reacher that the writer is enjoying the little plot twists too coincidental to be believable, the overdone perfection of the main character’s ability and perceptions, and inevitability that the hero will ride off into the sunset to his next adventure.

The book—and I presume the series––rely on Reacher as the prime mover and only focus for the story. There isn’t so much a plot as performance art by the ex-Army MP. Childs admits that storyline and plot are secondary elements for his writing: “Character is king. . . . So, my lead character to carry the whole weight.” And he does.

A Western Connection

The result is a fairy story for adult males. Childs claims to have modeled it after stories of knights errant. I tend to agree with other readers who, as Childs notes, “classify the series as a set of modern-day Westerns.” Though he does not fully agree, he notes this Western-Reacher connection “is convincing in terms of feel and structure.” Childs claims not to be a fan of Westerns, but he has noted that “Westerns too have strong roots in the medieval knight-errant sagas.”

I read the introduction after I read the rest of the book—remember, I was trying to veg out. But I had already pegged this is a Louis L’Amour (Childs references Zane Grey) with more sex and more graphic descriptions of violence. Childs is on the right track here.

This is a knight-errant story. It is a modern Western. It is exactly what many readers want to read.

The Reacher Series has been successful because it provides a good guy––without doubt about his moral compass––who is trying to unself-consciously punch the big guy in the face and set wrongs to right. This is a book about a character who knows which way he is headed and won’t bend to polls or shifts in public opinion.

The Power of Stories

So many contemporary stories–-movies and books––fall short because, to quote Harry Flugelman from The Three Amigos, they “strayed from the formula, and [they] paid the price.”

This is why the recent sequel to Top Gun has had ridiculous box office success and staying power. Maverick is predictable, it is cliché, and it is thoroughly enjoyable. The same is true of Louis L’Amour and the Lee Childs novels.

What do the people want? They want someone to look up to who isn’t really just a villain in disguise. They want to be treated as if goodness, honesty, and self-confidence are admirable traits. They want the hero to win and the bad guy to lose, but not just on a technicality.

The fact that people want that—even people who think the metanarrative of Scripture is a new Facebook feature––is an indication of the eternity that is written on the hearts of all humans. (cf. Eccl 3:11) It can be a foothold for the gospel, if we are willing to tell the old, old story well.

That desire for wrong to be set right and for a hero who is a good guy can point straight to the greatest story ever told. I think that is what makes Reacher: Killing Floor such an engaging story. And that makes me question how we Christians are telling stories and telling the story.

Maybe telling the great story of Scripture is more powerful than reasoning people to Christ. And we may find it helps that our great hero story also happens to be true.