Lost in Thought
Review by Jesse Hake
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Princeton, 2020.
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz is bold and counter-cultural. It invites and inspires without hesitating to confront comfortable habits and to undermine assumptions on both sides of our political aisle. It is a book that defies time: rooted and ancient while also being radically relevant and contemporary. In February of 2021, when MC Hammer raved about the book in a series of social media posts, Hitz jumped into the thread, resulting in the two of them scheduling a live chat about her book. While Hitz writes that “I follow a tradition originating with Plato and Aristotle that distinguishes types of desire by their final end” (31), she also has candid criticisms of Aristotle’s aristocratic leisure: “as if truth could not be tangled up with moral ugliness” (36-73, 45). While insisting that the intellectual life is living and available to everyone, she also warns about “contemporary parallels to the voluntary slavery of Plato’s law courts” as even “the ‘masters’ of our servant class have no leisure” (39-40).
Throughout her book, Hitz includes both traditional and contemporary connections and illustrations. Consider her exemplars from “Images of Inwardness” in chapter 1 “A Refuge from the World” (59-71): the Virgin Mary, Albert Einstein, André Weil (brother to the philosopher Simone Weil, André was a mathematician who continued his work in prison), Antonio Gramsci (a founding member of the Italian Communist Party who died in prison under Benito Mussolini), and Malcolm X. She notes near the end of this list that “prison has proven to be fertile ground for many intellectual endeavors” (68). These models show rather than tell us how an interior life can overcome the many tyrannies of our contemporary world: consumption, entertainment, and political action. By placing Mary with Malcolm X, Hitz challenges us to reevaluate the meaning of the intellectual virtues associated with Mary by so many church fathers:
According to a tradition first attested by the ancient Bible commentator Origen (Homilies on Luke 6.7), Mary was learned in the Hebrew scriptures; she had studied the law and meditated daily on the prophets. …Mary's love of study is held up by the church fathers as a model for Christian believers. Ambrose includes ‘studious in reading’ in a catalog of her virtues. …Her wisdom and learning explain the subtlety and caution with which she responds to the angel’s announcement in the Gospel of Luke by asking, ‘How can this be?’ (Luke 1:34). The fourth-century church father Ambrose praises her response—neither refusing belief, like Zechariah a few verses earlier, nor intimidated into hasty agreement by fear of her angelic visitor (Commentary on Luke). (60-61)
Mary here is no less humble for being fully in command of her answers. She also sounds like someone who would sing of her God who has “pulled dynasts down from thrones and exalted the humble, …filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” This is a Mary who stands naturally beside the other “Images of Inwardness” that Hitz offers, including the three from within their prison cells. Such inwardness, however, is not isolated or disconnected from the rest of the world. Here Hitz describes her own experience as she took up a specifically Christian vision for herself after growing up in a Jewish home with a great love of learning but no religious practice:
The tensions in me seemed to stretch out to the bounds of the world and to pull at sharp hooks anchored in the depths of my inner life. I began to see that human suffering was not limited to special events and that it could not be ended by reversing particular policies. There was no need to wait for disasters to strike: they were omnipresent, as was responsibility for them. Suffering was a cosmic force, an ever-present reality, Christ crucified at the heart of the world and suffusing it up to the edges. I tried to stop shifting the suffering of others out of view, as had been my constant habit. I began to seek it out, to force myself into regular contact with it. (15)
In the face of history’s hardships, contemplatives have typically been advocates of the present moment as our only contact point with the life of God. On the one hand, this highlights the fragility of our relationship to time. For example, C.S. Lewis writes:
A single second of lived time contains more than can be recorded. ...The past ...in its reality, was a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination. By far the greater part of this teeming reality escaped human consciousness almost as soon as it occurred. None of us could at this moment give anything like a full account of his own life for the last twenty-four hours. We have already forgotten; even if we remembered, we have not time. The new moments are upon us. At every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of ‘history’ falls off the world into total oblivion.
While we cannot keep the past in hand, the present moment is still a true contact point with the “eternal now” of God as Lewis goes on to note:
We are allowed, indeed compelled, to read [history] sentence by sentence, and every sentence is labeled Now. ...I mean the real or primary history which meets each of us moment by moment in his own experience. It is very limited, but it is the pure, unedited, unexpurgated text, straight from the Author's hand. We believe that those who seek will find comment sufficient whereby to understand it in such degree as they need; and that therefore God is every moment ‘revealed in history’ that is, in what McDonald called ‘the holy present’. Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?
With this focus on our personal experience in each present moment, contemplatives have no need to make sense of history as a whole and on its own terms. It need not be either a story of overall progress or overall regress. David Bentley Hart writes:
There is no such thing as a science of history, in the sense of some theory or experimental regimen that could reduce the flow of human events to a set of invariable laws—economic, social, political, anthropological, or whatever. …Historical eventuality is a vast, tumultuous, uncharted river carrying all our fragile vessels along—hazardous, scarcely navigable, and with unanticipated bends always just ahead.
It is hard to imagine living in these times without striving to either conserve some threatened past or enact a bold future with solutions that are long overdue. We think in terms of either conservatism or progressivism so instinctively, but this book by Hitz encourages us not to think that we must make a choice. In the light of regular and leisurely contemplation of eternity, our need to preserve the past and to work for the future both find perspective and guidance. Hitz claims that “learning matters for its own sake, because human beings are essentially knowers, or lovers, or both” (112), and she insists that if contemplative life “is not left to rest in its splendid uselessness, it will never bear its practical fruit” (190). At the risk of some alarmism myself, this brilliant case by Hitz for leisure and thought seems to be needed more and more with each passing day.
Jesse Hake is the Director of ClassicalU. He has been an upper-school humanities educator. Most recently before ClassicalU, he was Principal for seven years at Logos Academy, a classical school in downtown York, PA. Jesse leads the course production efforts at ClassicalU where he helps recruit talented teacher-trainers and professors, and arranges for all aspects of the course design, recording, as well as hosting presenters onsite in Camp Hill, PA.