Second-best things

Just think: a life’s work becomes a few weeks of reading. Of course, to really understand anything you have to dwell on it, if not live it, but it’s not something you do in a vacuum—all these ideas are going to be combining and running up against one another in different ways for each person, and somehow we all convince ourselves that things make sense. The more we try to discuss anything really important, the more danger there is that we will settle for cop-outs, superficial treatments and emotional exclamations, because there is something looming behind a great truth, or a great conception—like a shadow that weighs, it’s the possibility that we really have no idea what we are talking about. It’s the suspicion that all we are doing is talking, and that words are no guarantee for shared ideas, shared ideas no guarantee for anything beyond intellectual entertainment of the idea, and even the deeply held idea no guarantee for any approach to the actual truth of things. We’re doing it right now, crying ‘Lord, Lord’ and not knowing the kingdom of Heaven.

So there is here what you might call a presupposition—that experiential knowledge is the really important kind. What then of books and the new school? Yes, it is vicarious experience; yes, it is inspiration to better life, and a sort of context in which to understand experience more richly; yes, it’s at least a better way to go about things than the way we have now—but isn’t it still second-best things?

Every institution’s ideal is that state in which institutions are rendered unnecessary. Not that a person could be naturally perfect and know everything, but that he wouldn’t need anything but natural associations to reach that quality of life the institutions safeguard, or to reach toward it. Is this the hardest lesson for the new school to teach, to point beyond itself? Or does it only seem that way to me, looking to institute it rather than coming up through it?