Dismal housekeeping

Our familiar circle at St John's is various enough, I suppose, students coming and going from year to year--but among the tutors, now, how long can they really go back and forth amongst themselves and feel like that is sufficient--Touchstones, executive seminars, etc, because these ideas need to be heard, these stories told. When the teller is a book, it matters how we read it--and the Book, or the Qu'ran, how much more! Finally, that lingering question about Jonah's experience in the deep, and under the gourd--what about that righteous person, a kind of Meno, in whom no amount of talking and questioning and signs avails to give the understanding, the humor? the Pharisees, the Furies, like the poor, will be with us always?

For almost as long as I've been looking for jobs, the jobs have been getting more elusive, giving some kind of semblance anyway to the fact of the ever-existing and -growing difference between haves and have-nots. Yet that a place like this persists, small as it is and apparently purposefully so, has to mean something, too. Does it have to be so grand and expensive, relying on the rich, who have not only money but taste and a certain philosophic bent? Could it not be adapted to the needs of others starting at a much more basic level of reading and means both? Or is a certain amount of economic well-being prerequisite for the interest in so many unsettling questions?--unsettling up to a point, but your house and bank accounts are still safe from them. Or is the current and recurrent crisis the voice crying out in the wilderness for just these questions to be asked, and that the answers have some real bearing on lived experience its demand? We are so detached here from the world, the protests, repressions, board rooms, wars, and the necessity of working within that whole complex of forces; but we are so nourished here with ideas that when we do become aware of it waiting for us out there, we can't help imagining all the impact our ideas will have, leaping over by thought the rift, the disconnect, of privilege and circumstances. What is the project but to bring these two, ideas and the world, more into harmony? But can it be done unless somewhere each of the extremities is practically unmitigated?

The real questions about economics are all yet unasked--what our needs are and where they shade into wants, as if it were not a need in us to want and desire; how these require our living together, and only up to a certain point can we live together before we no longer feel connected with each other, or positively hostile to the people around us; and why there should be some analogy between the individual and the collective of which the household is primary and gives its name to the dismal science? What conditions we live in now, what these impose on us as far as our ability to think about the origins of our socialization and exchange--for at this point we are so abstracted from the grounds of need and nature, and full of history of things and thought, and so dependent on machinery for our lives' running smoothly which we never installed for ourselves but were more installed into. Even the household is not its owners', even the state is not its citizens', but the weighted time of money in electronic channels flows between and links all these, as if for its own purposes and not ours. What if this is not just rhetoric now but a real impasse--and the analogy of individual to state is rather an opposition and a conflict? How do we work, not from origins to it, but from it and where we are now back to where we can be?