Looking at the city

George Scialabba on the New York Intellectuals (from What Are Intellectuals Good For – which, sadly, seems to be out of print):

Their primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and [they] habitually, even if often implicitly, employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics...They were generalists: they drew, from a generally shared body of culture, principles of general applicability and applied them to facts generally available. Their "specialty" lay  not in unearthing generally unavailable facts but in penetrating especially deeply into the shared culture, in grasping and articulating its contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and force.

Paul J. Griffiths, distinguishing intellectuals from dilettantes ("Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual,“in First Things, a few years ago):

Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long. You’ll read many things and (perhaps) write many, but you’ll read and write about disparate topics, and once you’ve read for a while about something, and perhaps written about it, you’ll move on to something else. Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze (on which see below), and so their intellectual life coruscates, sparking here and there like a firefly on the porch, but illuminating nothing for long...I’d like to warn you against this tendency [because] the extent to which you embrace dilettantism is just the extent to which you won’t do serious intellectual work.

C.S. Lewis

Ignazio Silone

Irving Howe

Wendell Berry

Michael Walzer

Wilson Carey McWilliams

George Scialabba

The writers who do the kind of writing I want to be able to do aren’t necessarily the authors I most enjoy reading (although there’s considerable overlap there) or those I think are the greatest (that would be a much more diverse list – demographically, thematically, and above all temporally). These are writers whose works happen to have hit me at just the right time and who do things with words in a way that has left me wanting to be apprenticed to them. Perhaps there could have been others, but for me it has been them. (This is a running list: there may be some who belong here whom I haven’t thought of in a while, and I may add them later; I haven’t included anyone of my own generation; I might add some peers later, too.)

What do they have in common? (Some are living and some are dead, but I’ll use the present tense.)

1. They write essays and essayistic books. (Those on the list who also write novels or poetry are here for the sake of their essays.)

2. They are all members of or sympathizers with ethical socialist or egalitarian-communitarian traditions of political thought.

3. Some hold academic positions and some not, but none are traditional academic specialists. Yet they’re not quite generalists or dilettantes either: each has a set of themes or problems that he returns to persistently. (Think of Silone’s remark: “I should gladly spend my life writing and rewriting the same book: the single book that every writer has within him that is the image of his soul and of which his published works are more or less rough fragments.” Every writer? I’m not sure. These writers? Yes.)

4. Some are religious and some are ambiguous or ambivalent about religion, but none is resolutely and narrowly secular.

5. They all write in a certain way. I know it when I see it, but find it difficult to describe. It is, among other things, unburdened, frank, subtle, self-questioning, principled without being didactic, at times personal but never self-indulgent, neither resting easy with their own answers to the questions at stake nor dodging the risks of answering as best they can.

The congruence of those features – the way they accord with one another – is probably what attracts me to these writers.

I used to think of “public life” (the life we share with neighbors and strangers, in public space) as the basic concept in the study of politics. I now think a better concept is “common life.”

Politics does not equal publicity: it depends also on what we encounter in silence and in solitude.

Wendell Berry writes, in the second of his 1979 Sabbath poems:

Resurrection
Is in the way each maple leaf
Commemorates its kind, by connection

Outreaching understanding. What rises
Rises into comprehension
And beyond.

This seems to me like the place to begin thinking about our common life: that our most important connections are mysteries, matters to be approached with reverence and without undue claims to comprehension.

Asking about the nature of our connections—pushing past what’s historically situated or culturally specific, moving toward what’s simply true—does not lead us to secure, transparent knowledge. But it leads somewhere. I want to learn how to speak and write about that “somewhere.”

Here’s Berry again, from another Sabbath poem (with some elisions):

I would not have been 
an essayist except that I 
have been bewildered and afraid