My favorite contemporary author, Joseph Epstein, writes the following in my new book In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage. The title of the essay is "Why Are Academics So Unhappy?":
“Universities attract people who are good at school. Being good at school takes a real enough but very small talent. As the philosopher Robert Nozick once pointed out, all those A’s earned through their young lives encourage such people to persist in school: to stick around, get more A’s and more degrees, sign on for teaching jobs.”
He goes on to explain how dreams of a life of cultivated leisure collapse as young university profs realize that their work "couldn't be of the least possible interest to anyone but the hacks" of their respective professional organizations.
With that, I think I'll go eke out a few more lines about Thomistic metaphysics. I think next I'll read his essay "The Torture of Writer's Block".
No comments:
Post a Comment