If this email forwarded to you, sign up to receive weekly letters for the examined intellectual life.

All previous editions of The Letter are available on our website.

— Written by San Choudhury^*

  I’ve thought long and hard about the kind of life I should be living if I were to be a ‘good’ scholar. 

As scholars, we already have some idea of what we want to do in and with our lives. We wish to read, write, think, ask questions, and contribute to humanity’s knowledge by addressing the questions our curious selves beg us to ask. More so now, as we become ‘multi-faceted baddies’, as the internet has labelled us, we also want to do things that are not strictly the above. Slowly, we are beginning to expect that the scholar who is living a good life should ideally be able to pursue things beyond their scholarship. In my own case, that means creating content on Instagram, writing this newsletter, hosting workshops, and organising community events. Not that I’m claiming to be living the good scholar’s life. These are simply examples of things I want to pursue alongside my scholarship. 

*P.S. There was something

But these are only the things that we wish, or think, we should do as good scholars. What I am more bothered by is a desire to find out what life in general, the ordinary day-to-day of it, might look like for this good scholar who wishes to do all these things. That is to say: what does it mean to live a well-balanced scholarly life? 

The reason I find myself asking this question is because, admittedly, sometimes I am unable to conduct my life in a manner that makes doing these things possible. I want to devote my time and energy to these activities; I want to direct my attention towards them. Yet, many times, I can’t – or maybe I don’t. In this sense, I feel a creeping discrepancy between what I believe I want to do vs. what I actually end up doing. I know, or at least think I know, what a good scholar’s life looks like. Where I lack is being able to practice this good scholar’s life in the course of my daily life. 

My most recent encounter with a scholar I deemed to be living the good life is, interestingly, a fictional one: Herman Hesse’s scholars living in Castalia in The Glass Bead Game. 

Castalia is a fictional province devoted almost entirely to scholarship and knowledge. Despite Hesse’s novel being set in the future, Castilian life is analogue. Its scholars inhabit campuses surrounded by nature and work in well-funded physical libraries, reading books and manuscripts, and largely writing things by hand. Freed from funding-related concerns, there is little pressure to constantly perform or produce. Scholars are generally free to study what they wish, committing themselves to whichever branch of study calls to them. 

However, a key part of their scholarly becoming also includes meditation. They are trained to meditate, spending hours learning the art of introspection. In fact, the higher one goes in the Castalian order, the more the importance of meditation is impressed upon the scholar. For the intellectual elite of Castalia, as they journey towards increasingly focused and rigorous intellectual development, meditation serves as a way of perceiving the underlying unity of the universe. 

In this world, the scholar engages in extremely demanding and intense mental work but is also encouraged, and indeed taught, to practise meditation as a means of gaining actual, direct experience. Alongside sorting and analysing knowledge, they practise stillness and introspection. An average day in the Castalian scholar's life possibly looks like this: long stretches spent reading and writing, periods of intense intellectual concentration interspersed with meditation, walking, conversation and contemplation. To me, this sounds like the life of a good scholar.  

  Compare this with an average day in the life of a twenty-first century scholar. We wake up and reach for our phones. If we’re lucky, there will be no emails waiting to throw our days off completely. We check one notification and then another and, before we have even begun reading, writing, thinking or any other scholarly practice, we have already begun the day distracted. We wake up wanting to be, and ready to be, distracted. 

When – some days it’s an ‘if’ – we finally feel ready to begin our scholarly work, we often do so in this same state: constantly checking for this and that. I sometimes check three or four email inboxes as soon as I flip my laptop open. On occasions when I know I’m supposed to hear back from reviewers, co-authors, or collaborators, I compulsively check my email every chance I get. During the breaks I take after every sixty- or ninety-minute work block, I sometimes find myself, almost unconsciously, on my Instagram feed or the Puppy101 sub-reddit or some other page on the internet. Sometimes, it’s all of them, one after the other in rapid succession.