On encyclopedic urges

Four quotes:

"I see. You desire a catalog of all imaginary creatures from the dawn of time until the present day. From the ancient Greeks with their Minotaur to the Norsemen's All-Father." Dr. Flowers smiled, cherishing the absurdity of the request. "From the Fair Folk to the leprechauns. From the mermaids of the deep to the vampires of Serbia — "
— T. Baggins. Soulless. 2013.

“In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.”
— Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.

“Encyclopedias provide factual information, but they, like all texts, are authored, constructed so that subjects become captured. Things can be held under a magnifying glass one entry at a time, forever. Does that permanence give them a sort of truth that they are still existing? How, I wonder, does a writer account for the ways time is written into entries? Surely, definitions shift. Things change, and therefore so do meanings—but on the page, the words are impervious to adaptation, to learning. Maybe I can gain something from that sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was those books I went to so often back then, when I wanted to understand something.”
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 33.

"We as a culture have been content to analyze melancholy and intellectualize depression since we had the words for either, and likely even before this walls were strewn with highbrow marks about some hunter’s lost prey. Not being above that, there is doubtless some desire to utilize academic means or the analytical part of me to understand why my brain seems to want to set itself on fire. However, knowing mere analysis will only lead to further analysis, some dimension had to present itself to disrupt that tendency. Thus, much of the work here has been rewritten, and unwritten in an atypical approach to nonfiction. I don’t think that I believe in nonfiction. Language is as subjective and impossible as depression itself, so I have not attempted to reach anything like objective truth. I've sought a means of transmission, and what remains of it in reception seems beyond my grasp. I have warped old journals and papers and rewritten them because that is depression to me, that is anxiety and addiction and the only true means I’ve found of escape is through, as the old poem goes. So through the documents, the feelings, the intellectualizing and not, the anger, the sorrow, the misery, the piss, the blood, the wasted days and weeks and months and lives in seas of ugly rotting sentiment, or sediment, the only means that seemed to make any sense was total inclusion, and abjection in turn."
— Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. pp. 295 – 296 of PDF

"Ecologists have reoriented their field as a 'crisis discipline,' a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same."
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

If these ideas interest you, you may want to know that I wrote a biography of a man with encyclopedia-writing tendencies. The book is Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

On the unhappiness of the frustrated writer more generally

Elif Batuman (Jul 08, 2026):

"...the part of my own book that I’m working on right now, which is about Selin in the first few years after college...

...why am I still writing about that? But my core belief is that that very avoidance is worthy of examination. I mean, so many people feel that way about their 20s—and at the earliest opportunity they escape it into the dignity of actual adulthood, a stable relationship, etc.; and then that has a way leading into parenthood (“I have way too much to think about now instead of just obsessing over my dumb self”)—and then their kids are in their 20s and then they can’t wait to not think about it anymore. So I want to think about it.

Anyway, for me (and Selin), the defining “problem” of those years was wanting so much to be a novelist, and having no idea how to do it. And that’s just what The Magician and Famesick are about, at least at the beginning: someone in their early 20s who desperately wants to be a writer/ artist, and can’t produce at the level of their desire, and has no clear career path or trajectory, and how bad it feels. And then there is the “relationships and sex” B-plot, which is also depressing, and becomes part of that same “unhappiness” that later they don’t take seriously.

I recently had coffee with one of my best friends from that time in my life, and she said, of our 20s, “Remember how unhappy we thought we were?” As if what we had then was only an idea of unhappiness—not actual unhappiness, which we didn’t know yet. And to an extent that is what it now feels like: like that was such an “innocent time.” But I don’t think this feeling now is more true than that feeling was then.

Why study literature?

In 1987, political philosophy professor Allan Bloom published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. Over a million copies were printed.

The book "hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities," Rachel Donadio wrote in the New York Times in 2007. As she put it, he argued "that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the 'relativism' that had replaced it had 'extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life'; that rock music 'ruins the imagination of young people'; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers." These claims were controversial among academics, who had to contend with a "zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped," and in a context of the relative newness of American literature, which has barely had generations enough to form any canon at all, let alone one formed against a background of social inclusion of race and gender for writers and readers. For Bloom, the zero-sum game had a time constraint, too, since an American's years in college "are civilization's only chance to get to him."

Donadio quoted Mark Lilla, professor of political philosophy and religion, as saying that Americans seek "self-recognition" in literature and tend to find obscure, foreign texts to be "alienating" in comparison. She explained that philosophy professor John Searle remarked on the irony that texts which had been traditionally believed to teach critical thinking were now being criticized themselves. Searle wrote: "The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."

Canon or no canon, acquiring skills of critical inquiry is central to the humanities. Prof T. Kari Kitao wrote in 1999:

“Professionalism may prepare us for a career but liberal arts education prepares us for a resourceful life. In short, liberal arts education liberates us.

I don’t just mean that it makes a knowledgeable person, a person who can recite a Shakespeare sonnet, a person who, watching a ballet, can recognize a grand jeté pas de chat, or a person who can debate medieval thinkers, Boethius vs. Anselm. I mean a certain predisposition that urges a person to be inquisitive, widely interested in a variety of subjects, old and new, those in fashion and out of fashion, those of different cultures, including your own. I mean developing a multilayered personality, a person who is infinitely interesting.”

Then there is the perspective that literature and philosophy does not only teach us how to think, but it also affords us an opportunity to feel deeply, which is another way of understanding our condition and our place in the world.

Lee Siegel wrote in 2013 that "the humanities" as institutionalized in academia can be its own worst enemy. Not only is the classroom setting an ill-equipped place to understand literature that is subversive or charged with dissent, but it is also typically the wrong place to enjoy its beauty. For every great teacher of literature, "there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair." People can read literature without majoring in it, and he suggests that it is probably not true that "large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall." It is a "sentimental fantasy" that the absence of formal education in literature leads to "the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness."

"Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart."

Before the end of the 19th century, he said, literature was "part of the leisure of everyday life," not part of formal education, and "it was only after World War II that the study of literature as a type of wisdom, relevant to actual, contemporary life, put down widespread institutional roots," when returning American soldiers had the opportunity to go to school under the GI Bill and "yearned to make sense of their lives after the carnage they had witnessed and survived." Of the classics, he says: "They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive."

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Context Collapse

"One of the buzzy phrases to describe What’s Wrong With The Internet is 'context collapse,' that something can be easily stripped of its context to gain levels of unintended or non-existent meaning. When I look at this kind of thing, I feel like there’s something analogous going on, a kind of inability to distinguish among situations, in which every conflict or negative interaction needs a judge to decide who is right or not."
"On having a little self-respect," BDM, Substack, Aug 19, 2022

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To rise into the uncompromising energy of spirit is a hard task. Many people—in the sixties particularly—wanted to have the swan life right away during their twenties. I certainly did. I wanted the ascent before I had ever got down on my knees to eat acorns or had agreed to any form of sacrifice. It’s possible we used our parents’ sacrifices instead of our own as fuel. Now so many forms of personal sacrifice—the scholarship in cold rooms, the learning of Latin and Greek, the voluntary renunciation of multiple delights—have since the sixties virtually disappeared. We have a pop culture now, not a culture of swans.
Robert Bly, in Robert Bly and Marion Woodman. The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. pp. 103-104.

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November 19, 2024: It has come to my attention that Boston University, a school of which I'm an alum, has decided to stop admitting PhD students in the humanities and social sciences.

"Public education has been for sale for decades. Cultural theorist Henry Giroux was among the first to see how public universities were being remade as vocational feeders for private markets. Academic departments now have to justify themselves in the language of revenue, “deliverables,” and “learning outcomes.” CSU’s new partnership with OpenAI is the latest turn of that screw.

Others have traced the same drift. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades called it academic capitalism: knowledge refashioned as commodity and students as consumers. In Unmaking the Public University, Christopher Newfield showed how privatization actually impoverishes public universities, turning them into debt-financed shells of themselves. Benjamin Ginsberg chronicled the rise of the “all-administrative campus,” where managerial layers and administrative blight multiplied even as faculty shrink. And Martha Nussbaum warned what’s lost when the humanities—those spaces for imagination and civic reflection—are treated as expendable in a democracy. Together they describe a university that no longer asks what education is for, only what it can earn.

— Ronald Purser, AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education. Current Affairs, 1 Dec 2025.

More

To read: Fobazi Ettarh, Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves, In the Library With the Lead Pipe: An open access, open peer reviewed journal, 10 Jan 2018

Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities: Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year, Anna Bawden and Sally Weale, The Guardian, 14 July 2026

Sources

"Revisiting the Canon Wars," by Rachel Donadio, New York Times, Sept. 16, 2007.
“The Usefulness of Uselessness,” Prof. T. Kari Kitao, 1999. Swarthmore pamphlet.
"Who Ruined the Humanities?" by Lee Siegel, in the Saturday Essay for The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2013.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

When conflicting perspectives are opportunities to learn about oneself and others

Multiple worldviews can be a source of conflict, but they can also be a path to peace.

One approach is to reconcile some of the gaps within oneself. Gish Jen wrote in Tiger Writing:

It is clearer from the book [Philip Kasinitz's Inheriting the City] than from this quote that life in a structural hole [a term coined by sociologist Ron Burt for the location between two cultures] is not an advantage in the way that, say, private school education is an advantage. Still, the larger picture this term describes, including both the ‘structural hole’ in which children of immigrants like myself grow up and the ‘creative selective assimilation’ that results, seems to me on the mark.

People who grow up in multicultural families or neighborhoods may be especially attuned to certain areas of discrepancy in worldviews or mores, but they are not the only ones who experience this potential source of anxiety and this opportunity for growth and insight. Everyone is exposed to uncertainties and "structural gaps" where they are taught contradictory or incompletely explained ideas.

After acknowledging the gaps within oneself, another approach is to reconcile with others. Richard Kearney wrote in Anatheism:

I like to think that the eventual formulation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in March 1998 — permitting Irish citizens to be “British or Irish or both” — was greatly facilitated by the interconfessional and intercultural hospitality practiced by some of Ireland’s finest artists.

Here, a grassroots culture of acceptance and successful intercultural exchange is identified as being developed prior to a formalized political breakthrough. This is inspiration for self-empowerment; change can begin from the bottom-up.

Apparent contradictions can disguise significant opportunities for growth.

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I'll share something from Roy Speckhardt, "How to Be a Good Blasphemer: A Humanist Guide to Courageous Critique" (TheHumanist.com, 26 September 2025)

"People can stand up to those who would suppress dissent and endanger humanist ideals by being a good blasphemer. To be most effective, before they blaspheme, they ask:

• Is this critique aimed at harmful behavior or doctrine, not at vulnerable individuals?
• Is it a genuine exercise in humor, satire, or free speech—not a veiled act of bigotry?
• Does it challenge power structures that use religion to justify oppression?

Blasphemy has the most positive impact when it isn’t targeting people’s faith, but instead, interrogates the ideas underlying many faiths that shield injustice or demand unquestioned obedience."

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Sources:
Gish Jen. Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. p. 111.
Richard Kearney. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. (Kindle edition.)

Part of what makes a history video educational, says historian Shae O. Omonijo, is that you can "check a citation or follow a thread on your own. Real learning needs that architecture, the quiet ability to trace a claim back to where it came from." Otherwise you experience "epistemic alienation."

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Wollstonecraft: The formation of the human heart

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: "Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness." "Innocent" comes from the Latin for non-harmful. Wollstonecraft used it in the sense of ignorant, pointing out that ignorance entails weakness. She defended the right of women to have access to education so that they are not forced into intellectual subservience to men. She believed that "every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason; for if but one being was created with vicious inclinations, that is positively bad, what can save us from atheism? or if we worship a God, is not that God a devil?" This view assumes that God creates humans with the desire to be virtuous so that they may perfect themselves. Education must be a central part of a social program "to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason." But isn't this contradictory? It attempts to take both sides of the question of whether we are shaped by nature or nurture. If God forms our hearts, why should we need education to do it for us? What types of virtues or inclinations, we might ask, must be implanted in us by God (if we are to maintain a theism worth its salt, in Wollstonecraft's opinion) and what types may be acquired through education?

Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Chapter 2: The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, if you become a member of Medium, you can read my essays there.