The long weekend that today concludes Fall Break at Baylor has brought me a riotous, bacchanal consumption of books. Wild-eyed and frenzied have I been in feasting my eyes on words, countless thousands of them, as I have greedily clutched at and devoured everything at hand. P.G. Wodehouse’s Money for Nothing, Walker Percy’s Lancelot, Alasdair MacIntyre’s Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, two reviews of Wodehouse by Bottum and by Evans, and an essay by my colleague Phil Donnelly on the Miltonic and Dantean features of Wendell Berry’s Remembering have all, in turn, been swept up and consumed indulgently.
I believe they have been life giving as well, inspiriting a mind grown too stiff through insufficient use of the right sort. It is not as if I do nothing day-in and day-out. My days are full of a host of activities that call for discernment and judgment, and for thoughtful engagement and artful response. Yet for the most part, I have too much found myself dependent on the accrued intellectual and spiritual capital of bygone days, with scant opportunity to develop new stores.
These past few days, then, have provided occasion to restore my mind by giving it new material on which to work. What will be the results of drinking in Donnelly, Evans, Bottum, MacIntyre, Percy, and Wodehouse? Not stupor, I should like to think, but clarity and earnestness.
The luxury of the past few days as much as anything comes from a rare chance at solitude and quiet. Michele and Zachary left on Thursday for Birmingham, and with most of the college emptied out as well and classes cancelled on Friday, I have been largely alone, though all too present with myself.
Discomfited, distrait–this is the result of my reading. I feel out-of-place, off-kilter, at odds with the world. I am neither fish nor fowl, but some misshapen offspring not suited well for life in air or water. I occupy a lifeboat, perhaps, adrift in the wide ocean and at the mercy of the winds, able neither to swim freely in the currents nor soar on high in the heavens.
Life in Brooks College presents an unparalleled prospect of outfitting a better lifeboat for the heavy seas we face, and not only for me and mine, but for all the college members. I wonder if they have any inkling? Do they know the lavish gift they have been given? Can they see the need for, and the blessings of, community, discipline, prayer, study, and virtue, together with the simple, perfect joys of fun, leisure, and re-creation?
Glimmers of glory are still glory, even from a storm-tossed barque at the unpropitious outset of the third millennium. And so, however dark the skies grow, to whatever extent of obfuscation of plain eternal truth our age tends, wherever mercilessly the devils of the passing age prod and tempt us, we have a well-built craft and, better still, a good master of the seas and skies to guide our vessel home to port, if we but allow it.
