By David Willey, Consultant
When I spin around from my desk at the end of a writing session, one of the first things that catches my eye is a little volume on the end of my bookcase. The book is The Intellectual Life by A. G. Sertillanges, O.P., and its bright, cherry-red cover makes it look like a cheery little cardinal perched among the dustier browns and greens of the volumes surrounding it. A French Catholic friar, Sertillanges wrote the book in 1920 to describe the spirit and method required by intellectual work. It is one of the few books that I return to frequently for inspiration, and I am not alone in this. The MIT professor and author Cal Newport quotes Sertillanges multiple times in his seminal book Deep Work (2016), while the popular philosophy YouTuber, Jared Henderson, included The Intellectual Life in his video on his all-time favourite books. Sertillanges’s book hasn’t been out of print since it was reissued in a new edition in the late 1980s. Anecdotally, among friends in my undergraduate and graduate studies, this book is frequently mentioned as an important source of inspiration.
So, why the enthusiasm around this text? Self-help books, even of an academic variety, usually have a pretty short shelf-life, and yet this book is arguably more relevant than it was when it was first written over 100 years ago. Here, I will limit myself to just two reasons: his advice about approaching daily work, and his keen awareness of how our bodies shape our experience as writers.
Daily Work
At the core of Sertillanges’s practical wisdom is his insistence that we must set aside time every day for our work. “Have you two hours a day?” he enquires. “Can you undertake to keep them jealously, to use them ardently…? If so, have confidence” (11). As a graduate student, I have found this advice most applicable to my writing. Write two hours a day, and that is sufficient.
This advice is useful for two reasons. First, it is encouraging to realize that we don’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time at the writing desk. Often, as a graduate student, we can be pressured to think we have to spend four, five, even six hours a day focused on research and writing, but this is increasingly difficult to maintain with all the demands of assistantships, coursework, and departmental service. Sertillanges consoles us that a couple of hours a day is more than enough, if we stick with it.
Secondly, it is this discipline which prepares you for those insights which only come from diligent preparation. Truth will not “shine under your study lamp unless your soul asks for it with persistent effort” (6). Several years ago, a professor of mine advised me to never work until I was exhausted; rather, she said: Stop while your ideas are still flowing, make a careful note of where you are, and when you start writing again you can pick up your work much more easily. This advice works especially well when paired with Sertillanges’s discipline of daily writing, as it means you can progress from day to day with a greater degree of ease, more effortlessly picking up where you left off the day before.
Mind-Body Connection
Sertillanges is very far from the absent-minded thinker running around with his shoes unlaced and clothes disheveled. The Intellectual Life includes reams of immensely practical advice, such as the importance of frequently stretching and getting fresh air, the best diet, sleep habits and more.
His advice sounds remarkably similar to our modern advice of “self-care”: “Sound hygiene,” he writes seriously but with a slight twinkle, “is almost, for you, an intellectual virtue” (37). In other words: just because you are busy, doesn’t mean you can’t floss and get eight hours of sleep!
His emphasis on the mind/body connection explains some of his sterner advice that we should avoid the distractions of excessive socializing or the daily newspaper (I dread to think what Sertillanges would have said about the internet). He believes that a degree of external silence goes hand in glove with the internal silence that is a prerequisite of intellectual work: “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work” (xviii).
Conclusion
One of the greatest lessons from Sertillanges is the realism with which he acknowledges the cyclical nature of work. “The period of intensive work cannot be any more uniform than our intellectual life as a whole. Proportionally, it has the same phases; one gets into swing gradually, sometimes with great difficulty, one reaches one’s maximum, and then grows tired” (97). There is a lot of wisdom in recognizing that each writing session, each paper or research project, and each academic year will have its periods of droughts and its periods of rain. There are times we work with greater intensity, and times when we ease back from our work for a season of fallowness. Sertillanges reminds us that sometimes it is okay to do less, perhaps, if we do it with a sensitivity to the meaning that inspires our work. Whether you are currently in season of slowness or at a peak of productivity, I encourage you, dear reader, to pick up Sertillanges’s book to help guide you on your happy vocation of intellectual work.
Works Cited
Henderson, Jared. “My Top 10 Books of All Time.” YouTube, July 11 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-56bgEON8sY&t=561s.
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.
—. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Portfolio, 2024.
Sertillanges, A. G. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Trans. Mary Ryan. Catholic University of America Press, 1998.