Zena Hitz > Quotes

“I have described a life of utter futility. If I work for the sake of money, spend money on basic necessities for life, and organize my life around working, then my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work. It is like buying ice cream, immediately selling it for cash, and then spending the proceeds on ice cream (which one once again sells, … and so on). It is no less tragic than working for money and getting crushed by a falling anvil on the way to cash the paycheck. Activities are not worthwhile unless they culminate in something satisfying. For that reason, Aristotle argued that there must be something beyond work—the use of leisure, for the sake of which we work and without which our work is in vain. Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. Rather, leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“But just like the art of acquiring wealth, the art of struggling for political power requires no special discipline. There is no danger, in our hyper-moralized, hyper-political culture, that our young people will somehow fail to be enchanted by the prospect of making a difference. The danger is quite otherwise: that as all human goods are either put to use or discarded in the struggle for social and political ends, we lose our humanity and the dignity it implies. We lose what makes life worth living, whether that is intellectual life or any of the other unutterably precious human activities that dwell in peace and holy uselessness.”
― Zena Hitz

“Smith echoes the famous appeal of W.E.B. Du Bois to the human bond in books that ignores the veil of racial prejudice: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.64 Committed to a goal (Truth) beyond what mere social life might offer, Du Bois finds in books a human community open to him in a way that his local human communities are not, riven as they are by segregation and hatred. Instead, on the basis of common humanity and common concern for truth, the dead authors welcome Du Bois into their company.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“read and inquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective, to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among others.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The “masters” of our current servant class have no leisure either. The slave is a slave of a slave, and these days at the top of heap of the slaves there is not even an exploitative gentleman farmer—writing essays, dissecting animals, and speculating on the nature of the political—but another slave at a higher social rank. The wealthier in the chain impose such burdens on themselves, just as many of us in positions of privilege willingly put ourselves under electronic surveillance as constant as the Amazon warehouse, posting to social media even our time at the gym or our obsessions with our pets.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The idea that real and serous learning is something practiced only by a small elite is stubborn and hard to displace.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.”44 Simon sees that if lies prevail in social life and if truth is necessary for one’s full humanity, daily life with others is virtually unbearable.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Many of my thoughts will be only half-baked. Their batter may not be even quite mixed. Finish baking them your own way—or cook up something else.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far from pointless wheel spinning as are the forms of tenderness we owe our children or grandchildren. Intellectual work is a form of loving service at least as important as cooking, cleaning, or raising children; as essential as the provision of shelter, safety, or health care; as valuable as the delivery of necessary goods and services; as crucial as the administration of justice. All of these other forms of work make possible, but only possible, the fruits of human flourishing in peace and leisure: study and reflection, art and music, prayer and celebration, family and friendship, and the contemplation of the natural world.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome. Hence the retreat that intellectual work requires does not function only as an escape. It is also a place of salutary distance, a place to set aside our agendas to consider things as they really are. When we think and reflect, we struggle to allow our desire for truth to prevail over the desires that conflict with truth. We push aside the soft barriers and chip away at hard accretions of wishful thinking. It is for this reason that intellectual life is a discipline: the product of hard work and practice in a certain sort of self-denial. Everyone with even a passing interest in the life of the mind has felt the collision of illusion with reality. The”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The freedom of a leisurely activity is the freedom from results or outcomes beyond it, not the freedom of rest or recreation.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“By calling attention to Sullivan’s voyeuristic perspective, the film’s images of the poor and the desperate reach the viewer with greater effect. Sullivan himself is haunted by the failure of his efforts to become poor. After the second “rescue” by his handlers, he complains, “It’s funny the way everything keeps shoving me back to Hollywood … as if some force were saying ‘Get back where you belong…. You don’t belong to real life, you phony you.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Don’t you know that’s all some people have? It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“La recreación también se caracteriza por la atemporalidad.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Augustine describes his fourteen-year course of reading as a passage through various ideas and ways of thinking but more importantly, through certain motivations, through affections of his heart.13 At the age of eighteen, he is passionately inflamed for learning after he reads an oration by Cicero on the value of philosophy: “The one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was that I should love, and seek, and win, and hold, and embrace, not this or that philosophical school, but Wisdom itself, whatever that might be.”14 Cicero’s exhortation ignites in Augustine a restless seeking after wisdom, a form of truth and knowledge that could guide and organize his life.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Restoring Our Humanity How vainly men themselves amaze To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes; And their uncessant Labours see Crown’d from some single Herb or Tree, Whose short and narrow verged Shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all Flow’rs and all Trees do close To weave the Garlands of repose. —ANDREW MARVELL, “THE GARDEN”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“In this book I have tried to articulate what I have learned about intellectual life over the course of my own life. To properly acknowledge my debts in this experiential learning process would be tantamount to acknowledging the debts I owe for my life in general. It must suffice to say that I am grateful beyond words to all of the communities that have nurtured this activity in me, and to the teachers, students, and colleagues who made them up. But it all began with birth and childhood, and so I dedicate this book to my brothers and to our parents, with gratitude.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Einstein’s closest friend was the brilliant chemist Fritz Haber, who turned his intellect to the invention of the poisonous gases that could be deployed in battle, thus playing his part in murdering and terrifying thousands of soldiers.15 The Germany of the early twentieth century was at the pinnacle of human culture: science, literature, scholarship, music. That it turned to conquest and large-scale murder gives the lie to the claim that higher culture is humanizing in itself.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The personal lie appeals not only to the audience’s rational judgment, but also to their own desires: they too do not want to be disturbed by a difficult truth. The same is true on a grander scale for public lies. As a political leader, I aggrandize myself by exaggerating threats. I rely on my audience’s concern for their own well-being and the facts that determine it. I appeal to natural fears of uncertainty and weakness as well as to fantasies of strength. The more successful I am as a leader, the more dependent I am on lies: the vague threat of war turns into a direct lie about the facts of the matter, the unprovoked attack, the enemy at the gates. Words and stories become a means not only to present a false reality, but also to flood the airwaves, to drive out alternatives. The lies resonate and take hold in us, their audience, because they help us to pretend that deprivation is temporary, that suffering is curable, or that a confrontation has vindicated us or shown our strength.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life uncovers a human being who is not reducible to his or her economic, social and political contributions.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“So we have examined two ways in which the love of learning might overcome typical abuses of the intellect: ambition, self-deception, or ways of using the mind to create soothing or exciting spectacles. The love of learning has emerged as something profoundly serious, something that can change a life, a source of our highest aspirations—to know, to love, to flourish in our full humanity.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The intellectual life as portrayed in this film has four key features: It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection. As such it is withdrawn from the world, where “the world” is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status. It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by the contrast to Renée’s low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past childbearing age. It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“In the face of these examples, to justify intellectual activity in terms of its economic and political benefits, as do contemporary defenders of the humanities and liberal education, might seem banal or beside the point. But such defenses are worse than that: they are false and destructively so. For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Para Agustín, nuestra vida cotidiana no pasa de la superficie de las cosas. Buscamos experiencias bonitas o placenteras, o el honor de sentir la aprobación de un grupo. Los esfuerzos intelectuales nos llevan hacia adentro, a las profundidades.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“There is an almost unearthly directness to the interaction with books that Day describes here. She reads about something and walks out to look at it. Over time, the books open up reality to her, through the medium of words and authors. It is for this reason, I think, that she refers to the books as “companions” and compares her life with books to her life with the living human beings who lived in her houses. And yet her reading could have gone in any number of directions. A reader of Sinclair, London, or Dickens could take refuge in empty, self-aggrandizing talk about the injustice of things. Such talk would find a hospitable audience among the liberal middle class of New York or Chicago, as Day knows well. Or the books could have remained distractions, idle forms of entertainment. Day is a writer committed to encouragement, unwilling to speak ill of anyone, even her preconverted self. Yet in her autobiography From Union Square to Rome, Day describes using reading to escape from a feeling of profound depression, in which she is “overwhelmed by the terror and the blackness of both life and death”:”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“When I say that intellectual life cultivates our aspirations, I do not mean that it expands career choices, although of course it may do that. We may discover a desire to be a firefighter or a forest ranger through exercising the love of learning. We may decide to leave everything to live in a poor hut outside the village, growing vegetables, praying, and offering spiritual advice when asked. But human aspiration is deeper in range and broader in scope than our outward life. We aspire to ways of being: to be wise, or kind; to be vast in understanding, steadfast in truth, humble in success, witty in adversity. Albert Schweitzer, who left a brilliant career in divinity and music to provide medical care to the poor in Africa, pointed out that not everyone has the opportunity to make such a dramatic and costly choice.27 But anyone furnished with the basic necessities of life can aspire to the splendor of humanity, even if his or her individual splendor is not widely known or recognized”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“After all, it is impossible to deprive oneself completely of all bodily or worldly objects of desire. The powers of perception and desire cannot be simply turned off—we can turn the dial where we like, but the instrument goes on receiving. Rather, the soul has the capacity of refusing attachment to them while they are present. If its focus and desire are directed elsewhere, we can possess rejected goods without being ultimately attached to them.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Our desires for truth and understanding, driven on by both frustration and awe, bear us into the depths of the intellect where real learning takes place. But natural to us as these desires are, they fight against the other desires I have described: inbuilt sloth, the thrill of the spectacle, the easy rush of outrage, the drive for status or achievement, and the uneasy fortress of comfort given by belonging to a particular social group.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Unless we treasure something beyond our own bare experience, we cannot distinguish gazing at a mighty river from gazing at the TV channels changing one to the other, over and over again.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life