Zena Hitz > Quotes

“For the Sake of What? Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. PASCAL, PENSÉES, TRANS. A. J. KRAILSHEIMER”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Aristóteles decía que debe haber algo más allá del trabajo, el ocio, por el cual trabajamos y sin el cual nuestro trabajo es en vano. El ocio no es meramente recreación, que podríamos emprender en aras del trabajo, para relajarnos o descansar antes de emprender una nueva tarea. El ocio se trata más bien de una recámara interior cuyo buen empleo podría contar como la culminación de todos nuestros esfuerzos. Para Aristóteles, solo la contemplación, la actividad de ver, comprender y saborear el mundo tal como es, podría considerarse el uso final y satisfactorio del ocio.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Ambition and the Work of Art The old philosophers imagine what the life of the wise will be in the Islands of the Blest, that they will be free from every care, needing none of the necessities of life, and with nothing else to do but to spend all their time on learning and inquiring in the study of nature. We on the other hand see not only the delight of a happy life but also the solace of misfortune; hence many when they were in the power of enemies or tyrants, many in prison, many in exile, have solaced their sorrow with the pursuit of learning. —CICERO, ABOUT THE ENDS OF GOODS AND EVILS, TRANS. H. RACKHAM”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened … circumstances,” but that escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: it reaches greedily for the whole of everything. It was the prospect of somehow holding the whole world within oneself that led Plato and Aristotle to think of the intellect as something divine, as offering the furthest heights to which a human being could reach.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Cuando miento a alguien, me aprovecho de la apertura al mundo de esa persona, de su capacidad de percepción y de su juicio racional, como un medio para obtener lo que quiero. Quiero una esposa y una amante, así que miento para lograr ambas.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“An impassible gulf lies between the poor and the socially concerned middle and upper classes. Concern without knowledge or experience reeks of self-serving condescension. But to experience poverty as one among many possible learning experiences is not to experience poverty at all. In the face of this gulf, concern for the poor quickly collapses under the narcissism of the narrative, and self-regard wins an easy victory over self-sacrifice.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“According to the historian Plutarch, the great mathematician Archimedes was so absorbed in his proofs that he did not notice that the Romans had invaded and conquered his city, and was killed by a soldier when he insisted on finishing his work.5 Later writers gave him last words: “Don’t disturb my circles.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life is a way to recover one's real value when it is denied recognition by the power plays and careless judgments of social life. That is why it is a source of dignity. In ordinary social life, knowledge is exchanged for money or for power, for approval or for a sense of belonging, to mark out superiority in status or to achieve a feeling of importance. These are our common currencies, our ways of advancing ourselves or diminishing others. But since a human being is more than his or her social uses, other, more fundamental ways of relating are possible. These forms of communion can consist in the joyful friendship of bookworms or the gritty pursuit of the truth about something together with people one would otherwise find unbearable.”
― 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. If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Even the dignity of intellectual excellence, the dignity of Einstein or Aristotle, is not our ultimate dignity. We perhaps all know people of high intelligence who have particular difficulty facing illness and decline. Past the asceticism of discipline for the sake of excellence is the discipline of going eyeball to eyeball with reality, letting our fantasies about ourselves die a quiet death.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of intellectual development in prison is that of Malcolm X.21 Malcolm Little (as he was born) entered prison immersed in drugs, sex, and petty crime. In prison he met a polymath named John Elton Bembry who was steeped in culture and history, able to hold forth on a wide variety of fascinating topics. On his advice Malcolm began to read—first the dictionary, then books on etymology and linguistics. He studied elementary Latin and German. He converted to Islam, a faith introduced to him by his brothers. In the following years he read the Bible and the Qur’an, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as works of Asian philosophy. He pored over an especially loved book of the archaeological wonders of the East and the West. He learned the history of colonialism, of slavery, and of African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear “like snow off of a roof.”22 He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The difference between a basic orientation toward the love of learning and one toward the love of spectacle is that between two kinds of basic restlessness. The one sort, exemplified by Augustine’s own journey as he describes it, unceasingly moves past the surfaces of things to what is more real. The second flees unceasingly from object to object, all on the same level—never culminating in anything further, never achieving anything beyond the thrill of experience. It is the bare existence of a human possibility that inspires the exercise of the love of spectacle. The lovers of spectacle seek no good of the kind Malcolm X, André Weil, or Irina Ratushinskaya sought—indeed, it is the bad, the sad, and the ugly as such that hold special fascination for them. The love of learning always wants more; the love of spectacle is satisfied at the surface, like someone scratching an itch rather than trying to heal a wound.28”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human, in shaping our aspirations and our hopes for ourselves.

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

“The Varieties of Religious Experience more than the saccharine pious literature she encountered elsewhere that prepared her for her Catholic conversion.23 Perhaps she resisted its heavy sweetness; or perhaps too the pious literature was narrow and factional, written in a sort of jargon that only insiders could understand. James’s work in Varieties consists in an earnest attempt to find what is generally human in the various kinds of religious experience.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The overwhelming impression of political activity presented by the novels is that political words and what passes for political thinking are empty pretense, the ticket to social advancement for individuals. Political action moves without contact with reality, and is in fact motivated by a concerted attempt to avoid the difficulties for which it pretends concern.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“A local church invites the prisoners to a viewing of slapstick cartoons. Amid the roars of laughter of his fellow inmates, Sullivan comes to understand the value of his previous work. Once a final plot twist returns him to his former state of comfort and affluence, he renounces his attempts at more serious filmmaking. He concludes, “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

“[A former croft worker] hated the industrial system and had found liberation by operating a market garden on the edge of the moors where he had the use of a powerful telescope erected on his land. Indoors he gave magic-lantern shows of the heavens and their constellations, and on clear evenings at the dark of the year we were invited to view the rings around Saturn, the beauty of the Milky Way or the craters and valleys of the Moon. After carefully sighting the objects he turned to us solemnly, “Sithee, lasses, isn’t that a marvelous seet; a stupendous universe, yet we fritter our lives away i’ wars and petty spites!” As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of “night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void”—seeped into consciousness.26”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Learning and intellectual life are not the exclusive province of professional academics, but academics are their official guardians”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“De esta manera disminuimos el valor de aquellos a quienes hablamos; los tratamos como herramientas y les negamos dignidad. Simon predice nuestra respuesta inmediata ante la dificultad de hacer frente a las mentiras y falsedades de nuestros amigos y familiares más queridos: tratar de aislar las falsedades y las mentiras y limitarlas a los del otro bando —los ricos (si somos pobres), los pobres (si somos ricos), republicanos (si somos demócratas), demócratas (si somos republicanos), etc., etc.—. Simulamos que los demás se tragan las mentiras, pero que nosotros mismos hemos escapado ilesos. Imaginamos que nuestra clase o grupo social nos facilita una vía de acceso especial a la verdad. En consecuencia, nuestro enfoque en la verdad y la falsedad debe comenzar con nosotros mismos. La negación y la rebelión son actitudes que tienen cierto encanto, siempre que la actitud que rechazo y contra la que me rebelo se exprese a una distancia cómoda de mi propia persona. Pero si adopto la actitud de decir no a todas las falsedades, incluidas las que se fabrican y propagan a mi alrededor, así como las que siento brotar en mí, sé que me dirijo a una terrible soledad, a un país desértico sin límites, ni carreteras, ni agua. Allí mis queridos compañeros me fallarán. Mis hábitos, mis gustos, mis pasiones me abandonarán. Sin más apoyo que la verdad, seguiré adelante, desnudo y temblando70. Una vez que uno se aleja de la satisfacción de fingir que solo otros cayeron en las garras de la mentira y la falsedad, uno se encuentra aislado y desorientado, en «un país desértico»: Simon describe aquí la pobreza que no es una cuestión de que haya descarrilado la rueda económica, sino la condición humana, la pobreza de tener que cambiar las consolaciones sociales por la verdad y la dignidad. Esta pobreza también podría calificarse de alienación, una suerte de culminación de la soledad, de retrospección, el recogimiento que requiere la vida intelectual. Evoca la soledad, el sacrificio que exige nuestra ansia por la verdad.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“The Love of Spectacle and Life at the Surfaces And does not the democratic character also live out his life in this fashion, day by day indulging the appetite of the day, sometimes drinking wine heavily and listening to the flute; at other times drinking only water and dieting; sometimes exercising; at other times loafing and neglecting everything, and at another time occupying himself with what he takes to be philosophy? And frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever enters his head. And if he happens to admire soldiers, he is borne in that direction, and if moneyed men, in that one, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his pleasant, free, and blessed. —PLATO, REPUBLIC, 561C-D”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The fake busy-ness that is in fact a form of distraction is called by the ancient monks acedia. It is listlessness or lack of joy in the most important things. It is the plague of modern middle-class life.”
― Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

“Nuestros fines últimos a menudo presentan una fragilidad impredecible; de ahí la ansiedad juvenil por el futuro, nuestras crisis de mediana edad y los arrepentimientos de la vejez.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Our vision of the love of learning is distorted by notions of economic and civic usefulness. I can be more blunt. We do not see intellectual life clearly, because of our devotion to lifestyles rich in material comfort and social superiority. We want the splendor of Socratic thinking without his poverty. We want the thrill of his speaking truth to power without the full absorption in the life of the mind that made it possible. We want the profits of Thales’ stargazing without the ridicule. We want Einstein’s brilliant insights without the humiliation of joblessness followed by years of obscurity working in a patent office. Instead of facing reality head on and making a choice to accept the costs of a certain pursuit as they are, we pretend that there is no need to make a choice. Intellectual life can bring you wealth and high social status. We can have it all. So we lie to ourselves that what we really care about is the realm of the intellect, when in reality we would sacrifice it in a second to our idols—comfort, wealth, and status.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“What then are we doing when we diligently strive to be wise? Do we not seek, with as much energy as we can command, to gather our whole soul somehow to that which we attain by the mind, to station ourselves and become wholly entrenched there, so that we may no longer rejoice in our own private goods, which are bound up with ephemeral things, but instead cast aside all attachment to times and places and apprehend that which is always one and the same?27”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“There is rather some fundamental conflict, difficult to notice and even more difficult to describe, between the desires to know, learn, and understand and desires for anything else, especially anything involving social and political life.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I learned more, and more pleasantly, from weekly lunches with Jim than from many visits to the library.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The difference between a basic orientation toward the love of learning and one toward the love of spectacle is that between two kinds of basic restlessness. The one sort, exemplified by Augustine's own journey as he describes it, unceasingly moves past the surfaces of things to what is more real. The second flees unceasingly from object to object, all on the same level—never culminating in anything further, never achieving anything beyond the thrill of experience. It is the bare existence of a human possibility that inspires the exercise of the love of spectacle. The lovers of spectacle seek no good of the kind Malcolm X, André Weil, or Irina Ratushinskaya sought—indeed, it is the bad, the sad, and the ugly as such that hold special fascination for them. The love of learning always wants more; the love of spectacle is satisfied at the surface, like someone scratching an itch rather than trying to heal a wound.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“My coreligionists, Catholics specifically and Christians more broadly, have also fallen into the trap of educating by opinions: riven by anxiety about the broader, hostile culture or by conflicts within their ranks, they each retreat to their own faction and turn to the rigid promotion of factional teachings. In this way they reduce serious inquiry and intellectual development to catechesis and evangelization by bullet points. The educational agenda is set more by broad political goals—to each faction its own—rather than by the fundamentals of spiritual life. We teach self-justifying arguments rather than the common human bonds that ground persuasion. We need to remind ourselves that Christianity has a few basics and holds out the prospect of free, vast, and indefinite growth in understanding and in sanctity. Christian teaching is less a containable artificial lake than it is an inexhaustible spring.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Images of Inwardness Whatever lofty happiness man in his earthen bonds names with the names of the gods: the harmony of faith, that does not waver, of friendship, that knows no doubts; the light, that to the wise comes only in lonely thoughts, and for the poets burns only in lovely images. All that did I—in my best hours— Discover in her, and found there for myself. —GOETHE, “FÜR EWIG” (FOR ETERNITY)”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life