Habits that shape a mind

 I’ve spent the last few days telling friends about Scott Newstok’s book How to Think like Shakespeare.

If you want to get to the heart of it, here’s a good place to start:

I’m suggesting that to think like Shakespeare, we need to consider the habits that shaped his mind, including practices as simple as transcribing quotations, or working with a tradition.

I love that phrase: “consider the habits that shaped his mind.” It intrigues me because I have been trying to figure out the forces that shaped my own mind.

We all start with what medieval scholars called the textus receptus, the received text, the book that is handed down to us. Those old scholars were talking about the Bible, of course, but I am talking about the big package that our culture hands down to us, from one generation to another. This book contains marvelous insights and horrific prejudices.

Those forces shape us. And people shape us — some who accept and interpret for us the insights of our culture and others who resist them and teach us to reject the poison. We have people — a parent or grandparent, a teacher a friend — whose habits of mind influence the way we approach problems and interesting questions.

Along the way, we develop our own habits of mind. Newstok points out how important those habits are, even those that are so simple we overlook them — something as simple as copying quotations into a notebook.

I’ve been doing that for years. And, as obtuse as I am about such things, even I can see that I’ve been shaped by the habit of keeping a notebook.

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to propose an experiment. Sit for an hour with a pencil and paper and make a list of the forces that shaped you. Just sit quietly for a while. See what comes up.

My guess is that it might be the most interesting hour of the week, far better than anything on the Internet or TV.

• Sources: The quotation is from Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 11. For my first note on this extraordinary book, see  “Thinking about the Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2022.