Michael Dirda’s commonplace book, published as Book by Book, is a wonder.
I thought about something he’d said, remembered I’d seen the quotation I was looking for in in his book, and while looking for it found this:
It’s a note from Lionel Trilling, lamenting the decline of a once important idea in Western culture.
(It’s) the idea of ‘making a life,’ by which was meant conceiving human existence, one’s own or another’s, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment … . This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.
Trilling died in 1975, so this lament speaks to an earlier time. But even then, most of us were going to college in search of a career, rather than in search of a good way to live.
You could get a sense of what Trilling was talking about by reading Plutarch’s biographies or by reading Seneca’s letters.
The aesthetic sense of a life well lived absorbed Wittgenstein. He didn’t believe you could talk about a beautiful life, but he believed you could live it.
• Source: Michael Dirda, Book By Book; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005, p. 10.
As you’ve probably seen, many college and university websites now list possible lines of work to go with each major.
ReplyDeleteAt my freshman orientation, 1974, a Jesuit prof (whose name I no longer know) said to us, “You are not here to learn how to make a living. You are here to learn how to make a life.” In 2022 he’d probably he hustled off the podium. : )