Yesterday’s note was about the historian Peter Brown’s lecture “A Life of Learning.”
The lecture is part of a series. Since 1982, the American Council of Learned Societies has asked a scholar to give a lecture with that title.
Each lecturer is asked:
. . . to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and the dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one's own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship. We do not wish the speaker to present the products of one's own scholarly research, but rather to share with other scholars the personal process of a particular lifetime of learning.
I wish all my friends would take that as an assignment. I’d like to know what makes them inquire and how they went about it.
I’ve been reading through a few of the lectures. I was pleased to see that the sociologist Robert K. Merton said that his early education came from the public library.
That’s my story: What education I have came from the library.
• Source: Robert K. Merton, “A Life of Learning,” Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1994; American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, No. 25. You can find it here:
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