Cathedrals and Privies

Cultivating the important and the necessary in the life of the amateur

This is meant to be an encouragement to me as much as to you. Maybe more. My goal in writing this series for amateurs (and really, this whole Cultivated Amateur Substack) is to continually encourage those of us who are amateurs of literature (or of anything, really) to embrace our place and purpose as lovers, to lean into it and flourish, and not to ape the expert and scholar who have their own place and purpose. Both scholar and amateur have role of social importance in the life of the other and in society at large. This piece and it's companion (which will publish tomorrow) explore that relationship.

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Thomas Wyck, “A Scholar in His Study”

If you haven’t ever thrown a book or cried in frustration at some point in your reading life – because you wanted to understand what you were reading but every sentence felt like hiking through mud - are you even alive? (Tongue firmly in cheek here, but also, serious question.)

I vividly remember a point almost 3 years ago where I was struggling through a book on literary theory by Northrop Frye and burst into tears out of pure frustration because I just could not follow him more than two consecutive paragraphs without losing his train of thought or without having to look up words and read slowly and deliberately. It was a book that was beyond me and I felt stupid and beaten. I had occasional moments of clarity which encouraged me to keep going, but Frye is a dense writer and he can pack a lot of meaning into a single sentence. Even his “easier” books weren’t easy for me. And the same goes for his recorded lectures. I struggled. But the moments of illumination that I did manage to glean, those paragraphs that I could follow, the times I did understand what he was saying provided me with so much fresh insight and understanding into literature as a structure of words that I couldn’t quit. I had to keep reading. Which meant I kept running into mental walls. Hence the tears.

Literary Resistance Training

Reading challenging books is part of having a healthy reading life. We tend to read what we enjoy, and that’s a fine thing. But we ought to make sure we include books that we just don’t quite understand, books that we have to wrestle with, that challenge us and force us to grow as readers. It is not a pleasant feeling to be face-to-face with a book that is smarter than you. At least, it wasn’t for me. It’s still not my favorite, though I enjoy it now. It requires some honest humility, some willingness on the part of the reader to admit, “I didn’t understand this at all.” It requires the reader to decide if he is going to quit or do some extra work to understand what he is missing. It would have been easy for me to put down Frye’s books and say, “I don’t need to struggle with this. I’m not a scholar. He is mostly writing for literary people in ivory towers¹ and I just need to be honest and admit I’m not literary enough.” But thank goodness for inherited Scottish stubbornness. I was going to understand Frye or die trying. Obviously, I managed to avoid the latter.

The amateur has to embrace an attitude of fearlessness, or more accurately, he has to make peace with his fears - usually, the fear of failure along with the fear of looking like an idiot. He has to being willing to tackle works that he knows are well beyond his grasp. He has to be willing to fail. But for the curious person, this is exciting! This is the place where growth can happen. The amateur is excited about taking on a book that she knows is light years beyond her current ability. When she cracks the cover, keeps turning page after page, methodically plodding through until the final cover is reached and the book is closed, she knows she has just begun. She knows – and this is the important part – she is going to do it all over again. And again. And probably again after that.

This is because alongside fearlessness, the professional amateur, the amateur who is going to succeed at amateuring with her reading life or with any serious interest, needs to have endurance. Stick-to-itiveness. A stubborn refusal to give up. This doesn’t mean we never back off. During one of my Frye Freak-outs (I wish I could say there was only one), I decided to give it a rest for a while and just binge-read Crichton and Christie and poetry. I had been training too hard and had given myself a mental sprain. I couldn’t keep going at the pace I was trying to keep up. I was worn out and I knew I needed to let my mind rest before I jumped back in. But I had to jump back in. I couldn’t keep away. When I did decide to get back to Frye, I made sure to start with something I had already read and mostly understood. I went slow. I began to purposely build up my endurance and strength paragraph by paragraph essay by essay. I can tell you that in two years, it has paid off more than I thought it would. The works that set me crying before are intelligible and even enjoyable now.

Ignorance and Attitude

We tend to learn best by immersion. But whatever the subject of study we immerse ourselves in happens to be, it is not the material we study that is the most difficult obstacle to overcome; it is our own attitudes. It is the mindset that thinks difficult books are “over my head” or “too academic” that actually holds us back from growth. At the risk of sounding like a motivational speaker or a P.E. coach, I’m here to tell you need to embrace the thing that is too hard! Is it really the worst thing for you to pick up The Faerie Queene or Consolation of Philosophy or Dante’s Divine Comedy or Shakespeare or Nicomachus’ Introduction to Arithmetic or poetry in general and struggle through it, not understanding the bulk of it? No. This is your resistance training. This is building endurance and strength. The more you immerse yourself in a challenging work, the less challenging it eventually becomes. There is no short cut. If you want those strong, rippling literary muscles, you have got to put in the time.

A Labor of Love

Are amateurs crazy to inflict this unnecessary labor on themselves? Probably, at least a little bit. But love makes people crazy. Because for all the moments of frustration and real lament over the state (or lack) of his or her education, in the midst of the constant battle with our own lack of understanding, the amateur is completely smitten – like, head over heels in love – with literature, with stories, and with the way stories seem to connect with each other while illuminating the world around us. We are like Psyche trying to complete impossible tasks for Love’s sake. She has seen the face of Love, and whatever difficulties might stand between her and her goal, she has to continue. The amateur can’t quit, can’t give it up. He or she has seen too much and simply can’t walk away and pretend literature didn’t change their lives – that it doesn't continue to change their lives - for the better.

Don’t be ashamed of being an amateur. We can’t all be experts. We aren't all called to be experts. An amateur is a lover first but that does not mean the amateur is uneducated or someone who is not knowledgeable on their subject. All it means is we are not professional scholars, and this is not a bad thing. Like the artist, Frye says, the scholar is a producer and the producer of art and scholarship “needs to be complimented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist’s [or scholar’s] work.”² The scholar needs students. The student exists so that the knowledge the scholar gains, as fascinating as it is in and of itself, can go out and find a place in the life of the society. Scholarship trickles down to general education, he says, but unlike scholarship, “general education is a social and not primarily an intellectual matter.”³ That is, general education does not require all the necessary esoteric knowledge that is part of scholarship.

In Defense of the Esoteric

Esoteric is not worthless knowledge. It is often used as a pejorative, but a scholar is expected to know his subject in minute detail. Esoteric knowledge is not unteachable knowledge, but simply the detailed, thorough knowledge required of the scholar. From the Merrium-Webster website:

The opposite of esoteric is exoteric, which means "suitable to be imparted to the public." According to one account, those who were deemed worthy to attend the Greek philosopher Aristotle's learned discussions were known as his "esoterics," his confidants, while those who merely attended his popular evening lectures were called his "exoterics." Since material that is geared toward a target audience is often not as easily comprehensible to outside observers, esoteric acquired an extended meaning of "difficult to understand." Both esoteric and exoteric started appearing in English in the 17th century; esoteric traces back to ancient Greek by way of the Late Latin esotericus. The Greek esōterikos is based on the comparative form of esō, which means "within."

The esoteric knowledge of the scholar can become exoteric if the scholar is a good teacher, and sometimes even if he isn’t. The scholar has to have a wider view as well as a more detailed view of his or her area of knowledge and expertise than the general public. That intense scholarly knowledge of a particular subject won’t fit into the structure of general education, but it can fit into the structure of continuous learning which general education should prepare us for:

“Life will not stay around to be prepared for, nor, in a world where the coding, housing, and retrieving of information is itself one of the biggest activities there is, can life be conceived as anything apart from a continuous learning process. The essential aim of all early education should be the inculcating of a life-time habit [of learning]… It is one function of general education, I should think, to establish a context for special cultural interests. Every field of knowledge is the center of all knowledge, and general education should help the student to see how this is true for his chosen field.” In the same essay, he writes, “We can distinguish two levels in general education: an average or elementary level and a cultivated level; roughly, the difference between being able to read and write and being able to read with some depth and direction and write with some articulateness. At present many believe that raising people to the cultivated level on a huge and unprecedented scale is not merely desirable in itself but a necessity if our civilization is to survive. There has always been a practical distinction between what is important, like cathedrals, and what is necessary, like privies: in our day the important seems, possibly for the first time in history, to be becoming necessary as well.” ⁴

The cultivated level is not the scholarly level; it is the level between the scholarly and general. The cultivated amateur, the active self-educating person, provides a context of application, a place for the esoteric knowledge to become exoteric. “It is obvious that a cultivated and well-informed interest in a subject is something different from scholarship, with its dependence on research libraries and laboratories,” Frye writes, though the hearty amateur could enjoy an afternoon in a research library or a labratory, exploring the subject that he or she enjoys. A cultivated interest is an interest that has a place, and active role, in the life of the educated person, and through their life, the larger life of the society.

Cultivate Apprehending

Do not be afraid of reading difficult works of literature, of scholarly works, classical works, of getting in over your head and finding yourself lost and floundering. Works of classic literature and literary criticism and theory and scholarship are not inaccessible. The true scholar offers something for every mind to grasp in their papers and dissertations and thick tomes. A scholar of worth wants people to see the value in their area of knowledge (and tomorrow I will post a long extract from an essay by Northrop Frye on this very topic). Growing in understanding might take some work on your part. Actually, it will take some work – probably a lot of work – on your part. You might have to go regularly to the literary gym and lift some heavy weights, so to speak, but you can get there. You can read hard things. Comprehension is possible.

But comprehension isn’t like filling an empty bucket. You’ll never reach a point where you can say, “I’ve mastered it entirely. The bucket is full.” It’s more like planting and tending a garden. If all you do is apprehend (i.e., see and recognize and appreciate) the value and beauty in these works of art, even while they are beyond you, it is enough, and it is the best place to start. A life spent in apprehending the good things, while embracing the struggle to comprehend them, is a good life. It is a life well spent. It means you are hungry to grow, to learn, to see and know more about the things that make life a glorious thing. It means you are alive to all the things that make life worth living. It is not a waste of time to pursue what you love. What better way could there be to spend the few years we have on this incredible beauty-full earth?

1. Frye doesn't think much of people who use “the cliché of the ivory tower.” Check out his essays “The Instruments of Mental Production” and “The Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

2. “Instruments of Mental Production”

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.