Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Bourgeois Mysticism

Zena Hitz, according to her memoir, has enjoyed a life of wide-ranging opportunities for personal choice. As a child she could choose what to talk about among her family. And they listened. As a teenager she could choose where she wanted to go to university. And she did. She chose an institution that allowed students a wide choice of ways to study in a leafy Maryland suburb. And, given her non-denominational background, she also had a choice in religion. She chose Catholicism. Hitz considered a number of career alternatives from social work to the pursuit of international justice. She chose academia. Within academia she chose, and then re-chose, several locations and topics of study. And, in an academic job market somewhat more buoyant than it is now, she could choose a place of employment in a large Southern University. I think it’s fair to say that Zena’s life has been blessed… or, perhaps more descriptively, privileged.

For all this freedom of choice, Hitz gives few reasons for the choices she actually made. Her decision to go to college on the East coast seems to have been based on the fact that it wasn’t the West coast. Her decision to become a Catholic was vaguely determined by its intriguing unfamiliarity rather than spiritual conviction. Her pursuit of an academic career in philosophy appears more like a controlled drift than a decision. She gives no reasons at all for her decisions to attend Cambridge for her graduate work, nor her transfers to Chicago and ultimately Princeton. Her reasons for taking up a position at Auburn University are simply undisclosed. In short, Hitz, like many other upper middle-class people in America, had more a trajectory than a direction in her life. She had been shot out of a cocooned economic and social niche without any real concern that she would land on her feet, wherever that might be.

And indeed she became successful. A new position at the University of Maryland, professional standing as a fellow at Princeton, grants, travel, contacts all come her way. This success offers even more choice - of interests, of volunteer work, of political associations. But she finds her academic career increasingly shallow in light of the poverty and suffering she sees around her. She suffers herself with growing disillusionment in her profession and feels little personal connection with her students. It seems that all her choices have somehow been misguided. Some might call this a mid-life crisis, a bit early perhaps for a woman in her thirties but not unheard of. She has a serious bout of existential angst which, of course, provokes more choices for a person of her ilk.

Through her increasingly intense involvement in Catholicism, Hitz stumbles upon the idea of “discerning a vocation.” Essentially this involves ostensibly allowing God to make one’s life choices and therefore listening very attentively for the necessary divine signals. She considers various alternatives - marriage to a like-minded bloke, or a Dorothea Day existence of subversive worker support, or even a life in a cloistered convent. Once again, even in her existential crisis, Hitz has choices in abundance. But at this point she realises that it is the reasons for her decision that matter, not the decision itself. And it is this inspiration she awaits and responds to… well sort of.

Hitz’s “discernment” leads her to a clear idea of her past mistakes. She’s using the wrong criterion of choice. She had put intellectual life above communal life: “I had had things the wrong way around. I had to love my neighbors and find a mode of intellectual life that expressed that. To do that, I had to put above everything the form of love that goes under the rather cold English name of ‘charity.’ I burst into tears.” So she sells her car and takes up residence in a small lay religious community in rural Canada. Apparently Baltimore hadn’t enough people (or misery) among which to practice love of neighbour.

But then God apparently changes his mind and provides some new reasons to pursue other choices: “So I discerned that it was time to leave the community, and in a nearly miraculous set of coincidences, the job I wanted, along with a house and a car, fell into my lap.” How about that? ‘Seek and ye shall find’ verified yet again. But it is interesting that God doesn’t give the reasons for re-location. So, like Jonah and Moses before her, Hitz dutifully re-directs her life without much clarity as to why.

Hitz then goes on to explain at length the recovery of her childhood experience of learning for its own sake. Not learning to get ahead, or learning to produce something, even something beneficial for humanity or the planet. Hitz wants us to experience what she does - the aesthetic beauty of what there is to know, not what we might end up doing with what we know. More than that, she clearly wants us to know that learning can be a spiritual experience, that learning without a practical purpose essentially is a religious event. It brings us closer to God. Such learning is quite literally a “refuge from the world.” Hitz, it seems, wants to re-state the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. And more power to her if that is her intention.

But I don’t think that’s what she wants to do. The Stoics recognised that learning had to be for some purpose even if that purpose was the sanctification of oneself. Christianity calls this salvation and considers it, like the Stoics, a communal affair. The self-centredness of Hitz’s memoir is disguised behind her claim to be pursuing a life of communal charity. ‘Learning for its own sake’ is code for consummate self-indulgence. There is no such thing as inquiry without a purpose. There is no such thing as isolated learning, an individual hidden away in the bosom of Abraham, for example, learning how to be holy (or saved) through the sacred texts of religion or the ancient thoughts of Aristotle and Plato.

So let’s be serious, this is a book written by and for that class of privileged folk who can literally afford to engage in its intellectual fantasies. These are people with a similar plethora of choices that are available to Hitz. These are people who have a substantial economic and social cushion which allows them to enjoy these fantasies and to even act on them with impunity. Hitz is pushing the idea that we can get beyond the self-absorption of modern life by emulating her, that is, by increasing our self-absorption, our inner life, to the maximum extent possible. We can, if we choose, hide from the world and take refuge in the sea of divine knowledge. This sort of mysticism will no doubt sell well, especially in places like California where there is an established market for this mode of thinking. But it is bunk, essentially another self-help guide for those who use self-help guides to justify their positions of privilege and power.

View all my reviews