An Exhortation Upon the First Day of Classes

“If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions.”

 -C.S. Lewis, Learning in War Time

Today is the day of renewal, the day that teachers are met, syllabi rendered unimaginatively, and new class-to-class footpath hypotenuses approximated. It is the day of sewing new seeds upon the fallow rest-plowed and summer-harrowed rows of (more or less) rich collegiate earth.

But this can also be the day of forgetting, the day of neglecting the pleasure of voluntary and independent learning, of abandoning the joyfulness of the late-June autodidact. If one is not careful, it may become the last day of education and the first of many days of mining the deep, dark, cavernous academic salt mines of degree-making.

If you must –– if conscience, expedience, interest, or educative value compel you –– read the books assigned. But also read ones which are not. Take the time. If you have no time, the good news is that it can be made easily with standard household equipment.

Respect the academics whom age and certification, if nothing else, have positioned above you. Take them at their word, but do not let their words stand alone. Seek input from your own reason and from that of your peers. If this does not render any applicable wisdom concerning the particular subject, it will at least teach you about people. Most of all, keep an open line of communication with the dead, something T.S. Eliot describes as “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” If you don’t know where to start, then Eliot is as good a place as any.

If you must –– and, trust me, you must –– complete the assignments and submit the papers. Follow the directions given and respect both the office and fallibility of the giver. But color them with the breadth and character of your own wider understanding and polish them with the specificity of your own reading.

I am willing to concede a (purely) hypothetical universe in which one simply cannot make time to supplement their education with outside reading. Therefore, above all, take joy in the work given, appreciating the elegance of multi-variable calculus or the delightful absurdity of Foucault’s sociology. Sort the wheat from the chaff and give thanks for the bread which remains.