If you love books, this one’s for you — one of my favorite essays, on English Literature, by James Marriott, which you should definitely read on his “Cultural Capital” Substack.
It begins like this:
“English literature — so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of eighteen — was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at university and asked why exactly I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase which I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that “literature shows us what it is or might be to be human”. I believed it.
In books, I felt with Tennyson, that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine. Poems — especially poems by Hopkins, Eliot and Auden — worked on me like spells. I had contrived to download a recording of Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts onto my primitive mobile phone, and would stand in the playground with the device pressed to my ear, enraptured by the tinny incantation, convinced I was responding to a higher call. Literature, if one were to reduce it to anything so tawdry as a formula, was history x philosophy x life. I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off)…”
Marriott’s essay continues here. Hopefully you’ll love it too.
“I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off)…”
I must say that I deeply relate to Marriott’s line above, about preferring the “glamorous mysteries of the human heart” to the study of “mere facts.”
But it’s also true that these days I’m just as likely (more likely?) to plumb those mysteries via studying psychology rather than reading literature.
In fact, I’m soon to start a formal certificate in depth psychology - the study of the psyche and the unconscious, via mythology, story, symbol and dream. More soon on that - I’m excited to share my learnings with you.
(In the meantime, if this description appeals to you, I highly recommend the “This Jungian Life” podcast - whose hosts were our Candlelight Chat guests not too long ago!)
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What about you: what’s your preference - facts or mysteries?
And, if you could go back to school, what would you study?
Psychology, literature, or something else?
After starting my undergraduate schooling in engineering, I added a second major in philosophy. The first trains how, the second trains why.
I actually like a mix of both - like I find mere facts of physics very mysterious and magical. For example - as a child I found the rainbow very fascinating and beautiful, and learning about how it's made through water and light made me love it more. Also , learning that the stars we see in the sky might not exist in real time but we can see them - opened so many doors in my mind.
My father , when he had to choose subjects in school, he wanted to study both physics and psychology, a combination of subjects which we are not allowed to study together in school ( maybe because it doesn't lead to a conventional career ). And I also faced something similar when it was my time to select subjects.
I find facts and mysteries are not on the opposite sides - everything is kind of interlinked in some way - and it's all so fascinating