✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Rats and trads

gleech.org · 2,871 words · saved by 1 readers

Recently I spent some time at a liberal arts college, doing close reading out loud with a group of the profs. It was lovely; stimulating, collegial, civilised. A little pocket of air outside history. But I was aware of being an interloper, of feeling inimical to them. But why? After all, I’m an obsessive reader – and they do little else. I’m uninterested in most kinds of worldly success – and, e.g., none of the six professors present had ever heard of YCombinator. We both love learning and teaching and talking about ideas; admire and promote mathematics; take aesthetics seriously; get really into philosophical questions; think that virtue is extremely real and extremely important and at least a little transmissible; and have serious misgivings about AI, academia, goodharting, specialisation, and other mechanisations of the as-if soul. From the outside we seem like the same kind of intellectual fundamentalist organising our lives around thinking. Is it that they’re religious? No; I have

Recently I spent some time at a liberal arts college, doing close reading out loud with a group of the profs. It was lovely; stimulating, collegial, civilised. A little pocket of air outside history. But I was aware of being an interloper, of feeling inimical to them. Why? After all, I’m an obsessive reader – and they do little else. I’m uninterested in most kinds of worldly success – and, e.g., none of the six professors present had ever heard of YCombinator. We both love learning and teaching and talking about ideas; admire and promote mathematics; take aesthetics seriously; get really into

Explore this link on the map →

related reading