Review: Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought

This review shouldn’t exist. After all, I read Lost in Thought to produce this review, and not – lamentably – for the sheer love of learning. Even worse, I fretted over what my opinions of the book ought to be, prompted by my desire to write a good review. What you are reading, then, is a symptom of the problems that Zena Hitz sets out to address in Lost in Thought, a book that is part (spiritual) autobiography, part polemic, and part self-help manual.

Fundamentally, the target that Hitz takes aim at in Lost in Thought is ‘worldliness’. She never uses this word, but it encapsulates the fact that this is a book guided by the Christian dichotomy between spirit and world. Hitz’s world is the social and political realm that she sees as ruled by competition, lies, superficiality, and egotism. A world that has become an Althusserian nightmare in which we, as workaholics, all become slaves of slaves of slaves, endlessly pursuing wealth, social superiority, or what Hitz sarcastically calls ‘making a difference’. A world in which our obsession with observing ourselves and others as a form of spectacle means that we all willingly submit to observation and render ourselves superficial objects, docile puppets in a pointless, idly satisfying show. Hitz depicts this world through tales of her own life in academia, as well as through her broad-brushed attacks on the current version of mass higher education as she views it.

Conversely, Hitz’s spirit is the fundamental human dignity that exists within us all, and which, through intellectual passion, functions as a retreat from the world and an escape to a deeper communion with humanity itself. For Hitz, the pure love of learning, and the humanity that underlies it, exist in all of our original selves, rather like Charles Lamb’s assertion that the heart of childhood remains within those who we call wisest among us. So Hitz returns to her childhood to depict the ideal of intellectual life upon which the rest of her arguments centre. She lovingly remembers a youth in which stacks of books lined floors and walls, obsessions were cultivated, arguments were had around campfires, and all with the Wildean assertion that ‘not one piece of knowledge that we sought or acquired was useful for any purpose whatsoever’.

Given that Hitz goes on to spend 200 pages arguing for the usefulness of ‘useless’ learning, what she is really doing here is dissociating learning from the kinds of outcomes that have come to be conventionally valued. Namely, outcomes that aim for ‘visible results or high prestige credentials’. In her first chapter, she builds up a who’s who of virtuous models of withdrawal from the world into literal and/or figurative invisibility. The Virgin Mary, Einstein, Malcolm X, Simone Weil, Primo Levi, and Socrates are among the cast of characters that Hitz draws upon to illustrate how isolation and marginalisation can provide the conditions for an emergence into a greater world. The conclusion is that the intellectual life is essentially ascetic; it requires the giving up of a lot, for the disciplined pursuit of the fundamentally more.

If it seems counterintuitive – and more than a little daunting – for us to look to luminaries like Einstein or the Madonna as our models for the hidden life of the mind, Hitz acknowledges the issue. She is well aware that by painting these idols, the first chapter of her book sets up aspirational models, which would be an instrumental purpose encouraging egotism and social advancement. In other words, part of the problem. Instead, at the end of the lengthy first chapter, Hitz introduces the exemplar who is to be the star of Chapter 2: Saint Augustine. For Augustine, the love of learning is itself one of the highest manifestations of the human, because it is an escape into what Augustine calls love itself, and what Hitz calls communion. As such, within Hitz’s argument, rather than pushing us to gain individual renown, learning drives us to see the universal glory in everyone.

Augustine is a hero here because he provides for Hitz a story of redemption from the depths. Augustine’s self-reflection and conversion, which sees him abandon a lucrative and glamorous career, an obsession with sex, and a false spiritual ideology, mirrors Hitz’s own double conversion as narrated in her prologue. Having seen her childhood love of learning corrupted into a self-involved pursuit of academic stardom, Hitz first converts to Catholicism, and then through Catholicism, converts to a career that sees academia – when carried out correctly – as a kind of loving service.

Approaching Lost in Thought as a thesis on education, one begins to feel that Hitz’s book is a descendant of Matthew Arnold’s work, most famously Culture and Anarchy. Arnold calls the means that we turn into ends fetishes, things which might be productive of wealth, machinery, or population but which are not productive for or of humanity itself. His antidote is to study the best that has been thought and known, dispassionately and for its own sake. The similarities are clear. Throughout Arnold’s work, he attacks the English public school system, a system that he famously satirised for teaching only manners and cricket. Hitz argues that too often wealth, social status, and justice become ends when they should be means, and she closes her book by attacking North American higher education, a system that deals in ‘opinionization’ through simply reducing learning to sanitized, regurgitable nuggets, and which neglects the most vital commodity: teaching.

It is in the nature of the teacher that Hitz’s book yields its most powerful and democratic insights. She believes that we all need great models to draw on – which she provides in abundance throughout Lost in Thought. But she also believes that true teaching occurs through the wisdom and guidance of elders who have not just experience, but the willingness to ‘expose their own ignorance and uncertainty when guiding the young’ in person-to-person communion. Such a teacher, who begins to sound rather like Jacques Rancière’s ideal in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, engages on an equal level with a student who is assumed to be capable of taking responsibility for her own learning, and who is motivated to do so. Crucially, both the assumption and the motivation rest on the simple fact of the student’s humanity, and with it the urge to be a knower and a lover of humanity at its deepest.

If all we need to learn is our own humanity; and if teaching is a natural outcrop of the communion or love that grows from pursuing learning for its own sake, then all we need to do is look around. Examples of what Hitz calls ‘the human splendor’ – which is both the object and outcome of the true intellectual life – surround and permeate us. They are within each of us, if we only choose to look to them, and away from ‘the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture’. We can sit back in awe at the hidden wonders of the everyday, and in so doing, we can shed light on them, a light that for Hitz is the only guide to a healed human world.