Irina Bălan's Key Ideas from Lost in Thought
by Zena Hitz

What does it mean to pursue learning for its own sake? Is it even possible? Is the joy of learning itself selfish

For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.

Despite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not. This is why carpentry, or gardening, or housecleaning can be satisfying in a way that ticking boxes, pushing paper, or thinking through complex but trivial problems is not.

The robustness of the capacity of human beings to savor, contemplate, and enjoy indicates its natural depth in us. Leisure, recreation, and art, music, serious conversation, and loving service, by contrast, bring out the best in us. They are goals toward which we strive; they are engines for limitless personal growth.

Hearing such stories, we ought to be motivated to promote sufficient time for all workers to think, to savor, to reflect, to pursue wholesome pastimes —not simply a lucky and special few.

Consider Mendel Nun, a fisherman on a kibbutz in the Galilee, born just after the First World War. He found ancient stone anchors as he fished and collected them into what is now a small museum. Seeking to understand what he found, he studied the sources on fishing in antiquity and, since this was a rare interest, he became one of its foremost experts. I imagine that this intellectual project, discovered in the course of his daily work, changed how he lived.

Consider the story of Albert Einstein. Judged a failure as a graduate student in physics, he could not find work teaching and researching at a university. He worked for seven years as a patent clerk, and in his spare time he wrote his seminal papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the theory of special relativity—papers that turned physics upside down. He called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas".

Intellectual life is not a merely professional activity, to be left to experts. Because its central goods are good universally, it belongs in taxicabs, at the beach house or the book club, in the break room at work, in the backyard of the amateur botanist, in thoughtful reflection whether scattered or disciplined, as much as or more than it does at universities.

I learned over time, first as a graduate student and then as a young professor, that the amateur’s human questions are always the best questions for scholars to start from.