A Scholar Experiences Poverty At a Mid-life Break

A Thrilling Start To An Academic Life

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s, Zena Hitz had always loved reading. As did her older brother, and parents, with the family often engaging in fierce literary feuds that sparked off her lifelong zeal for learning. It was the kind of home where knowledge wasn’t viewed merely as a means to a job, but as something “that had its worth in itself.”

When she pursued a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College, her family did not object. In the idyllic campus, she savored the manner in which ideas were tossed about or expounded – with some discussions running over into lengthening nights, as students jousted with insights. “There was no artificial clarity or forced organization to soften the discomfort of the work of the mind, no cushion between us and the difficulties or danger of inquiry or the thrill of discovery.”

A Gradual Disenchantment with Academia

While many of her friends pursued careers in law, politics, journalism or business, Zena remained in academia – by attending graduate school and then by becoming a professor. Even at graduate school, she had started sensing that academic life consisted of more than the transmission and production of ideas. There was a familiar, if aggravating currying for favors from the “in” crowd, and ruthless contests between colleagues. Lofty institutions and departments could not evade the micro-politics of judgments, of barbs and put-downs: “To say we sought status and approval sounds more bloodless than it was: we wanted it at the expense of others.” It was, as she puts it, a gladiatorial battle, with victors treated like mini-celebrities. At first, she participated enthusiastically as a member of the fray, wishing like all others, to emerge among the triumphant.

Then 9/11 happened. Suddenly, at least for an interlude, many of the pretensions vanished. People started displaying more compassion and friendliness, to an extent that Hitz started hoping that some other horror would visit them in order to awaken everyone’s humanity. In the meanwhile, she also started questioning her belonging to this community. Should she continue to wander among libraries or should she engage in other ways with the world? But since she couldn’t yet conceive of an alternate path, she stayed on by changing her research focus rather than her choice of career.

Soon, she had landed a tenure-track position at a large university in the South. Her faculty work was more leisurely than her graduate student slog. But the extra pockets of time were now clouded by “boredom and loneliness.”

Volunteering In The Real World

To break the monotony, she started volunteering at a tutoring service, at a hospice and a refugee center. She also wanted to join a religion. Since her parents hadn’t practiced her ancestral religion – Judaism – she didn’t feel particularly compelled by it. After attending various church services, she picked a Catholic parish. In 2006, she was baptized.

Moving soon after to Baltimore, she was torn by the evident distress in the city and her own bubble-wrapped academic environment: “In Baltimore, it was impossible to hide from the sight of poverty or its consequences.” She started deliberately encountering suffering rather than averting it. She also started sensing that her academic life was relatively alienated from many of those scenes: “I remember going to one academic dinner party among many and suddenly feeling queasy as we suggested that the central values in our lives were fine wines and trips to Europe.”

At Baltimore, she met a more diverse crowd – people who had forsaken successful careers or others who volunteered alongside their jobs: “They worked in hidden corners, invisible to any broader public.” While she persisted as a professor, ignoring the discontent simmering underneath, she also practiced what the Catholics might call “discerning a vocation.” This involved spending time in silent prayer, and permitting God or a Higher Force to guide her next steps.

Stepping Off the Academic Track

Since she had never been short of self-esteem, she felt God would tug her into some noticeably standout role. Like living as a Catholic anarchist in a poor neighborhood, with an anarchist husband and kids. Of course, she couldn’t figure out how she would fund herself through all this.

Later, she wondered if she should become a nun, but she felt miserable even in the most stunning nunneries. With rising aggravation, during a particular church service, she thought about the Madonna House. It wasn’t an exotic place, but it would imbue her with a physical experience of poverty: “I understood that I could not live a life of the mind and love my neighbors as a hobby…I had to love my neighbors and find a mode of intellectual life that expressed that.”

Choosing Barebones Living

At Madonna House, she resided in a dorm, wore second-hand clothing, pruned her personal use of water, ate vegetables only when the seasons or freezer stores allowed. Inside the House, tasks were rotated by diktat.

At first, she was a baker, emerging from the kitchen slathered in flour and dough. Then a handicrafts worker, “restoring furniture, repairing books, organizing materials, decorating for holidays.” Then assigned to the library, and the antiques department, where donated items were restored. Common jobs like cleaning, washing dishes and gardening were shared. No one was permitted to stick to one area or role for too long. The idea was to stop seeing work as a means to parade one’s talents, but rather as a form of service to the community.

These experiences were new to Hitz, who had from the age of 17 till 38, always been attached to institutions of higher education: “First as a student and then as a professor and scholar of classical philosophy.”

In the Catholic community, since no one was climbing the ranks, simpler tasks started acquiring a “luminosity” that was scarce earlier – even jobs like sticking leaves on cards, painting pots. She also started pondering the real value of an intellectual life. Her three years had sharpened her awareness of how others – like taxi drivers, plumbers, artisans et al possessed a kind of intellectual life that could rarely be fathomed by ivoried academics. Over time, she realized she wanted to impart her learnings to new students at her undergraduate alma mater.

Returning With New-found Reflections

Returning to St. John’s with a deeper sense of what constitutes an intellectual life, Zena found herself pulsing with renewed passion. As she puts it, learning is not just what happens between the pages of a book, or inside a classroom lecture. It’s also what takes place when you watch the rain splattering across a window, or birds gathering at a rainwater puddle. No knowledge is of value unless it shifts another’s understanding. “The hidden life of learning is its core, what matters about it.”

Moreover, learning has to abide with its “splendid uselessness” or it will fail to “bear its practical fruit.” The mere nurturing of a rich inner life, a sort of cave-like refuge or escape from the tediousness and suffering that constitutes life, should be one its ends. Such quiet, masked pleasures can only be transmitted person-to-person – not through online lectures or inside large classrooms. Moreover, it’s as critical as any other human endeavor – cooking, cleaning, making art, caretaking.

Such a life doesn’t have to be confined to universities or schools. “…it belongs in taxicabs, at the beach house or the book club, in the breakroom at work…” Moreover, it need not be confined to elite students or to materially rich households. In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), one worker says after reading Tennyson’s poetry: “The colored world flashed out and entranced my fancy; they drew pictures in my mind…My dormant imagination opened like the sun.”

Such riches are strewn all around us, but sometimes it takes a glittering mind to reinforce their magical radiance.

References

Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Princeton University Press, 2020