On November 10, Saint Benedict Institute co-founder Jared Ortiz was invited to interview educator and scholar Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press, 2020). This event was presented by the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago. The following excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity. Watch the full, archived interview here: https://youtu.be/7iVhIlDkrVI.
Jared Ortiz: Let’s start with the prologue you wrote with the delightful title, “How Washing Dishes Restored My Intellectual Life.” Classically, servile labor is always contrasted with the intellectual life. Even today, we often see this as a hindrance or a distraction from our real work. So start us off by telling us how washing dishes restored your intellectual life.
Zena Hitz: As far as washing dishes and intellectual life, I think it’s helpful to first recognize that our culture disassociates our work from the obvious human good that it is meant to produce. You can work away at something without really knowing why it matters.
I went to a wonderful liberal arts college, St. John’s, where I teach now, which matured my intellectual interest. I learned how to sit with a difficult text or a difficult question and work through it. Then I went to graduate school because I was in love with learning and I wanted to do more of it. I became a professional academic scholar in classical philosophy. But I got sucked into the prestige and status game that happens in various parts of academia. I lost touch with what I was doing. I didn’t like factory style teaching in large classrooms. I had to reduce the books we were reading to bullet points and evaluate how well they were absorbed. Many of my students were there to fill a requirement and never caught the bug. It felt mechanical. So I quit.
I went and lived in a religious community in Canada for a time and it was very focused on manual labor and poverty. It was there that I lived a very full human life and had everything I could ever want except for an intellectual life at the level of intensity I was accustomed to. I had to think hard about why it [the intellectual life] mattered, why it mattered for me and why it might matter for the kinds of people I was around who were from all walks of life, all levels of interest. The book came out of that experience from living in a very basic way and having a chance to think about why the intellectual life mattered.