‘Wisdom Is Better Than Rubies’: The Intellectual Life Is for Everyone

Great thinkers remind us that silence, reading, and contemplation are the beginning of wisdom.

The intellectual life requires moments of solitude, reflection, and engagement with ideas that nourish the mind. Giammarco Boscaro/Unsplash

Whatever their physical conditioning, all Americans recognize the value of hitting the gym, playing golf or tennis, walking or running, and movement in general. We’re also more aware than ever about the foods we eat, deliberating, for instance, over the inventory of calories and additives on bottles and canned goods in the grocery store or limiting our intake of sugar and alcohol.

The same level of care extends to our mental and emotional well-being. We take to heart self-help guides such as “The Healthy Mind Toolkit” and “Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry.” Some of us seek therapy or take medication when we’re troubled or depressed, while others find strength and comfort in their religious beliefs and practices.

But what about the intellect, that seedbed of ideas, imagination, and reason? How many of us incorporate the intellectual life into our quest for optimal health?

An Open Invitation

The intellectual life: If that description conjures up any image at all, we may think of some pale, dusty scholar spending his days in a library’s study carrel, surrounded by books, papers, a laptop, and empty coffee mugs. Or perhaps we summon to mind a professor with a smattering of the alphabet following her name: B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

Yet in her book “Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life,” scholar, teacher, and writer Zena Hitz maintains that the intellectual life belongs to all who wish to possess it.

“If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings,“ she wrote. ”All intellectual life, no matter how ultimately sophisticated, originates in the human questions arising in and behind ordinary life.”

A.G. Sertillanges’s classic “The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods” extends this same invitation. His book is aimed a bit more specifically at students and teachers, yet just as Hitz does in “Lost in Thought,” Sertillanges opens the gates of the intellectual life to anyone wishing to enter.

Great works are not reserved for scholars—they're available to anyone willing to ask questions and seek wisdom. JJFarq/Shutterstock

What It Means

So what is this neglected garden of thought, this intellectual life to which all are invited?

The definitions vary, but they contain commonalities. The care and keeping of the intellect require intentional solitude, meditation on questions asked by the heart, and sources of wisdom—usually books, music, or the arts—to spark our interior conversations. Wisdom is the ultimate goal for us as well, to know ourselves as best we can and to love learning and truth and so become more fully human.

In his short book “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day,” a guide which remains in print after a century, journalist and novelist Arnold Bennett divides a week into parts and finds that most of us have several hours available when we might “reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.”

In Bennett’s program, literature, history, and the arts are all worthy objects of pursuit. He recommends setting aside a portion of the day, withdrawing from the world, stimulating our thoughts with reading and the arts, and contemplating the big questions of life. Distractions—in our day, that would be first and foremost our phones and screens—are the enemy of such contemplation and must be diligently avoided.

To begin constructing your own intellectual life, should you choose to do so, it’s therefore first necessary to set aside some daily time for this project while shunning distractions. Below are several other assists recommended by Hitz & Co. to steer you into the intellectual life.

Put Ambition and Pretense Away

Hitz stated, “Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is beyond politics and social life.”

Studying for career advancement is good, but it lies outside the realm of the project we’re discussing here. Moreover, to take what you’ve learned and use it to lord over others ruins completely the purpose of this safari into the interior self. No—the intellectual life means studying and meditating on philosophy, history, literature, and the arts to enhance our souls, not as a tool for material advancement or showing off our superiority.

"School of Athens," a Renaissance wall fresco by Raphael, decorates the interior of Stanze di Raffaello, Vatican Museum, Italy. Aristotle and Plato, among other philosophers, are at the center. Pixabay/Pexels

Ask the Big Questions

The busy lives we lead bring many questions, such as “What are we going to have for supper?” “Should we invite Uncle Ted for Thanksgiving?” and “Why are you voting for that man for president?” Necessary as they are, these questions can smother the larger questions of life that hover around us, such as “Why are we here?” “What is beauty?” and “Am I leading a worthy life?”

Whether we’re reading Aristotle or Dostoevsky, listening with our hearts to some piece by Brahms, or writing a poem, when we make these retreats, we’ll find moments of reflection in which such questions arise. And as we consider our answers, we’ll find that the questions themselves will ask more questions.

Discover the Grace of Silence

For those unaccustomed to it, silence can be terrifying. Noise in our world is a constant. Conversations, radios, car horns, beeping phones: The intrusions of babble and blare are endless.

“Do you want an intellectual life?” Sertillanges asked. “Begin by creating within you a zone of silence.”

Christian writers and worshippers have long held that we encounter God in the silence of our hearts. There, too, we can encounter our deeper selves.

Silence creates the space needed to encounter both our deeper selves and the wisdom of others. RossHelen/Shutterstock

Sip, Don’t Gulp

“The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading,” Sertillanges wrote.

Bennett wholeheartedly agreed with this proposition.

“I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year,” he said.

Like Sertillanges, Bennett stressed the importance of absorbing what we read and then taking the time, a great deal of time if necessary, to reflect on that reading and how it might lighten up our darkness.

Outside of the time that we set aside for the intellect, we can, of course, continue to read as we wish for entertainment.

Connect With Wisdom

In “Lost in Thought,” Hitz several times showed us the magic that occurs when books such as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels or Augustine’s “Confessions” bring their light to her own thoughts and reflections.

Bennett recommended the works of the Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus: “Read a chapter—and so short they are, the chapters!—in the evening and concentrate on it the next morning. You will see.”

The wisdom of the past can thus act as a springboard into the hidden wisdom within us.

True learning comes not from speed reading, but from reflecting on what we read and how it shapes our lives. Lomb/Shutterstock

Make the Joy of Learning and Revelation the Center of This Adventure

This one is simple. If we stick with our program, our efforts will bring delights. By cultivating an interior garden of thought, we ourselves become a part of that soil and those blossoms and will carry those flowers of reflection and study, often unconsciously, to our families, friends, and the world.

“Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time to think,” Hitz concluded. “Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.”