Confessions of a recovering academic, OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Stephen king

I once thought I was the second coming of Plato.

Then I realized I wasn’t.

Now I don’t care one way or another, because I’m too busy reading Stephen King.

I’m a recovering academic, in other words.

***

“Imagination is God, and I am his prophet,” thought middle-school me, and not without reason. I couldn’t stop writing music, drawing, penning poems, acting, imagining movies I wanted to make, and so on, not even to do school — much to my mom’s dismay. (I was homeschooled.)

Then, in late high school and early college, I encountered “the intellectual life.” I felt like a kid who’s gotten bored with last year’s Christmas gifts unwrapping this year’s: in the face of philosophy, how could I have possibly been so obsessed with poetry? I studied Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, and I threw myself into the task with high hopes and thoughtless abandon — I drank the Platonic Kool-Aid down to the last drop.

Plato famously reduced imagination to an educational tool: it stimulates virtue in the restless souls of children more effectively than the arid discussions of philosophers, but needs to be left at the door of intellectual maturity. Midway through college, I realized that seriously embracing philosophy would mean adopting Plato’s position, which would in turn mean definitively turning my back on the way of life I had cherished as a child. It was a moment of deep personal crisis — but for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, I chose philosophy.

Making that choice suffused my final years of study with a confidence and work ethic I’ve never been able to replicate. At the suggestion of several professors, I applied to graduate school, and was accepted with a full scholarship, plus stipend! In the secret places of my soul I feasted on delusions of future glory. I thought of the tomes I would write — published, of course, by the most prestigious university presses — in which I would synthesize all human knowledge, from Thales to Husserl and beyond. I thought of lectures and debates with the finest minds of my generation, and of being studied in universities long after I was dead. When I walked at graduation, I felt like I was stepping into an apotheotic sunset.

Within a year, I was miserable. These professors and most of my fellow students were brilliant; I, on the other hand, was average. These professors produced academic papers on a regular basis; I, on the other hand, could barely finish a cakewalk term paper on schedule. I sheepishly consigned the tomes on which I would rest my laurels to the dustbin of wishful oblivion. Worst of all, the enthusiasm and work ethic that had sustained my last years of college melted, trickling through my fingers like the last spilth of water through the cracked hands of a desert pilgrim. I finished my Master’s degree, but barely. When I walked at that graduation, I felt more like I was stumbling home with my tail between my legs.

Philosophy, it seemed, had gypped me. For the first time since that moment of crisis in college, I found myself wondering, “Why did I do this to myself?”

***

I never felt the answer to that question was far, but it always seemed to lurk just beneath the surface of the protean emotional sludge which pools in the lower regions of the heart. Try as I might, I couldn’t dredge it from those Jungian waters. Then one day last year, the late Sir Roger Scruton — with the instinctive deftness of a grizzly bear paw-fishing in a mountain stream — hooked the subaqueous answer to my question and served it to me on a platter.

I had stumbled on an old interview with Scruton, in which he said:

“I find it is very satisfying to understand the intellectual structure of a philosophical problem, and to have a philosophical overview of a problem that is not in itself philosophical. That is very satisfying. But being satisfied intellectually is not the same thing as being consoled. Being consoled means being at one with something, and finding your place of rest there, and that's not something that I find very easily with philosophy.”

I replayed his comment countless times, because as soon as I heard those words, I knew immediately: that’s my problem!

When I first encountered the intellectual life, I was still, for all intents and purposes, a child, and that made all the difference. If I had encountered Scruton’s distinction then, it would have been lost on me, because children in the West — to the credit of our age — know comparatively little real suffering, and without suffering, consolation is unintelligible.

Children, moreover, are steeped in seemingly perpetual newness, which colors their experience of what Scruton calls satisfaction. The process of mastering a game, reading a book, or developing a friendship can be deeply satisfying, if you have the patience to stick with them. But children are so often beginning that process of adaptation that they become addicted to the anticipation of starting over under new conditions.

In a word, children are born drunk on ease and novelty. Growing up is getting sober, and it’s about as much fun.

With those few words, Scruton helped me realize that I had come to both poetry and philosophy with the restless, anticipatory enthusiasm of a child, and wasn’t in a position to appreciate the satisfactions of either. Moreover, when I first really experienced suffering in college — that is, when I realized I needed to be consoled — I was so dazzled by the glamour of philosophy that I turned to it for consolation. But, pace Boethius, that’s one thing it simply couldn’t provide for me, although I wouldn’t learn that lesson for a few years. Until then, I sped along the highway of higher education, burning the fumes of intellectual vanity, until my tank sputtered, empty, in graduate school.

***

The unexamined life is not worth living, but neither is the relentlessly examined life.

My dalliance with philosophy left me perpetually uneasy around beautiful things: I was always afraid they might distract me from single-minded devotion to Truth. Long after I ceased to take pleasure in reading outright philosophy and theology, I still couldn’t pick up a novel or sit down to watch a movie without that lingering taste of Platonic Kool-Aid spoiling my appetite for either.

The epiphany with Scruton changed that. I found myself approaching the sacraments explicitly as consolation, as balm. And I was consoled. A still, small voice began whispering things to my soul.

I remembered the wild love of beauty that had thrilled me as a child. I wondered if other consolations might be sleeping between the pages of those novels I had been too anxious to open, those novels I had once dismissed as a waste of time. Hesitantly, I began taking them off my shelf one by one… and soon I was tasting the sea air of Earthsea, huddled for warmth beside Sparrowhawk in Lookfar; wandering Arrakis with Paul and Jessica, feverishly stoned on spice and wracked with visions; exploring the spires and rooftops of Gormenghast with only the despicable Steerpike for company; aimlessly pacing the Compson household with Benjy the manchild mourning for exiled Caddie… and I was consoled. Richly, warmly, deeply — consoled.

Enter, at long last, Stephen King.

I had kept my distance from his books even after I sloughed my scruples about literature, because he seemed so low, so vulgar. But for some reason I still don’t understand — perhaps it, too, is still swimming in those Jungian waters of the mind — I began here and there to read some of his short stories. Stephen King writes with an earthy candor, and he does sometimes indulge in gratuitous vulgarity, but that’s because he writes of the most human things, in the most human way. He can scare you, he can make you laugh, and he can move you to tears. Reading him, I was consoled.

It was Stephen King who led me to another epiphany:

“I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them. Nor am I speaking metaphorically. Good writing — good stories — are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.” (Introduction, Nightmares and Dreamscapes)

The imagination may be a tool, in other words, but not like a hammer. It’s the flint that sparks the fire. The hearth of my soul was dark, because reason preferred to ponder by starlight, and it was damn cold in there. Stephen King, among others, broke in and made the hearth blaze again. Reason’s still sweating in the corner, but he’ll get used to it.

***

I said my soul ran out of gas somewhere in the desolate wilds of graduate school. I’ll be honest, I never expected that the two Good Samaritans stopping to fill my tank would be Roger Scruton and Stephen King — and I suspect they’d be just as surprised! The road to intellectual sobriety makes for strange bedfellows.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have promises to keep — in Derry, Maine…