Here Come the Allodidacts

Deep Reading with Ena Alvarado, Franklin Eccher, Brian Hamilton, Benjamin Laufer, Gabriella Okigbo, and Caroline Young

A core component of our activity here at The Hinternet is the exploration of ideas for the preservation and stewardship of the irreducibly human powers of creativity, imagination, and intellectual discovery, in the face of a rising machine-dominated social order. A clear split has emerged within the broad coalition of people who share this concern, between those who are seeking to bend tech to their own creative will in new ways, and those who argue it’s best just to leave your tech in the lockers by the door when you enter a space of human creativity at work, whether intellectual or artistic. Both sides agree that the effort of preservation and stewardship must be assured through new forms of allodidacticism — not sequestering yourself as an intellectual hikikomori, but also not pretending that the traditional credential-granting institutions are fulfilling their responsibility to keep our humanistic and artistic traditions alive. Nay indeed, we are all in agreement that universities, at this point, are where intellectual passion goes to die, buried under mountains of pointless grant applications imposed on us humanists by the insane and suicidal cargo-cult of STEM worship, which in the end is just a poorly disguised worship of money and power (to name only one of several conjoint threats).

We are grateful to our friend Bill Deresiewicz, and to his associates, for this compelling account of their own smartphones-in-your-cubbies approach to the allodidactic calling. What results they are getting! And how meaningful for us, too, to see Matthew Strother, our old friend, and one of the most loyal early Hinternet readers and supporters, honored in this way. —The Hinternet

The mistake people make when they talk about reading today (I have made it) is to accept that it is just one thing. The screen, our fractured attention spans, et cetera ad infinitum. But it is not one thing and never was and needn’t be. Culture, Lionel Trilling said, is a pattern of oppositions. Every culture calls forth its countercultures, which are a part of culture, too. There are many forms of reading, even now, and many people doing them. Nothing is “inevitable”, as the tech lords would have us believe. No one is making you do this. (“For the individual,” said Harold Rosenberg, “the last voice in the issue of being or not being himself is still his own.”) You can go your way, and you can even attempt to bring others along.

My student Matthew Strother understood this. He didn’t own a smartphone; he didn’t have Wi-Fi. He would take his laptop down to the café each morning, check his email, then stay off the Web for the rest of the day. He read, books, slowly, cover to cover. Fiction, poetry, history, thought; book after book after book after book. Having determined to work his way through the whole of the Western philosophical canon (“to run through the course set by civilization up to one’s own time,” as Mark Greif has put it), he started learning ancient Greek by way of making a beginning. He believed that what’s at stake, when you read a book, is nothing less than life itself.

But as much as he loved books, he also loved company, and most of all, company in the reading of books. He loved school, or at least the ideal of it: a small group of people studying together, seriously and unprofessionally, learning for the sake of learning and conversing on the fundamental things. He had brushed against the genuine article in a handful of courses in college and graduate school, but he refused to accept the idea that it belongs exclusively to young adulthood. As he headed toward thirty, he began to lay plans for a school of his own. He thought about Plato’s Academy and Deep Springs College. He thought about The Catherine Project and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (through both of which he took courses). A student of Nietzsche, he thought about the philosopher’s experiences at Villa Rubinacci, where he passed a crucial winter in the company of three close friends.

Matthew got his notebook out and formulated principles: a very small scale; free room, board, and tuition; “an aspect of retreat” (remote location, no technologies of information or communication); mindful living (“an on-going, open interrogation of conduct, habits, and ethics”); a program of study, labor, and contemplation; a commitment to cultivating attentional capacities; student self-governance; communal self-reliance; “an overt emphasis placed on who you are going to be in the world, not what”. The school would be a Deep Springs for adults, The Catherine Project but in person, Walden in a group, a secular humanist monastery. In 2019, with his partner, Berta Willisch, he bought a beautiful old farm in the Hudson Valley, two hours north of New York City, and prepared to make ready.

You have no doubt figured out by now that Matthew is no longer with us. He died two years ago, of cancer, at the age of 35, facing the end, to the end, with clear mind, wide heart, and open eyes. Before he went, he charged Berta with keeping his spirit alive by realizing his vision. And that, with the help of myself and some others, is what she has done. Already last May, scarcely a year after his death, the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life conducted its inaugural program, then two more in August and October. I led the third. Five students, a teaching assistant, and me. One book, ten days, three hours a day, around the table in the autumn morning in the barn. Long meals, long conversations, shared labor and play. No phones, no spinning world.

If I say it felt like heaven, life perfected, I do so mindful of the way Virginia Woolf concludes her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”:

I have sometimes dreamt…that when the Day of Judgment dawns…the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

So when The Hinternet approached me to contribute to this series, I knew that that was what I’d write about: this thing we did, this flag we planted, this practice that, we insist, will also be a way of reading now and in the future. But then I thought, why only me? Each person’s experience is unique; I should let the others —Ena, Frank, Brian, Ben, and Caroline, plus my TA, Gabriella— speak about their own. So I asked them to write something up, and I offer their accounts in due course below, before some final thoughts of my own.

For me, the reading culture that our practice would be counter to, as I thought about my session in advance, was as much that of school, of college, as of the internet. This was one of the things I was most looking forward to. The reading we’d be doing would be utterly non-instrumental. There would be no papers, no grades, no credits or transcripts, and thus none of the habits and affects that come with them. The students wouldn’t be competing with each other, nor would they be stressed or fearful. They wouldn’t be doing the minimum, or trying to “figure out what the teacher is looking for”, or asking whether this was going to be on the test. I wouldn’t have to wheedle them or humor them or pressure them to do the reading. The program wasn’t going to get them anything except the experience of doing the program. They would be there for that.

I was also looking forward to evading the conventions of academic literary study. You know: theory, jargon, interpretive paradigms, secondary texts with their secondhand thoughts. Students in the program do not know what they’ll be reading —not even if it will be literature or philosophy or history or something else— until they get there. The point is to enroll people who are attracted to the idea of the experience itself, not a particular book or author or genre, but also to prevent them from stuffing their heads in advance with clever things to say that they had read in some professor’s monograph. It would just be us and the book and what we could make of it.

For the same reason, I looked for an edition of my chosen text —it was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, because Berta had asked the faculty to select books that had been transformative for us, and I had pretty much become Stephen Dedalus when I was 19— that included as little ancillary material as possible. I wanted one with no introduction, no notes, no aids or guides, no nothing but the naked text. It is remarkable how difficult that proved to find. No one, apparently, trusts the reader, certainly not the student reader, to encounter a classic like Portrait on their own. I went to Powell’s, here in Portland, Oregon, where I found at least a dozen editions, old and new, but not a one that wasn’t garlanded with extras. The Penguin edition, which seems to be the market leader, has a 37-page introduction and 52 pages of notes. At last, Gabriella found something online: the Viking Compass edition of 1964, slim and sturdy, handsomely designed, and available, scraping together the sellers, in just enough copies.

It also helped, in the event, that my students arrived with a variety of intellectual backgrounds. Ena is a former English major, now a film and book critic; Caroline is a creative writer and visual artist; Frank studies the history of education; Brian teaches ethics and theology; Gabriella is a former philosophy major with interests in mysticism and monasticism; and Ben, an autodidact college dropout, reads everything that he can get his hands on. Such heterogeneity is something that we look for in assembling the groups (and another reason we don’t announce the readings in advance). We don’t want a bunch of former lit majors studying literature or philosophers studying philosophy, people who have all been initiated into the disciplinary norms, who know the sorts of things that you’re supposed to say. We want our students reading as generalists, as amateurs — in other words, as human beings, with everything they might bring.

So much for the kinds of reading that we don’t do in the program. What do we do? The rubric that Berta and I arrived at is “deep reading”. The term’s imprecision is part of the point. Every aspect of the program is meant to be conducted in a spirit of experimentation. Our idea is to create structures within which students (and teachers) can improvise, explore, and play. Matthew laid down principles. We are investigating what they mean, and what else they might mean. So it is with deep reading, which we define, simply, as serious, sustained engagement with texts of lasting value.

Whatever else it is, deep reading is slow reading. That is why the program only does a single book each session, and not a long one, either. Portrait runs about 250 pages, and we talked about it for thirty hours of seminar time — the equivalent of twelve weeks, more than three quarters of a semester, in a standard college course. Nor was there a single day we didn’t have to cut our conversation short.

Beyond that, for me, deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them. The afternoon the students arrived, I handed out a sheet with some orienting material. At the top, I put two quotations. The first was from David Neidorf, the former longtime president of Deep Springs College: “To read a book truly is to cooperate with its effort to teach you something.” The second was from Ursula K. Le Guin: “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” Says it, that is, like all art, through form, which it is the purpose of close reading to expound.

One of the virtues of choosing Portrait is that it is highly responsive to this kind of scrutiny. The first day’s assignment was nine pages long. This was already a way to signal to the group what we were going to be about. The next morning, we launched right in with no preliminaries, beginning at the beginning, which is not the first line but the title. We ended up spending about an hour on it, turning it this way and that, starting with “Portrait” and discussing every word but “of”. Then it was a good half-hour on the epigraph, a line from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And so it went; we barely made it past the middle of the second page that day. The whole thing was quietly thrilling: for them, because they were seeing just how much was possible; for me, because I was seeing how much they could do.

As fun as all that was, it was on to other things the second day. What else could deep reading involve? An aspect of the program is that students take turns leading the discussion for a day. Gabriella and I had decided that would happen on days three through seven, so we felt that one of our jobs, the first two days, was to introduce a range of ways of engaging the text — so the students could make use of them themselves if they so chose, but also to encourage them to come up with their own.

With that in mind, I asked them to arrive in class the second morning having selected a short passage from either of the first days’ readings that especially appealed to them, to read it aloud, say what they liked about it, and to talk about what was happening in the prose to create the effects they liked. The point was to have us attend to the novel’s aesthetic dimension, the sensuality of its language, its beauty rather than its meaning — something that is rarely if ever discussed in a college class, still less one in graduate school, where the idea of beauty is indeed anathema, retrograde, naïve.

Next we tried a third modality. In the center of the novel’s first chapter is the famous Christmas dinner scene, where the young Stephen witnesses his family idyll (as he imagines it) crumble to pieces under the emotional pressure of Irish politics in the wake of the fall of Parnell. The scene seems purpose-made for dramatic performance, so we chose parts, arranged ourselves in the appropriate places around the seminar table, and did a staged reading. Afterwards, I asked the group what they had learned — what each of them had learned about their character, what all of us had learned about the scene’s dynamics and construction. In what way the exercise had been valid as a form of deep reading.

Then, day three, the students took the baton. I had been loving how little I needed to guide them, especially compared to undergraduates. These were grown-ups, and the best thing I could say, I saw, was nothing. Now I kept my lips shut altogether, lest I undermine the leader-of-the-day’s authority. Ena had us write responses to specific questions; Brian had us do stylistic imitations; Frank asked us to take turns acting out —really acting out, this time, he said (he gave us some time to rehearse)— three of Stephen’s epiphanic moments.

But for the most part, as on the days I led myself, all five simply had us talk — had us do that miraculous thing where a group of people sit together, patiently and openly, and one of you says one thing, and another responds with another, and like sticks being placed in a stove, the whole thing suddenly kindles, achieves its own momentum, and the spirit flows, and some larger thing is born between you that is all of you together. It is a kind of intellectual jazz: call and response, solos and riffs, theme and variation, a beautiful polyphony and unpredictable improvisation.

I had forgotten about this. It had been a long time since I’d taught, many years of solitary reading, and when I imagined what the program would do for its participants, I thought exclusively about the individual, the possibility of personal transformation in relation to a text. What I learned is that the highest purpose of a text may be the conversations it enables. I am reminded of a certain yoga teacher who is known to say that the poses are not the point; the poses exist to provide a conduit for the breath. The text exists to provide us with an opportunity to talk about it, to commune together through it. We gathered, in the program, to read together; we read together as an occasion for gathering.

And that, it turned out, is what nearly all the others wrote about, as well, each with their own variations of sensibility and perspective, when I asked them to reflect on what we went through.

Here is Brian:

Reading feels lonely now. It’s strange, because being alone has always been one of my favorite parts of reading.

We all read alone there too, of course — twenty pages or so at a time, on the lawn or in the barn or in our rooms. But that reading seemed preliminary. I barely remember it. I have other much more powerful memories of reading alone. There, it felt instead like we didn’t really start reading until we sat down at the seminar table. Only after the curtain had been pulled over the door to block out the cold, only after the fire had been stoked and the coffee poured, only then did the book begin to reveal itself.

Maybe that seems obvious. I’ve spent many, many hours at seminar tables, and they would have been an embarrassing waste if I hadn’t often come away with some new insight into the book or into myself. But I mean something more than that. It wasn’t just that I noticed some new detail or made some new connection because one of the others pointed out what I had missed. In that case, my private experience of the book would still have been primary, and the seminar supplemental. This was the opposite. My primary experience of the book was a collective experience.

I was worried at first that spending so much time together would compromise the solitude I came for. It’s usually only by being alone with a book that I’m really able to hear what I need in it. Somehow, though, while we were around that table, the voices of my friends became part of my inner voice. My solitude felt deeper and more complete. I could not have found what I needed in that book if it had not been for them.

So now I find myself feeling lonely when I read, and I find myself wishing for a solitude that I cannot quite reach alone. I suppose that’s just an overwrought way of saying that I miss my friends. But it is also the trace and the promise of a different kind of reading and a different kind of solitude than I knew was possible.

Caroline:

I turned to books for companionship, but the truth is that reading can be incredibly lonely. How often had I encountered something in the forest of words —a strange beast of the mind, a revelation in the form of the campfire’s flicker— only to despair upon realizing no one else would get to experience it with me?

Reading has largely been an act of solitude for me. Name any reason: screens have replaced pages; tastes don’t overlap; there’s no time to read, much less meet and chat about what we’ve read. I’ve lost count of how many book clubs had arisen out of good intention, yet fallen because the intention wasn’t strong enough for the group to follow through. And while my friends and I may share what we’ve recently read, we know that any attempt at retelling tends to become a muddled mess, that the nuance —the good stuff— inevitably gets lost in translation unless both parties have read the book. Once in a blue moon, my ears perk up at the sound of a familiar title, and I get to ask, “What did you think?” Sometimes, this line of inquiry leads to a riveting tête-à-tête; more often than not, the conversation drifts away, never to be plucked from the sky again.

But recently, what I had begun to accept as reality —that reading was an integral part of me that very few, if anyone, would ever get to truly know— got flipped on its head.

Every morning, a small group of readers, all strangers to each other at first, gathered around the table to discuss what we had just read. More accurately, we discussed the text all the time: at the dining table, under the willow tree, late at night over shared snacks. We also acted out scenes, debated, sleuthed, wrote, and filled the pages with marginalia. In the characters, we saw ourselves or people we knew. We shared what parts of the text we resonated with or didn’t at all, and what memories arose for us, whether of an interaction, environment, or emotion. By diving into the book so rigorously, we mapped out not only the text but also how we saw, related, empathized, and connected with one another.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, reading took over my entire life. I can’t express how fortunate I was to meet my fellow readers at the Matthew Strother Center and share such special memories with them. My only qualm is similar to the one I expressed about reading — that any firsthand account will fall tremendously short of experiencing the real thing.

Ena:

During each of the ten days I spent at the Matthew Strother Center, the three hours of seminar were always, without a doubt, my favorite. I cherished the mornings of structured conversation in the barn far more than I did any other moments on campus, including those of reading on my own. I guess if one were to cling less literally to definitions, what we did around that big wooden table would still qualify as reading.

By “what we did” I merely mean an assortment of practices centered around a text: asking questions, proposing interpretations, reciting passages, playing out scenes, writing pastiches, and so on. Somehow, participation in these fairly simple activities invariably led to precious insights and sometimes even to epiphanies of the Joycean kind. Seminar brought the novel’s richness into focus. It clarified serious confusions. It induced an appreciation for beauty, especially with regard to elusive lines. It revealed ideas and unleashed feelings that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. It should come as no surprise then that, like Stephen, I often felt “transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience [falling] from [me] in that magic moment.”

How could so much come out of so little? To me the answer seems plain enough: seminar created the perfect conditions for concentrated thinking, and as a young Stephen once mused, “by thinking of things you could understand them.” It obviously helped that we were completely cut off from distractions and that nothing in the book, no matter how perplexing, could be “looked up.” There was no way to rely on secondary literature, say, to cut some corners. We just had the page and each other to make sense of Joyce’s words. Still, I think the power of seminar transcended the Center’s “low technology environment.” The magic stemmed from reading with others.

When I read alone, I rarely enact any of the practices I mentioned two paragraphs ago, and if I do, they take place faintly and fleetingly, within the confines of my head. In contrast to communal reading, solitary reading now strikes me as quite passive and ultimately narrow in scope. Dialogue exposed me to unfamiliar trains of thought that frequently catalyzed new and unexpected analyses of my own. Reading in the company of others also opened up fresh ways of engaging with a text beyond exegesis. By reading out loud or discussing how the same phrase could sound different upon repetition, I was able to enjoy the novel in a more embodied sense — for its tickling of the senses rather than its intellectual nourishment.

I am reminded of a passage from Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, in which “the reading person” is described as “gluttonous in the most revolting manner”:

It is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full, as one might say, rather than read the whole book as the normal reader does, who in the end knows the book he has read no more than an air passenger knows the landscape he overflies. He does not even perceive the contours. Thus all people nowadays read everything by flying over, they read everything and know nothing.

The experience of seminar stands as the greatest antithesis of this kind of empty reading, all too often encouraged by the vastness of the internet and the list-obsessed, “reading challenge” mentality of sites like Goodreads. My time at the Matthew Strother Center checked these greedy impulses. It may sound trite, but I realized that to make sense of letters from cover to cover is to engage in the most bare-bones and impoverished form of reading. When we pause and study, especially with others, we instead catch “glimpses of the real world about [us].”

Ben:

In search of deeper friendships, people search out the commune. And in search for a path towards transcendence, the monastery. A voluntary adherence to a disciplined schedule introduces you to a purer relational experience — between you and a friend, you and the divine, and so on. The commune models the good friend, and makes the implicit suggestion that maybe you were a poor friend. It is the model and the suggestion that begets some change for the individual.

My reading experience at the Matthew Strother Center was similar.

At home, books are strewn across tables and chairs. In my house, books whisper to my peripheral vision: “read me, you have a few minutes”. So, I drop in and out of multiple texts over a day or week, taking a month or two to finish any one book. And in between, newsletters, blogs, articles, and tweets. From the start of the book, until its end, I’ve read from another dozen books and a few hundred shorter pieces.

It is not only that our attention is diffuse at the moments we read, as D. Graham Burnett’s self-observation makes clear, but that the component sessions of reading are scattered and drawn out, successively interrupted by other readings. I finish an hour of reading a book, having furnished a room of complex feelings and ideas, and then enter an unfurnished room when I open the book a few days later. I’ll perform a cursory glance at the pages which precede where I left off, but I hardly inhabit the same space I did when I left off.

I read a good bit. And often, I’ll reflexively and foolishly take that as me being a good reader. A good reader doesn’t just read a lot; they read well. And it’s a good setting that makes reading well possible, or at least easier.

At the Center, a single book positively overwhelmed my peers and me for ten days. My processing of the text was more generative because my reading accreted — ideas, sounds, memory intact from the seminar that morning, or the reading a few days ago. Variance in Stephen’s language lifted off the page, and I could associatively link thoughts across chapters. During shared meals and labor sessions and walks back to the cabin, my mind lingered on the dialogue or the sermons.

At risk of sounding trite, the MSC modeled that for a book to feel alive, it needs to accrete. Words, sentences, and themes relate to one another, and if I cannot draw those relations, my eyes will just flit over an inert string of letters and punctuation. Those relations, drawn by the reader, from the contents of the page, construct the book. Outside the Center, my discontinuous reading habits result in a lot of reading-of-pages and not as much reading-of-books.

A collection of overdue coffee-chats isn’t good friendship, just as a collection of partly and slowly read books is not good reading. It is not only the attention we hold for someone or something in a moment, but an effort at continuity across those component moments. My reading experience at the Center, in relation to my reading experience at home, made that apparent.

Gabriella:

The experience of the program in its totality offered me a whole new dimension of what it can mean to be inside of a text. To spend three hours daily in deep, concentrated reading over a single text with others is a process of confronting one’s blind spots, and of a perpetual building up and taking apart. One of the most profound aspects of the seminar was the inertia created when with others, the movement made between the particular minutiae of a text as it is encountered and the greater arc of a text as it develops. The maneuver between part and whole was a seemingly infinite task with Joyce, and as such, would now feel inadequate to do on my own.

There’s so much of your own thinking that gets generated merely in response to others’ singular observations that likely would have been missed or lain dormant. When the task is shouldered with others, each person raises the vantage point from which we can engage in the text while we all help each other to re-focus on the permanent fixtures in our field of view. This requires a large amount of energy — and part of the revelation of our experience is that a lasting text demands nothing less. It seems to me that the pitfalls of reading a text without dialogue with others is that one can rarely maintain the momentum and scope that being in a group sustains. The way that our days were structured, and being that our work on this text was the heart of what brought us together, there was a beautiful (and playful) seriousness afforded to the task which rarely exists elsewhere.

Ever since, I seek the merit or lasting value of a text in its ability to unfold and not entirely exhaust itself when put under the same conditions. I ask myself: how will a book expand when put under the weight of those stranded to it? The biggest gap between our reading experience and my experience in school has been that when stripped of instrumentality and conveyor-belt formulas of engagement, we are given space to renegotiate what the fundamental stakes are in reading a text and why we do it in the first place. It is in allowing one’s personal answer to this question to be present and be what holds any collective endeavor to read that a text can have any hope of assuming its highest potential for lived transformation.

And finally, Frank:

Towards the end of my first semester of graduate school in history, I was let in on a withering secret: no one is reading the books. There are books, to be sure, and there is the ritual of ordering them from Borrow Direct, carrying them around for a week or two, maybe stacking them in a pile in a library carrel. There is even the opening of the book, the flipping of the pages, the moving of the eyes. And there is certainly the placing them neatly in front of one’s notes at the seminar table —“knives out,” as everyone seems to say— ready to devour, dissect, dismember.

We read in, around, about, for, and against, but rarely is the preposition or the pretense dropped, the book actually read.

I learned this not from my peers —the prepositional language games are all part of the social posturing— but in an article written by the cultural historian Scott Sandage, who coined the term the “X-Ray Method” for “Achieving a Sustainable ‘Book-Life Balance.’” Sandage reflects that it wasn’t until graduate school that he realized what a slow reader he is. As he noticed time constantly slipping away from him, he decided to develop a way to keep up with his faster-reading peers. The X-Ray Method, as summarized by one of his advisees, the late Dr. Sonya Marie Barclay, begins: “Everyone knows the Butler did it. But in graduate school, you don’t have time to enjoy the whole mystery. You have to be able to very quickly take in who did it, how they did it, why they did it, when and where they did it, and who else knew about it.”

In short: read the title, table of contents, footnotes, index, the “Chapter That Tells You that the Butler Did It,” and skim the rest.

As a tactical survival guide for comprehensive exams, I am amazed at how well the X-Ray Method works. I couldn’t be more grateful for it. But, as the social contract for building a classroom community, the X-Ray Method is a travesty. Our books aren’t written like they want to be read, and we are happy to oblige. Given the curse of the thing we’ve always wanted —to read for a living— we learn that we might only enjoy a book through a fire hose.

The thing is, I never wanted a “book-life balance” in the first place. So, when I learned about the Matthew Strother Center —a place for adults to read, think, and work deeply in community— I jumped at the chance. The Center is a number of things: a farm, a library, an intellectual retreat. Above all, it is a kind of living memorial to its namesake, the late Matthew Strother, whose vision and vitality hums in the margins of every page. But I think it would be most appropriate to call it simply a school: there are students, there are teachers, there is a text. And unlike most educational institutions I’ve ever been a part of, there is nothing else to get in the way of the vital relationship among the three.

We read a single book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Slow reading was not only welcome but encouraged, necessary. I preferred to read in the lovely, formless time between the afternoon labor shift and dinner, a few pages at a time between long walks around the property. I noticed the branches of a weeping willow cascade downwards into a pond; noticed a little island meandering around the surface of that pond; and this was reading, too. It was a solitude in the anticipation of others, a kind of wandering in the faith that together, in seminar, both the text and my own reactions to it would reveal themselves.

For me, our days at the Center orbited around these seminars. They took place in a bright red barn (not unlike a one-room schoolhouse), with a dark wooden table in the center. A woodstove —what looked like two old oil drums stacked on top of each other, one of the farm’s many clever contraptions— sat crackling in a corner. There was a loom, two typewriters, a cabinet of books, some hay bales. The seminars started in the mornings, always with a bit of a chill, with wool hats and steaming mugs.

We were asked to consider three questions:

• What is the novel telling us?

• How is it telling us?

• What is it telling us about how it is telling us?

And with that, we would do a kind of dance: from the text to each other and back again, throwing our weight, shifting our balance, generating heat.

But true love is not magic, and a good seminar discussion isn’t either. It’s work, maintenance, tending. It’s the 72 labors of the Buddhist monastery: the flowers refreshed, the wood chopped, the table set, the coffee beans ground, the door held, the text read and re-read, the notes taken. It’s the true fulfillment both of solitude and of community, and the necessary movement between the two. We built a world in which Joyce’s novel could be read, and in turn, Joyce’s novel became a world of its own.

For all the fretting about the death of the humanities —and the cottage industry of publishers gathered around its open grave— I was struck by just how simple, attainable, and necessary the Center’s deeper and more democratic relationship to the practices of reading and study is. The university may need outcomes (especially the elusive “critical thinking”) to justify its English and Classics departments, but this defense relies on a hazy memory of why we ever bothered to read together in the first place.

The truth is that we are always and have always been reading together. We despair the same headlines, curse the same weather, try the same restaurants. We might even be in the same book clubs. But what the Center makes possible is a kind of training with which to revitalize that shared conversation, to make it holy. It is a training in a grammar of reciprocity: to the text and to each other in equal measure. It is a posing of live, urgent questions, and an attempt to live them with others. It is an incitement to imagine our lives, our relationships, and the world otherwise — and to muster the courage to live them as such.

So there it is. Not long after I returned from this blessed experience, which felt like it added five years to my life, I had a phone call with a recent Deep Springs student who is interested in founding an alternative educational institution of his own. In paraphrasing back to me what I was telling him about the Center, he used the words “adult education” — as a neutral description, but the phrase flashed out at me. Because of course it’s also used by universities to designate a kind of off-brand version of their product, lesser courses for lesser students (less equipped, less bright), whereas what we’re doing is the opposite: something better, for students who are better, something more genuinely intellectual, existential, humanistic than is offered now not just to college but to doctoral students, for individuals who are more serious about all of those things.

The death of the humanities, at least in the academy, is real. On a recent episode of Eminent Americans, Daniel Oppenheimer’s podcast, Julianne Werlin, an assistant professor of English at Duke, reported that enrollments in her department have dropped by three quarters over the last twenty years. Shakespeare now gets 12-15 students. Her survey in the history of tragedy had five this year. The course in the Romantics used to be a lecture that attracted 60-70. Now, “it’s not clear you can run a class in Romantic poetry at a place like Duke.” Colleges and universities are not going away, as some insist, but their humanities departments might.

So it’s no surprise that founding alternative educational institutions is something that a lot of people are doing these days. I've started to construct a mental map of this expanding terrain. In one region is the new flock of microcolleges created on the Deep Springs model, including Outer Coast, in Sitka, Alaska (which Frank helped launch). In another are short-course programs like The Catherine Project, the Brooklyn Institute, the Zephyr Institute, and others. Over here are the reading groups recently started by public figures like Yascha Mounk, Ted Gioia, and Matthew Crawford. Over there are the salons and speakers’ series run by various little magazines and independent bookstores.

All this is pretty great —the nucleus, one hopes, of a new humanistic infrastructure— but there’s a problem, and it’s been nagging at me for a while. At this point, all of these initiatives are parasitic on the academy. Nearly everyone who has taught, is slated to teach, or is on our growing list of those who might teach at the Matthew Strother Center has an advanced degree. The same is surely true of all the other programs I just enumerated. If the academic humanities really do collapse, or even only if the most committed readers continue to abandon them in disgust, how will this nascent ecosystem replenish itself? Can it expand to the point where it becomes self-sustaining, a community of autodidacts —or rather, allodidacts— standing hand-in-hand?

I look at all the ferment happening outside of mainstream institutions elsewhere in the culture (on Substack, for instance), and I think, it might —it just, goddammit, might.

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William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic.

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