Militancy and Monkishness: Two Approaches to Culture
For years now, I have oscillated between two basic approaches to culture: militancy and monkishness.
In my militant mode, I march through Western culture, campaigning through the canon at a frenzied clip, propelled by anxiety as much as by zeal. I draw up vast lists for reading, watching, and listening, then I turn to my calendar to fill out each day, scheduling some purposive activity for every waking moment, muttering memento mori under my breath. I wake at 5:30 to watch a film before work. I tear through novels as fast as I can, time-tracking myself like a factory manager (1 page per minute; 120 pages every 2 hours; about 1 novel every two days). While working I listen to Bach or Mozart, or Scarlatti at night; and while cooking, or eating, or cleaning up I listen to lectures on philosophy, literature, and history.
This militancy is a mania that I have to will myself into, not at all my natural way of being. It is brought on by impatience and reinforced by the instant gratification of consumption and list-ticking. It is exhilarating for the few weeks that it lasts, but then I grow suspicious of skimming the surface, of covering so much terrain without ever digging down into it. I decide that this militancy is misguided. So, I re-orient myself toward a more monastic ideal.
My monkishness begins with reimposing limits. I throw out the lists or whittle them down to a few key works or authors I want to spend time with and come to know deeply. I relinquish the anxiety that underlay my militant aspirations and settle into a new attentiveness. My watchword is "cultivation": of knowledge, of virtue, of self. I proceed at a slower pace – in fact, I revel in the slowness. I wake up early to work through ten pages of a foundational text, reading and re-reading with intention, stepping back to reflect and synthesize in a notebook. I stop filling the silence with lectures and music and re-commit to stretches of solitude in the day, to long walks and quiet meals, time for thinking at my leisure. I allow myself contentment, even pleasure, in the effort of becoming.
But monkishness soon wears thin. It just isn't enough. Every text I read with such care points me back to five other texts I must read to understand it, not to mention the broader historical context. Thus, I am thrust back in the shadow of the canon; I grow impatient, anxious, unsatisfied with the progress I've made within these – I note – self-imposed limits. The mind starts to wander. The buzzing starts again. I begin to make frantic lists.
This oscillation between extremes is unlivable, but I haven't yet worked out a solution in the form of a productive synthesis. It's curious, though, that both the militant and the monk – figures that did not consciously serve as ideals but which emerged, spontaneously, from the practices I associate with each mode – are figures of great discipline; a discipline that enables them to pursue higher values and pursuits. Taking up the spirit of either is clearly a reaction against the anesthetized, automatized conditions that enlist us today.
At the same time, I've grown to doubt the adequacy of these two distinctive approaches to culture. For each ignores or downplays, in its own way, the mundane pleasures of embodiment; just as each, in its own way, rejects a kind of ease of being that makes life fun. Whatever their virtues, each seems to me, in the end, insufficiently human, committed to an asceticism that crowds out savoir-vivre in its most expansive sense.