“Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.
The intellectual life is not self-begotten; he is the son of the Idea, of the Truth, of the creative Word, the Life-giver immanent in His creation. When the thinker thinks rightly, he follows God step by step; he does not follow his own vain fancy. When we gropes and struggles in the effort of research, he is Jacob wrestling with the angel and “strong against God.”
Is it not natural, given these conditions, that the man of vocation should put away and deliberately forget his everyday man; that he should throw off everything of him: his frivolity, his irresponsibility, his shrinking from work, his material ambitions, / his proud or sensual desires, the instability of his will or the disordered impatience of his longings, his over-readiness to please and his antipathies, his acrimonious moods and his acceptance of current standers, the whole complicated entanglement of impediments which block the road to the True and hinder its victorious conquest?
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, says Holy Write; this filial fear, is, at bottom, fear of self. In the intellectual sphere, we might call it attention freed from every inferior preoccupation, and fidelity perpetually alive to the danger of falling away. An intellectual must always be ready to think, that is, to take in a part of the truth conveyed to him by the universe, and prepared for him, at such and such a turning point, by Providence. The Spirit passes and returns not. Happy the man who holds himself ready not to miss, nay rather to bring about and to utilize, the miraculous encounter!
Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy (Because a man is lifted out of and above himself… out of one’s ordinary foothold); only in the second place does the talent of arrangement, the technique of transitions, connection of ideas, construction, come into play. Now, what is this ecstasy but a flight upwards, away from self, a forgetting to live our own poor life, in order that the object of our delight may live in our thought and in our heart?
Memory itself has a share in this gift.”
(A.D. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life, Translated by Mary Ryan, M.A., 1960, viii-ix)
I used to discipline myself in the habit of writing first thing in the day. A thousand words to warm up feels ecstatic, and also, perhaps surprisingly, effortless. Beginning with such a simple objective makes it easy to get started with—there were no other qualifications besides a thousand complete words strung in some coherent sentences—and accomplishing it does wonders to a digital-age brain. I often feel like I could do just about anything after I finish this exercise.
But the real challenge is to give up that structure and instead put the task in the evening, right before bed. I had never dared to do so. For unlike mornings, the nighttime is a lot more unpredictable. Not because of the activities of the evening itself, for those are easy to predict and plan for. Rather the very experience of nighttime is much like a deadline for someone with a tricky relationship with time, such as how I am normally not fond of deadlines nor constraints with time. Especially when it comes to writing: I found that while I can write fast enough to churn out a thousand words in a few minutes, doing so does not train the right muscles that I would like. Would you train to run faster if what you wanted all along was to bulk up? Probably not. You would run but speed is not what you would care for.
Likewise, at the heard of intellectual ‘work’ is probably not speed or typing rates or deadlines. Are those not what technology should be for? Those can look for and organise things faster than a human mind can. And maybe, to an extent, this is another way of trying to figure out what else is there in human life if these activities like calculation and problem-solving are being taken over by the artificial, but there has to be something. Something that might not be easy to describe initially, but it is there transcending the cognitive—it is not beneath it, it surpasses it.
Honestly, I worry that one day I would read a poem, love it so much, and later find out it was not written by a person. Is that possible? Probably. I have seen images generated by machines that looked so uncanny and bothersome and strangely appealing. One solution might be to stop those things altogether, but any such effort is the only thing that is impossible. This structure of liberation is a new sort of prison of its own.
Animals can make art. Take music for example—some of the best songs are not from the human species. From the start, perhaps, it should not be surprising that nonhumans can engage in some sort of thinking, in literature, in the arts. But because the human species revel in significances and differences, there is that ever pervasive question of uniqueness. If we are not the only ‘rational ‘animal’’, then what are we? The species seeking for intellect while struggling to dwell in silence. Machines can be silenced. But a “zone of silence” is a derisive idea. One longs to be able to meditate, but feels compelled to rush through all their activities so that they might finally arrive at the point of emptiness with anxiety (fed by exhaustion) as their sole companion. When was the list time you had nothing to do? Or had no to-do list? When was the last time that was the case and you felt at peace?