Stop and think. These 2 new books argue this is essential.
One of the most pleasurable byproducts of my work as a writer is that it requires me to sit down and think.
Or sometimes stand up and think, or walk the dogs and think, or wash the dishes and think, or stare up at the ceiling in the last 20 minutes before getting out of bed in the morning and think.
I feel like I’m lucky that I have work that allows me time to think, because thinking seems to be a form of indulgence in contemporary American society. If you’re thinking, you’re not doing, and doing is what matters.
But two recent books, “Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life” by Zena Hitz and “How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education” by Scott Newstok, aim to challenge that notion by arguing that thinking is doing, and that we should be doing a lot more of it.
Both Hitz and Newstok are academics, so like me they are, to some degree, paid to think. Having experienced the benefits of this kind of life, they are eager to see it made available to everyone.
Hitz takes on the argument about utility head-on, producing a book that is a philosophical and historical defense of thinking as an activity without proscribed outcomes. The goal of thinking is to think, to use it as a tool to pursue one’s own curiosities, to learn for the sake of learning. Hitz believes that an intellectual life is the right — perhaps even the responsibility — of every person, not just something available to the most fortunate denizens of the Ivory Tower.
Newstok is equally skeptical of the utilitarian approach to education, where students are trained to pass standardized tests in preparation for college and career. The frame of thinking like Shakespeare is mostly a clever jumping off point for a series of short chapters that outline what thinking is like and how it is done in different contexts.
Both books demonstrate that thinking is a practice, a collection of attitudes, skills, knowledge and habits of mind that coalesce into a way of seeing and processing the world.
As Hitz makes clear, many of the benefits of thinking are personal, as a life spent in pursuit of one’s own intellectual curiosities is a good one. The way she explores and enumerates her own pleasures as a thinker and scholar is utterly charming, as she embodies what she champions. Hitz herself stepped away from a high-pressure academic position where chasing prestige and accolades were the coin of the realm, choosing instead to make space for self-directed thinking. “Lost in Thought” makes an utterly convincing argument that she did the right thing.
Newstok, a scholar of Shakespeare, wears his erudition proudly and lightly, weaving quotations and maxims from dozens of artists and scholars throughout his text. Like Hitz, he demonstrates how deep study ultimately manifests itself comfortably and naturally into one’s world view.
Newstok specifically makes a case for how schoolchildren should be allowed much more latitude to operate as independent thinkers, rather than dutiful test takers, which will in the long run benefit their educational development.
Even as someone who needed no convincing of the virtue of thinking, I walked away from these books energized. For sure, life can get in the way of thinking, but these authors make us believe that we are all capable of pure intellectual pursuits.