The Scholar I Might Have Been

Loving literature and old books can draw someone toward scholarship, but it does not by itself produce the habits which scholarship demands. You must learn linguistic discipline, methodological patience, command of secondary literature, archival competence, a willingness to spend months on a very narrow problem, and the ability to turn your enthusiasm into an argument that survives expert scrutiny.

I saw this during a seminar I took in Fordham University’s Medieval Studies Department: MVST 5707, Meditation, Contemplation, and the Spiritual Senses, taught by Dr. Albin and Dr. Davis.

That was where I first encountered scholarship as an actual craft rather than something I wanted to imagine myself doing. Those students were not merely people who loved medieval things. They were acquiring languages, learning paleography and textual criticism, competing for fellowships and research funding, narrowing large interests into questions that could actually be answered, and producing polished work that would eventually become parts of dissertations and published articles.

Seeing that up close punctured my romantic image of the scholar without diminishing the love of books that had created it.

I think one of my personal myths has always been that, if I had managed to pursue a PhD in literature in my late twenties or early thirties, I would have been good at it. Maybe I would have been. But I no longer think loving literature and possessing a certain amount of intelligence would necessarily have made me a particularly good scholar.

In my late twenties, I had enthusiasm and, I think, some genuine literary taste. What I did not yet have were intellectual qualities I acquired much later.

A scholar needs to know which questions are actually interesting, rather than merely doable. Experience teaches you to tolerate ambiguity. You learn to recognize your own hobbyhorses, and distinguish evidence from an attractive theory. You become willing to abandon an interpretation you love, or at least prefer, when the texts will not support it.

Those things sound obvious to me now. I am not sure they were obvious to me, then.

There is also a distinction between being a productive research scholar and being a good reader, teacher, synthesizer, or critic. Academia tends to bundle these abilities together because an academic career requires some combination of publication, specialization, teaching, grants, professional networking, and institutional survival.

In reality, most people have very uneven distributions of those abilities. Most of us are not equally good at all of them. I was sorely lacking in more than one.

At Fordham, I learned something about the distance between literary passion and becoming a professional scholar. It is a real distance.

I was, at least, self-aware enough to recognize it when I saw it.

What remains unknowable is how much of that distance I could have crossed if I had spent five or seven years doing exactly what those students were doing. In my own defense, I was traveling hours by train to the Bronx while working full time and trying to keep up with graduate students for whom this was their full-time occupation.

Maybe I could have become a good scholar. Maybe I would have been a fairly unremarkable one.

The second possibility is harder for my younger self to accept, but strikes me now as entirely plausible.

I loved that world. I probably romanticized my place in it.

And now, I understand much better what the work actually requires. As I move forward in the classes in my humanities degree, I get to scratch that itch a little bit.