William Deresiewicz is an independent scholar who will be with us on Sunday, June 29 at 3 pm Eastern Time for a Casual Conversation focusing on the essays in his collection The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society (Holt Paperback 2022).
You have read my encomia for our past 100+ Casual Conversationalists, so perhaps it is best to let our classmate Tex Talmadge have the first say:
I write to endorse Arthur’s suggestion that we support independent scholars by purchasing their books.
I also want to say that The End of Solitude by our future speaker William Deresiewicz is a terrific read. I won’t summarize the extensive praise of his work here. That is easy to find on Amazon, Goodreads, Google, and elsewhere.
I also like reading works that I can enjoy in less than one hour. Essays satisfy that criterion.
Thank you, Tex.
Now for my reaction. He makes me think. By invitation and through the exercise of the craft of clear and intelligent writing. Can there be higher praise? I think not.
I was introduced to him by the happenstance of buying a copy of the Fall 2024 edition of Liberties: “Respect, or the Missing Relation.” Mr. Deresiewicz writes: “All around us we are witnessing the loss of this thing that I’m calling respect. The problem is bipartisan. The left speaks constantly of ‘difference’ but cannot abide it. ... But the right is no better these days, having largely extirpated its liberal commitments in the name of an epochal moral crusade.”
In order to explore this notion of “respect,” Mr. Deresiewicz turns to Martin Buber. But as he finds much to admire in I and Thou, he also finds much to question. For example, “[I]f we need to love the other in order to treat them correctly, then we are all in a great deal of trouble.” We had a Casual Conversation with a rabbi who wrote a book about Buber’s teachings, using them to create 52 responses to Torah portions. I find it bracing to have someone who has a decidedly different view. Think.
Mr. Deresiewicz’s The End of Solitude collects 42 essays, some previously published and others new to the printed page. “If there is a single theme that joins the essays in this book, it is my attempt to defend, and, as well as I can, to enact, a certain conception of the self ... [,] a self that emerged in the renaissance ... and appears now to be passing into history. In other words, the individual: developed in solitude, in fearless dialogue, by reading, through education as the nurturing of souls; embodied in original art and independent thought; beset by the online cacophony, by education as the manufacture of producers, by groupthink and the politics of groups. To be an individual, the years have taught me, takes a constant effort.”
Our guest gave an address to the plebe class at West Point on solitude and leadership:
It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think that this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like “duty,” “honor,” “country”—really mean? Am I happy?
In his essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, Mr. Deresiewicz states: “As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. . . . [A]n elite college inculcates a false sense of self-worth. . . . The message is, you have arrived. Welcome to the club.” It is not just what college education does wrong, but what it can do right, especially a course of study in the humanities in which the past is not discarded in the face of an ever-advancing present, as in science, but in which the same issues are addressed again and again with insights that may bring us closer to understanding ourselves and others.
The essays are not just about education, and about why Mr. Deresiewicz no longer teaches at Yale, and about leadership and friendship including the sorts of friendship put aside by our culture that focuses obsessively on the question of whether men and women can just be friends. Or what advertising truly sells: envy of another’s soul.
There is much more, but you can only find what more by joining us on June 29 at 3 pm Eastern. Bring your mind and be prepared to think for yourself. And reflect. But isn’t that the reason why you come to any of these Casual Conversations? That privilege—to think and reflect—is something we all have and did not need to attend Dartmouth to possess.
RSVP by COB Friday, June 27 at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson