UTTERLY RANDOM THOUGHT (BOOK RECOMMENDATION): There are a lot of reasons I rave about how good The Secret History is. (Donna Tartt’s, not Procopius’s, although the latter is fun too if you like ferocious accounts of sixth-century court scandals.) Vivid writing; exactly as lurid as I wanted it to be; captures the feeling of entering a world in which every gesture and joke is a meaningful and often sinister allusion to past offenses, or a tactical strike in an ongoing, covert factional war. But one of the main reasons I love this book is that it presents education as the search for ecstasy. There are two competing versions of ecstasy in the book: the drug-addled weekend self-forgetting that is itself forgotten during the week, and the central characters’ attempt to revive ancient mysteries. I don’t think it’s revealing too much to say that neither one of these options ultimately achieves what the main characters are seeking. But the belief that education is spurred by and involves a search for ecstasy, a sublime standing outside oneself, strikes me as exactly right; and Tartt’s portrayal of different versions of that search also struck me as pretty much right-on. (No, I have not read her new book, because it sounded lame. Sigh.)

I would link to a piece I did for the Yale Free Press on this very topic, but Yale’s finest publication seems to have destroyed its archives in order to save them. Oh well. Will fix link if/when undergrads revamp website.