Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of it. At least this is what I do.
Johnson had a young friend who must have been more or less the age of most students, again a man who reminds us of Plato’s potential philosophers, as Johnson himself reminds us of Socrates. This young man was named Bennett Langton, from a famous English family that once included, during the reign of King John, a Cardinal of the Roman Church. In 1757, Langton was a student at Trinity College in Oxford. Johnson had occasion to write to him about the general relation of knowledge to life. Let me cite these lines from Samuel Johnson. They are ones any student can take away with him either for testing the truth that he may have learned in his college or for finding it elsewhere, if he succeeded in learning little truth in his academic career.
“I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between ideas and reality,” Johnson wrote to this young student. “It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed. You, who are very capable of anticipating futurity, and raising phantoms before your own eyes, must often have imagined to yourself an academical life, and have conceived what would be the manners, the views, and the conversation, of men devoted to letters; how they would choose their companions, how they would direct their studies, and how they would regulate their lives. Let me know what you have expected and what you have found.” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I, p. 224).
Note what is said here. Ideas need to be tested by reality, by what is. If our ideas are not so tested, we will easily find life a disappointment, filled with phantoms of our own making. Yet, as Socrates and Christ taught us in considering their deaths, reality too needs its testing.
–James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning
